Doom9 Researchers Break BD+

An anonymous reader writes "BD+, the Blu-ray copy protection system that was supposed to last 10 years, has now been solidly broken by a group of doom9 researchers. Earlier, BD+ had been broken by the commercial company SlySoft." Someone from SlySoft posts a hint early in the thread, but then backs off for fear of getting fired. The break is announced on page 15.

Comments

Congratulations!

[symbolset]

A hearty congratulations to the brilliant programmers of Doom9, including Oopho2ei - who claims not to be a "professional programmer".

Re:Congratulations!

[h4rm0ny]

Seconded. I have managed to play Blu-Ray discs on my Linux box, but it has been one Hell of a struggle. If this moves things closer to the ubiquity of breaking CSS, then hearty congratulations to these heroes! :D

But can someone just clarify seeing as that is rather a lot of posts to read though... does this mean we don't need keys, a la the way we can break CSS? If so, that's very impressive, but how did they do it? Not by breaking the encryption but by finding some way around this, presumably? And equally importantly, is this a permanent fix or can it be superceded by updates from the supplier, like when keys are revoked? Explanations and implications, please? :)

Re:Congratulations!

[impaledsunset]

And thank you. As long as the DRM continues to be broken quickly as this, we will be able to exercise the freedoms that it was designed to take away from us. Yes, it doesn't solve the problem, but it brings a relief, when the unpleasant possibility that the DRM scheme might actually work this time is crushed. DRM or not, you will still be able to exercise your right to play the movie you bought, your fair use rights or whatever you believe you are in the right to do.

I don't think this is so much of a bad news for the MAFIAA, as their benefit from the DRM scheme will still be whopping, but it's good news for everyone that would have been hurt by it.

Re:Congratulations!

[TubeSteak]

What's more impressive is that the thread was started August 24th,
which means it took them 5 weeks and a few days to break BD+.
Kudos to them.

Is this just for MKBv7 (Media Key Block) or is BD+ permanently broken?

Re:Congratulations!

[Anonymous Coward]

You could say that the Doom9 researchers have fragged BD+.

Re:Congratulations!

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Is this just for MKBv7 (Media Key Block) or is BD+ permanently broken?

For the most part it is permanently broken. BD+ is just a very simple virtual machine - these guys reimplemented the virtual machine. So the disc publishers can write all kinds of new copy prevention code in the BD+ 'language' but the doom9 guys' VM will be able to execute it pretty much like any sanctioned BD+ VM would. The disc publishers might start exploiting non-standard or undefined behavior in the BD+ VMs (presumably most hardware players all just run the same BD+ VM from macrovision, so any bugs in it should be the same across most if not all hardware players) but such shenanigans won't be too hard to reverse engineer and include into the clone VM.

Now when the publishers switch to MKBv8 that will be a new set of AACS keys that will need to be rediscovered, but that's independent of and in addition to BD+.

Re:Congratulations!

[mpe]

As long as the DRM continues to be broken quickly as this, we will be able to exercise the freedoms that it was designed to take away from us. Yes, it doesn't solve the problem, but it brings a relief, when the unpleasant possibility that the DRM scheme might actually work this time is crushed.

About the only reason for a DRM scheme not being "broken" quickly is if there is little or no content people are interested in using it. No matter how good the cryptography (ab)using encryption in this way is fundermentally flawed.

Re:Congratulations!

[alex4u2nv]

Congrats indeed. Now how long until DIGG.COM crashes?

Re:Congratulations!

[Goaway]

Sure, congratulations on getting this far, but the Slashdot story is entirely exaggerated. People are working hard on BD+, and it'll probably fall sooner or later, but it certainly isn't "solidly broken" yet.

To quote Oopho2ei himself:

The whole project consists of three major tasks:
1. vm instruction processing (95% done)
2. trap implementations (80% done)
3. event/callback processing (10 % done)

I'm sure they'd be happy to get some help, though. There's a lot of programming gruntwork to be done.

Re:Congratulations!

[Goaway]

It's not broken yet. The work is still very much ongoing, and this Slashdot story is an exaggeration.

There's great work being done for sure, but it's not FINISHED yet by any measure.

Re:Congratulations!

[Goaway]

Well, I was somewhat mistaken on that, that post was older than I thought. Progress has been made since that. I'm fairly sure it's not quite "solidly" broken yet, but at least it can decode a couple of discs.

Getting it to handle ALL discs is likely to take some further work still, though.

Re:Congratulations!

[Rude Awakening]

And congratulations to Sony! Now the Blu-ray format should become much more attractive and take off with consumers.

Re:Congratulations!

[Kjella]

It's not broken yet. The work is still very much ongoing, and this Slashdot story is an exaggeration.

There's great work being done for sure, but it's not FINISHED yet by any measure.

They have a BD+ implementation that works perfectly on many BD+ discs. It doesn't cover every corner case of the VM yet, but I would consider that pretty much broken. At least you're down to the publishers playing new tricks, find the corner case, update decoder and it's done. It means that once this gets coded up into a real player, I expect that within a week or two of any BD release it'll almost certainly play on Linux. I'd call that good news.

Re:Congratulations!

[Goaway]

Yes, I didn't read quite all the way to the end of the thread (I blame the interface, of course). They got it far enough to decode some discs.

I'm sure there are quite a number of kinks to work out yet, though, and then the cat-and-mouse game starts. Currents discs already do some checks to see if they are running on a conforming virtual machine and lock up if they don't, and that'll only get stricter from now on. Shouldn't be too big a problem, though, as long as enough people put in the effort to work on it.

Re:Congratulations!

[squiggleslash]

I understand where you're coming from, but it probably will make Blu-ray less attractive.

The issue with BD+ is it's the equivalent of the hacks game writers used to put into games for 8-bit computers in the 1980s that would do little timing loops and check various memory locations to make sure that nobody's plugged in any hardware they shouldn't. These hacks were almost always universally awful, with users having to screw around trying to find combinations of things that'd work to play games afflicted with these "copy prevention" methods. And, whenever Commodore or Sinclair released an updated computer, it'd break a certain percentage of those games.

Right now there are tens of models of Blu-ray player. BD+ has posed to be a problem even so, but for the most part the problems have been "containable" with manufacturers releasing firmware updates to fix the issues as they've come up. Another thing that's made this containable has been the fact that the system hasn't been universally deployed - indeed, the vast majority of discs do not have this ACM applied - and where applied the hacks have been simple checks of the "I run, therefore I am" type. The only VM they've been looking for is Slysoft's.

Now two things are going to happen. The first is that the BD+ scripts are going to get ever more complicated. This increases the number of Blu-ray models that'll get false positives. Worse, the false positives will increasingly be because of a bug in the script, not the player, which will make player manufacturers a little less happy about patching their firmware to fix the problems.

The second - unrelated to BD+ being cracked - is that the number of Blu-ray player models is going to increase, and the number of manufacturers involved in Blu-ray will start to become somewhat greater than the "We're all a bunch of happy Blu-ray supporters" group that currently make players. Virtually everyone making Blu-ray players today wants Blu-ray to succeed enough to be prepared to do anything to do it. This is unlike, say, DVD where most player manufacturers know that DVD has succeeded and therefore just want to make money.

Taken together: we're looking at increasingly unreliable scripts, with many, many, more opportunities (player configurations) to fail, and consumers rioting because they're finding the only way to watch every movie they buy or rent is to own two or three players, or a Playstation 3 (which'll probably be the only Blu-ray player everything gets tested on.)

CSS was a predictable algorithm that could only be implemented one way. When it was cracked, that was not a disaster for DVD, indeed it probably helped the format.

AACS is a predictable algorithm that can only be implemented one way. When it was cracked, that was not a disaster for HD DVD or Blu-ray, indeed it probably helped the HD formats.

BD+ is an unpredictable algorithm based upon technologies that have failed in the past, will continue to fail, and which have failed for Blu-ray already. The ONLY way the Doom9 crack is going to be helpful for Blu-ray is if it convinced Fox et al to drop the technology. As for me, it's on my list of reasons why I'm not going to get Blu-ray. If the BDA removes BD+, and works on Blu-ray's other flaws, I might reconsider my stance. But everything's going to get worse, and Hollywood will blame pirates in the same way as some idiot who accidentally shoots and kills his wife because he didn't expect her to enter the house via the backdoor blames "criminals" for making him scared in the first place.

Re:Congratulations!

[arminw]

...the Blu-ray format should become much more attractive and take off with consumers.....

only if the price of the players and the disks are sold for no more than present DVDs. Most consumers cannot tell the difference in the sound of mp3 files and of a CD disk. But mp3s are much more convenient. Unless shown on a TV 50"+ the quality blu-ray over normal, especially up-converted DVDs, is not all the noticeable. The rapid transition from VHS to DVD was driven mostly by convenience, not that DVDs picture on the then existing analog TV sets was that much better. Other than an increase in quality, blu-ray has no huge advantage over regular DVDs. The computer business has got the principle, especially Apple, of giving better performance for the same price, not necessarily greatly reducing the price. Hollywood apparently has not grasped that yet. In their eyes the higher data content of HD blu-ray should cost proportionately more.

Re:Congratulations!

[DocSavage64109]

This must be why bluray players are so much slower for nearly any interface function than even the oldest dvd players.

Thanks so much for the crappy functionality, Sony.

Re:Congratulations!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you want to play Blu Rays on a stupid PC?

Re:Congratulations!

[Anonymous Coward]

Regions only exist because distributors want to release their products over the world at different times to control money flow. In the same time, they screw the customers by overestimating their resolve and hunger for the product they are distributing.

Re:Congratulations!

[Goaway]

I don't think it is, but if you want another reason to rage at them, maybe you can assume it's because they use Java for the interactive features.

Re:Congratulations!

[complete loony]

I think the existing checks are already pretty strict. They provided the doom9 guys with a heap of unit tests to stress test their VM.

Re:Congratulations!

[DinDaddy]

I'd agree. The older 1.0 and 1.1 profile discs were plenty fast for me on the PS3, but the 2.0 ones sometimes even bog the PS3 down a bit, and it is better than (almost?) every other current player.

Re:Congratulations!

[Anonymous Coward]

The people who designed BD+ expected the VM to be emulated, and designed the system so this wouldn't be a catastrophic failure.

In fact, they expected it to happen within the first year; it took much longer than that. A conspiracy theorist might even suggest that they _wanted_ it to happen, because nobody will buy their fancy VM verification algorithms or license their technology to build key-renewal servers until the basic VM is cracked.

Meanwhile, nobody has to exploit non-standard or undefined behavior. The VM was explicitly designed to make it possible to validate (in a variety of ways) that the VM you're running in matches the key you were given.

This was all in the whitepapers that cryptography.com posted years ago, when they were trying to sell this to Sony and the studios.

Unfortunately

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately this will probably just mean that a ton of consumers will be SOL when they implement new encryption schemes on BluRay that aren't supported by some existing players.

Re:Unfortunately

[Wuhao]

Wonderful. Finally, people won't look at me like I'm from Mars when I tell them that DRM affects legitimate paying customers like them.

Re:Unfortunately

[Lumpy]

Oh I hope so. I hope that Sony and the rest of those idiots over-react hard and screw most all customers with BluRay players.

Disrupting the consumers from viewing the new shiney will actually make them sit up and pay attention. I hope this screws a lot of people really hard to the point they say "HEY! WHAT THE HELL!"

Now they need to crack HDCP.

Re:Unfortunately

[Firethorn]

Disrupting the consumers from viewing the new shiney will actually make them sit up and pay attention. I hope this screws a lot of people really hard to the point they say "HEY! WHAT THE HELL!"

I think this has actually happened a couple times. My first negative experience with DRM was as a kid - I bought a video game that kept insisting I 'insert the original disc'. Turns out they fubared the pressing such that even the original disc was seen as copied - didn't impress me with the quality control. It was something where pulling even a single disc and trying it out would have found the problem.

My second was with an E-Book program. I decided to check out this 'ebook' thing, downloaded the one Stephen King wrote years ago - the idea was that if you liked the book, you paid for the next installment. While I found the installment nice, the reader broke so many things that after reading it I uninstalled the reader and therefore the book. Never again. For example, it mostly broke copy/paste, as well as various other things in attempting to stop screen captures.

I mean, if I had wanted to copy the book, it would have only taken a few hours of my time to [i]retype the bloody thing[/i] using dual screens or even two computers. It wasn't a hugely long book, and I am a trained(if out of practice) typist. If I wanted to do a lot of books, some sort of OCR system would work.

Or just find & download it off the internet today.

Especially with the popularity of MP3 players that are quickly turning into media players, the 'average user' is seeing the effects of DRM more and more. Especially when they buy that DVD duplicator and discover it won't work for 'copyprotected' discs.

Re:Unfortunately

[Anonymous Coward]

HDCP has been cryptographically cracked since 2001. Furthermore, there are "non-behaving" HDCP devices that accept HDCP input but output non-protected digital. Spatz tech's box for example.

Re:Unfortunately

[init100]

Unfortunately this will probably just mean that a ton of consumers will be SOL when they implement new encryption schemes on BluRay that aren't supported by some existing players.

Good! Maybe then the consumers can start to understand why DRM sucks, especially systems where their decryption keys can be disabled after the purchase. It's unfortunate that they'll have to learn this the hard way, but there is not much we can do about that.

Re:Unfortunately

[Kjella]

Now they need to crack HDCP.

Uh, HDCP was cracked almost before it left the lab. It still doesn't solve the problem of badly compliant HDCP devices not talking to each other though.

Re:Unfortunately

[Jorophose]

Now they need to crack HDCP.

If BD+ and AACS were cracked, is there a need to break HDCP?

Of course the more you crack is better. And it'll help bring us closer to playback on linux it seems... But isn't it unecessary to the process?

Re:Unfortunately

[the eric conspiracy]

I suppose it could happen, but BR players generally have quite a bit of firmware upgradeability. I'd bet most if not all could support new encryption schemes via a firmware update.

Re:Unfortunately

[Whiteox]

While I found the installment nice, the reader broke so many things that after reading it I uninstalled the reader and therefore the book.

Same for downloaded mobile games. Pay $ for a game then find a few months later that you have to master reset the mobile as it's gone funky. This wipes out the game as well. Consumers can't backup the game or other purchased content so they are screwed. Why do they do this? Because no mobile game company wants their product transferable. Same with your ebook content. That's the real problem with DRM. You don't buy content these days, you buy content with DRM which effectively means you don't own the rights to it. 90% of the consumers out there don't know this and don't care about this until they want to rip it or copy it so they can archive the original somehow.
But for DVD, that doesn't matter anymore as the proliferation of the $2 DVD shows. A piece of plastic with some shiny foil is much cheaper to make than reels of mylar, casing, mechanisms and assembly that VHS requires. So they pound out these DVDs for almost nothing and they are winning, because it's a lot more convenient to buy the package= disk+shell+pretty pictures, than download it and set up equipment/software to see it on screen.
With multiple TV/monitors in homes nowadays, it's much easier to move a disk from player to player than network a home.

What is more apparent to me is that there is a stratification between DVD and BluRay.
Sure, if you want top viewing experience on a large screen, then go BluRay. If you just want to watch the movie then DVD is fine.
Archiving BluRay isn't going to make a huge world wide difference in how the general DVD viewing public react to that. They'll still be watching cheap DVDs.

Re:Unfortunately

[Paradigm_Complex]

Don't count on it. Plenty of people look at me like I'm from Mars when, after begging me - the local techie - to fix their computer, I try to explain to them they cant do such-and-such because of DRM (and what DRM is, etc). eg: Just recently had to explain to someone why their WMA-DRM'd music won't work on their ipod.

No, most likely Joe Sixpack will accept that there's some technobable reason why it's not working and that the choices are (A) buy another player, (B) have the techie rig up some questionably legal solution, or (C) stop watching the movie/playing the game/etc.

Re:Unfortunately

[kvezach]

Now they need to crack HDCP.

No, Lieutenant, your HDCP is already dead.

Re:Unfortunately

[funkatron]

Now they need to crack HDCP.

Why bother. Grabbing and storing the raw pixel data isn't all that interesting not that it's possible to get the compressed data off the disc. I don't event think there's a common storage solution that can operate at the speed used by HDMI.

Re:Unfortunately

[Firethorn]

With multiple TV/monitors in homes nowadays, it's much easier to move a disk from player to player than network a home.

It's still coming, though. With the proliferation of wireless, things like Ethernet over power, it's easy enough. I looked through some manufactured homes at the state fair - one was wired with cat 5, including a line to the anticipated home theater area. They said it's a very common request, almost standard now. If people buying double wides in North Dakota are going for this stuff, what does that tell you?

Last week I saw a ad for some cable/internet provider where one of their advertised features was the ability to playback DVR recorded video on any TV in the house. How this was done wasn't mentioned. There are a number of options. For example, the Slingbox @$300 will put your DVR/cable/whatever onto the network. For another $300 you can get the 'slingcatcher' which will hook up to any remote television and allow access.

[quote]What is more apparent to me is that there is a stratification between DVD and BluRay.[/quote]

Very much true. Without some sort of method to get the contents to a DVD or networked DVR, it's difficult to get any blueray movie to, say, the standard definition TV in the kids room, the playroom, master bedroom, whatever. You end up buying any movie twice if you want to watch at HighDef AND in a convienent location, assuming you're not rich enough to upgrade to bigscreen highdef blueray systems in the whole house.

The more blueray is cracked, though, the more transferability is enabled, the more attractive the media is to the consumer.

One thing to consider with physical media, especially with the spread of DVRs, is space. Consider how many DVDs an individual who buys a mere 2 a month - $30-60, That's 24 a year, 240 over the course of a decade, and I've been collecting for more than a decade. Over 200 videos starts to get to be a pain in the butt without a good media management system. Personally, I'd prefer to be able to archive the discs down in the basement somewhere and free up the space in my living room.

Re:Unfortunately

[Whiteox]

Over 200 videos starts to get to be a pain in the butt without a good media management system. Personally, I'd prefer to be able to archive the discs down in the basement somewhere and free up the space in my living room.

That's my problem also. My wife is an avid dvd buyer (I don't know where she's getting the money for them) and that's all she watches except a bit of satellite. I particularly scrounge the sales bins, while she gets the full priced stuff. Although I started to rip to divx, I worked out that I need about 600hrs+ of ripping time and a few old laptops and a decent management software to drive everything.
Someone needs to produce network capable TVs. I think there's one or two manufacturers out there that do wireless ones, but hardwired is fine too.

Re:Unfortunately

[Lumpy]

Sweet, give me the Disc with the 2009 superbowl on it. or the Disc with all the TV shows that have not aired yet.

you know HDMI with HDCP is not just for DVD players. I have a projector that makes my cable box complain saying that "my connection is COMPROMISED! OMG!OMG!OMG!" I need a device that will tell the cable box to STFU and work with my projector.

Re:Unfortunately

[Firethorn]

Someone needs to produce network capable TVs. I think there's one or two manufacturers out there that do wireless ones, but hardwired is fine too.

I haven't seen any wireless TVs, but from studying the information about the slingbox, for HD video wired is best - you can get into bandwidth limitations very quickly if you're not careful with wireless.

The slingbox, if it works correctly, seems to be one of the better options at this time. I'd be hesitant with an integrated device at this time.

Re:Unfortunately

[Whiteox]

http://www.pcworld.com/article/114176/philips_shows_networked_tv_home_theater.html is what I saw.
I wouldn't want that on wireless though. I stream video on wireless and works ok, but slows down everything else if I'm not careful.

cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

The best part of all: the DMCA makes it perfectly legal to use with Linux since OEMs don't provide linux codecs.

Re:cool!

[cp.tar]

Now, that sounds interesting. I would like to hear a legal opinion on that matter, though.

OTOH, wasn't there something about this kind of hack making copy protection "inadequate" and therefore unenforceable, i.e. legally circumventable in Finland?

Re:cool!

[bhima]

Ed Felten called HDCP "A hook onto which to hang lawsuits" when if first came out.

I haven't heard much on BluRay Super Duper Double Plus Awesome DRM... but I've been ignoring it. I figure the whole HD-TV market is based on deception. I don't have the patience or tolerance to unravel all of it in order to make an informed purchase.

Hopefully HD-DVD, BluRay, HD-TV will all completely fail and something else a lot more open will take its place.

Re:cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the court of appeal thinks CSS is still quite adequate I'd say no for now.

See http://www.turre.com/blog/?p=156

Re:cool!

[repvik]

Fortunately, citizens outside the United States of Asshats* doesn't have to bother with this whole DMCA crap.

* Referring to lawyers et.al.

Re:cool!

[Culture20]

Hopefully HD-DVD, BluRay, HD-TV will all completely fail and something else a lot more open will take its place.

You're joking, right? Digital broadcasts are just the start (and required by law). Soon, all broadcasters will be foregoing "regular" digital for HD broadcasts complete with broadcast flag.

Re:cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ed Felten called HDCP "A hook onto which to hang lawsuits" when if first came out.

Surely that's "a hook on which to hang lawsuits". The other way just sounds weird.

Re:cool!

[a_nonamiss]

HEY!!! I'm American, and I'm offen.... oh wait. Never mind.

Re:cool!

[Gavagai80]

Digital != HD.

Re:cool!

[Culture20]

English comprehension != reading comprehension. I explicitly kept the concepts of digital and HD separate in GP.

Re:cool!

[russotto]

You're joking, right? Digital broadcasts are just the start (and required by law). Soon, all broadcasters will be foregoing "regular" digital for HD broadcasts complete with broadcast flag.

The broadcast flag was defeated (which isn't to say that it won't be resurrected in the future, but there's way too much silicon out there which ignores it for that to be a practical matter for a long time). HD broadcasts are just as open as analog; they're just an MPEG-2 transport stream with AC3 audio (usually).

Re:cool!

[evilviper]

HD broadcasts are just as open as analog; they're just an MPEG-2 transport stream with AC3 audio (usually).

Why do you say "usually"? To the best of my knowledge, AC3 is the only supported audio codec in the ATSC standard* (defined in A/52). MPEG-2 is similarly the only supported video codec.**

*To be pedantic: 2-channel AC3 is actually called AC2, but nobody cares, and even Dolby screws up the notation on a regular basis.
**Also being pedantic: MPEG-2 decoders are all backwards compatible, so a broadcaster could conceivably choose to use MPEG-1 video.

Re:cool!

[gnud]

First, IANAL.

I don't think copy protection has any legal status in most countries. I don't know of any besides the U.S, but there are probably some.

Think of the DeCSS case in Norway -- Jon Johansen never shared any copyrighted content (a mathematical algorithm can't be copyrighted), so he was never convicted of anything. Also, guessing how content on a disk you _own_ might be interpreted, is thankfully still legal in most countries.

Re:cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

Many of the engineers I work with are citizens of the Unites States, and they don't bother with the DMCA.

My senior year project for a DSP class was a circuit that grabbed a bit-perfect copy of each 1080p frame from a specific TV's framebuffer and piped it to a DSP circuit that spit out a h264 video file.
I was not allowed to publish it, but somehow the information made it's way to a torrent. I've received letters from individuals who built it and said it worked perfectly, one of them actively uploads blu ray rips to various trackers.

DRM will always fail because there are countless people who take it as a personal insult to have someone tell them what they can and cannot do with their data. The cross-section of people who get mad and people who can actually do something about it is small, but it only takes one.

Re:cool!

[russotto]

I was just covering the two-channel variant.

Re:cool!

[Kjella]

Right.

Re:cool!

[tlhIngan]

Hopefully HD-DVD, BluRay, HD-TV will all completely fail and something else a lot more open will take its place.

Tell me, has DVD failed?

The irony of the whole HD-DVD/Blu-Ray thing was that HD-DVD has less DRM than even DVD. DVD has encryption and region coding. HD-DVD has just encryption, and the encryption key for it was discovered. (And encryption was optional on HD-DVD, like it is on DVD) Ironically, the "openness" of HD-DVD most likely lead to its demise - for the lack of region coding meant that any HD-DVD released with the DVD may be imported into countries where said movie was still showing in theatres (and thus, causing delays in the release of the HD-DVD, by which time others may have bought the DVD, and won't want to upgrade, or bought the Blu-Ray instead).

Instead, we get Blu-Ray left, which has mandatory AACS encryption, region coding, ROM-mark (basically a way to identify who made the disc, and disc type, so players can easily refuse to play BDMV from burned discs), and BD+. And history has shown that rights management on video will survive. We've had Macrovision on VHS tapes since the early 80's and everyone seemed fine with it.

Music's only going DRM-free because of the way Apple's bullying the labels - the hope being that the Amazon store will weaken the iTunes store so the labels can make both stores bend over and obey, rather than the other way around.

DRM is here to stay, unfortunately. Even new technologies are incorporating it - if you think HDMI is bad because it has HDCP, DisplayPort supports both DPCP (DisplayPort Content Protection) and HDCP. The only unencrypted links are the analog ones - VGA, component video, etc.

All that can be done is to find ways to break it.

Re:cool!

[DeadBeef]

In New Zealand our DVB-T platform is broadcast in h.264 with a kind of funky LATM AAC audio codec and also 2 channel AC3. Our DVB-S platform is still the more conventional mpeg2 with AC3.

I'm not sure if these are options to the relevant ATSC standard or if we just chose to ignore the standards, either way I guess NZ is an example that is not mpeg2 / AC3.

Re:cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the DMCA leaves it perfectly legal on Linux; it would have been perfectly legal on any platform without the DMCA.

Re:cool!

[plover]

The broadcast flag was defeated (which isn't to say that it won't be resurrected in the future, but there's way too much silicon out there which ignores it for that to be a practical matter for a long time).

Are you sure about that? My understanding was most recorders were set up to respect the flag and based those on the pending standard for the flag. There were only a few cards (Hauppauge made one) that were released that explicitly didn't include support for the flag.

At least that was true in the days prior to the defeat of the broadcast flag. I don't know about cards or recording equipment manufactured since that time.

Re:cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

At least in NZ the proposed DMCA == will allow personal hacks to do this. But you are not allowed to distribute this hack. So you need to post it to some eastern Europe forums.

Re:cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically, you'll get federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison time in Finland for trying to watch your own DVDs in Finland on Linux. So I'm guessing 'no'.

Re:cool!

[miro f]

I am an Asshat, you insensitive clod!

Re:cool!

[Mathness]

It is legal to circumvent these copy protections to play (not to copy) the medias in Denmark since 2002 (http://www.kum.dk/sw5124.asp), and later for any Europian country that have made Infosoc part of their law (http://www.kum.dk/sw5335.asp).

Link are in Danish, I was too lazy to find any English ones.

Re:cool!

[russotto]

Are you sure about that? My understanding was most recorders were set up to respect the flag and based those on the pending standard for the flag. There were only a few cards (Hauppauge made one) that were released that explicitly didn't include support for the flag.

As far as I know, no card intended for recording ATSC broadcasts respects the broadcast flag. They all pass it through in the stream, but none of them blocks, encrypts, or otherwise prevents access to the stream based on the broadcast flag. What the software on the host does with it when it gets it is another matter; I'm unaware of any software which respects it, but I don't play on the Windows side which is where I'd expect such software to be.

There are cards (well, at least one) intended for recording cable broadcasts, with a CableCard. Any such card respects the cable copy protection mechanism, but that's a different story.

Re:cool!

[evilviper]

DVB (T/S/C/H/M) isn't related to ATSC at all.

For some reason, European countries didn't like the ATSC standard and decided to develop their own incompatible standard from scratch. Much the same as happened with 110V@60Hz electricity, radio frequencies, the NTSC-M TV standard, and many other technologies. The only example I can think of going the other way would be DAB, which the US opted not to adopt, but isn't exactly ideal, nor terribly popular in Europe.

Re:cool!

[Tuntematon]

OTOH, wasn't there something about this kind of hack making copy protection "inadequate" and therefore unenforceable, i.e. legally circumventable in Finland?

The decision was overruled/changed in higher court. Unfortunately some lawyers are idiots in Finland too.

Freedom Fighters

[PenGun]

Well done.

Re:Freedom Fighters

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight?

They never mention that part to us, do they?

Kudos to them

[Enderandrew]

That being said BluRay burners are expensive enough, and the blank media is expensive enough that I'll probably still buy my BluRay movies on Amazon.com (where I routinely find cheap deals as opposed to retail stores charging $35 per movie).

Re:Kudos to them

[jmorris42]

> That being said BluRay burners are expensive enough, and the blank media is expensive enough that I'll probably
> still buy my BluRay movies on Amazon.com.

Which is perfectly good. I didn't buy my first DVD though until the protection was broken and I have no intention of buying anything BD until it is broken. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. Who wants to buy a BD movie until they can pull a copy to a DVD for portable players off in the rest of the house, the in car players, etc. Until we can yank clips out of one. Until we can play then on our non-Windows machines.

Once stable build of mplayer support this stuff and the battle of key revocation settles down I'll think about investing in the stuff. Not before.

Re:Kudos to them

[Jorophose]

Consider it a backup at the same time.

However I'm in the same boat as you; I find it is a bit sad we don't have 100% working blu-ray playback yet. Ripping is good enough, though. Are they still recorded in MPEG2 or did they step up to h.264 yet for commercial films?

Re:Kudos to them

[weber]

Why burn a copy? You can just rip & re-encode it (x264) to an MKV-file on an (external) harddrive, and play it using popcorn hour or similar. That way you can also take your movie collection with you when you visit friends.

Re:Kudos to them

[evilviper]

Many people said exactly the same thing when DeCSS and css-auth came out.

Re:Kudos to them

[Anonymous Coward]

BD burners aren't expensive. We bought our first for £250ish and the latest for £140. The price'll keep on dropping until BD is a viable replacement for DVD - a replacement with at least 5x the bandwidth and capacity. If only Apple would get behind the format we'd be half way there by now...

Re:Kudos to them

[Bert64]

With the ability to copy blu-ray discs, the demand for burners will increase which should bring down the prices... Same thing happened with DVD.

Re:Kudos to them

[socsoc]

This is my plan, a PCH is already ordered and on the way.

Re:Kudos to them

[Tom]

That used to be true about both CD and DVD burners. You know, in the past. A couple years from now, we'll add BluRay to that list.

Re:Kudos to them

[mako1138]

Agreed, I'm not buying BD until the DRM is de-fanged.

Re:Kudos to them

[Haeleth]

Which is perfectly good. I didn't buy my first DVD though until the protection was broken and I have no intention of buying anything BD until it is broken. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. Who wants to buy a BD movie until they can pull a copy to a DVD for portable players off in the rest of the house, the in car players, etc. Until we can yank clips out of one. Until we can play then on our non-Windows machines.

Well said! And we need more people to say this. We need the public and the media to understand that a significant number of the people who cheer on efforts such as this have no interest in "stealing" stuff -- we want DRM gone so we can buy things secure in the knowledge that we will be able to use them!

Re:Kudos to them

[complete loony]

True, but why bother burning when right now buying a hard disk and filling it with pirated movies is cheaper per GB than buying those movies on BD Disks.

Re:Kudos to them

[Enderandrew]

* I like having the special features.
* Pirated movies don't come in 1080p, though now they might with BD cracked.
* I financially support the products I like. For instance, Kevin Smith's film career is largely predicated upon successful DVD sales. Other films that I don't care about (such as The Hulk) I download.
* I'm a broke parent paying on my wife's student loans to Creighton, but I'm not so broke that I can't buy things.

Obsolete the installed base? I think not.

[symbolset]

Sony isn't having a ton of luck building an installed base of users of BD, even after buying their competition into submission. If they obsolete their installed base they have to start over again with thet negative examples of HD-DVD and the additional strike of cyclic obsolescence against them. It would be too obvious that the purchase of their content is actually a short term lease. That would be the death of BluRay before it's even well started, and it wouldn't even buy them an additional year before it was cracked again.

It's more likely that we're nearing the end of this DRM nonsense forever. Finally!

Or am I too optimistic of their intelligence? History does weigh heavily against my hopefulness here.

Thats not THAT impressive...

[Zathain Sicarius]

I could do the same thing with a slege hammer and 30 seconds. ...Though I don't know how useful a pile of broken circuitry would be. Congrats, I haven't liked Sony too much lately.

last barrier

[peas_n_carrots]

Looks like the last barrier against BR adoption has been bypassed. Cue the cheap players and burners and BR might actually rise from its coma and take the market from DVD.

I'm hoping that won't happen because a world ruled by Sorny is surely worse off. But don't fret, Sorny will do everything in its power to prevent mainstream adoption.

Re:last barrier

[Enderandrew]

Samsung has a $200 player which comes with 4 free movies. Given that the movies retail for $35 a pop, that is $140 in free movies with a $200 player. The rumors is said player will go for $150 on Black Friday. A player for $150 with $140 in free movies is a pretty good deal.

The biggest problem with BluRay is retail stores charging $35 for movies. DVDs are often selling for $10 or less. Knock BluRay prices down to $25 a movie or less and I'll bite.

Re:last barrier

[drunkennewfiemidget]

You're justifying the $200 price tag with the free "$35/movie" price tag, which is an arbitrary inflated value of the movies that we shouldn't be paying in the first place.

Re:last barrier

[Enderandrew]

I'd contend a hidef movie player is justified by itself at $200 with no free movies. Getting free movies makes it a pretty damned good deal.

Buy a nice big screen. Watch low-res TV and notice how the flaws are amplified by blowing up the picture to a large size.

Now get a really good up-scaler to 1080p for standard DVDs and/or a BluRay player to play 1080p content on the same TV.

Trust me, $200 is well worth it.

Re:last barrier

[sjames]

Samsung has a $200 player which comes with 4 free movies. Given that the movies retail for $35 a pop, that is $140 in free movies with a $200 player. The rumors is said player will go for $150 on Black Friday. A player for $150 with $140 in free movies is a pretty good deal.

The biggest problem with BluRay is retail stores charging $35 for movies. DVDs are often selling for $10 or less. Knock BluRay prices down to $25 a movie or less and I'll bite.

Gotta be careful with that math. The movie is WORTH $10-$15 (based on DVD pricing and people's apparent willing to pay that), so it's $60 worth of movies claiming to be a $140 dollar value, just like the blue-screen commercials where they give away the '$100 value' worth of the stuff they couldn't sell in the last blue-screen ad and really just don't want cluttering up their warehouse (here, you throw this away!).

Millions bought our "shiny penny" for $100 and millions more bought our "crisp 10 spot" for $150, but if you act RIGHT NOW, you (yes, you) can have BOTH for the low low price of $99.95! You know It the deal of a lifetime BECAUSE I'M SHOUTING!

And YET AGAIN...

[Khyber]

The common man proves that if man can make it, man can break it.

This is a lesson companies will NEVER LEARN when it comes to DRM.

Re:And YET AGAIN...

[Memroid]

The common man proves that if man can make it, man can break it.

thus we need Skynet to build the next generation of DRM... to keep us mere humans from penetrating it!

Re:And YET AGAIN...

[__aagmrb7289]

As I stated elsewhere - you're idea of the purpose of DRM is flawed - therefore you are "expecting" them to learn a lesson that doesn't apply. It's not about stopping ANYONE from stealing their stuff - its about making sure that the amount of theft is trivial. Check your assumptions about other's intentions when you think them a fool - sometimes they are a fool - but sometimes the fool isn't them.

Re:And YET AGAIN...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is something about 'penetrating your skynet' that just sounds.... dirty.

Re:And YET AGAIN...

[petermgreen]

The problem is that illegal copies don't have DRM so making an illegal copy of an illegal copy is trivial. It's all digital so there is no generation loss.

Add that to the fact that there is this huge distribution network called the internet and one illegal copy can become a huge number in a relatively short space of time.

Re:And YET AGAIN...

[symbolset]

The Internet is only the core of the distribution network. The last mile is external USB HDD.

Re:And YET AGAIN...

[Anonymous Coward]

The common man proves that if man can make it, man can break it.

This is a lesson companies will NEVER LEARN when it comes to DRM.

One man can multiply two large primes.

This does not imply that another man can factor the product.

Just an example.

As the article says...

[Angstroem]

...start reading on page 15, it'll discuss (a) what they did and (b) how resistant it is against potential counterattacks by the BD+ people.

Mind you, the idea was not to break the underlying encryption scheme (breaking AES could still turn out being hard for the next couple of years...), but rather disable the BD+ security layer.

Re:As the article says...

[IamTheRealMike]

As far as I can tell, it wasn't actually disabled though. What they guy did is write his own BD+ VM. An impressive feat for sure, but that attack was always anticipated. As the dude says later,

Apart from that the purpose of the program (called "content code") running inside the player on a virtual machine is to detect any known compromised players or known unlicensed emulators (like ours). The content code is give a wide range of opportunities to do that. For example it has (limited) access to the player memory and can even execute arbitrary code on the machine though we haven't seen that yet and our emulator doesn't support this either.
As long as we have access to a working (licensed) players all these measures are useless as we can record traces from this player and adjust the data "injected" in the virtual machine address space by traps or events to perfectly match our recordings. Even if whitebox attack resistant AES or ECDSA algorithms are used and nobody manages to break them we can still use the obfuscated algorithms and their keys.

So basically the disk authors can keep up for as long as they can trace the VM of an existing licensed player. They don't need to do that currently because no publishers are searching for their VM specifically.

They'll probably be able to do this for as long as publishers want their discs to be playable on software players, simply because it's quite easy to reverse engineer x86 code on a PC, when you have a debugger and plenty of Jolt. I don't know what the BluRay player market looks like. If most BluRay players are hardware based, then as a movie studio I'd be tempted to simply write some BD+ code that looked for existing software players and banned all of them. Then the "trace a licensed player" step outlined above suddenly turns into a silicon reverse engineering problem instead of a software reverse engineering problem. Much harder.

That said, I doubt they'd actually do that. Presumably they allowed software players for a reason, despite knowing they were way easier to hack than hardware players.

Re:As the article says...

[squisher]

...
Presumably they allowed software players for a reason, despite knowing they were way easier to hack than hardware players.

Uhm, you do realize that actually watching a BD movie on a laptop or computer is done in software? Obviously this has to be supported, even big companies are not that dumb. Heck, I bet BD is decoded in software on the PS3.

Re:As the article says...

[c]

> If most BluRay players are hardware based, then as a movie studio I'd be tempted to simply write
> some BD+ code that looked for existing software players and banned all of them. Then the
> "trace a licensed player" step outlined above suddenly turns into a silicon reverse engineering
> problem instead of a software reverse engineering problem. Much harder.

Even then, you can still run the BD+ code in the VM, and trace it under the VM, and figure out what makes it fail, and ensure that it sees a VM environment which doesn't look like an existing software player. Or any kind of software player. And you may have the ability to modify the software player to explore what triggers the problem (a lot of people who's software players no longer play the latest releases would be rather thankful for a patch).

Harder, but a boatload easier than tracing silicon.

The BD group pretty much has to outlaw software players entirely to avoid this kind of attack.

c.

Re:As the article says...

[IamTheRealMike]

Yes I know. What I meant was, what proportion of BluRay watching people watch the movies on their laptops or desktops, vs a dedicated hardware player or PS3. And yes I expect the PS3 does a lot of it in software too. Point is, I also expect tracing the BD+ VM in a PS3 to be quite hard.

Re:As the article says...

[ceoyoyo]

"can even execute arbitrary code on the machine"

Oh excellent. I think I'll skip BD, thank you.

Re:As the article says...

[IamTheRealMike]

I agree that the BD group may eventually be backed into a corner over software players, at which point it'll boil down to pure economics. I read that the vast majority of BluRay players in the world are PS3, although of course, that doesn't mean the vast majority of used BR players are PS3s.

I honestly have no idea what proportion of BluRay watchers watch via their PCs, but the equation is simple - take a graph of disc sales. Presumably at some point its BD+ program is cracked and sales will fall as high quality rips show up on the internet - I'd imagine the graph looks like a sharp rise upwards on release week followed by a gradual decay into nothingness over time, with a sharp drop around the time the BD+ program is cracked (assuming it lasts long enough that you can even get a sales baseline, ie, not within a few days).

Now let's say 10% of BluRay watchers use a PC, so reduce your project sales by 10% but remove the sharp drop due to piracy, take the integral of both graphs and see if the difference is positive. If it's big enough it might be worth abandoning PC playback to avoid the piracy (or shift that sales cliff to a point where sales were low anyway).

If the economics don't look like that, then the BD group needs to try and get PowerDVD and friends seriously buffed up, security wise. It's certainly possible to make x86 code annoying and difficult to reverse engineer, but very few people can do it well. I'd imagine most of them don't work for BluRay player software companies.

I'd be very interested in a chart of every BluRay title released and when it was cracked, but I doubt such information is publically available.

Re:As the article says...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the most obvious "insightful" post I've seen in a while. Obviously those run on computers are done in software. Everyone knows that. Its clear the poster knew that. But you didn't understand that he knew that. That doesn't make you insightful, it means you have poor reading comprehension. people actually lose insight when they read your postings.

Re:As the article says...

[Bert64]

Most bluray players will probably be software based, at least some of the toshiba hd-dvd players were linux based and quite hackable.
Besides, if you can't play your bluray content on any computer then the number of people who might want pirate copies increases significantly... Even people who don't have an HDTV usually have a computer monitor capable of 720p at least. In my case, i travel a lot, and always have a laptop with me (travelling for work, need the laptop), 720p video looks much better on it than low resolution dvd does so i will watch the higher resolution video if i can get it. Sitting close to the screen makes the difference more obvious too.

Re:As the article says...

[eean]

I wouldn't really expect that. The PS3 runs Linux and is much more like a computer then a DVD player. It probably does the decoding in its PowerPC multicore processor, not in a special chip.

Re:As the article says...

[Constantine XVI]

The PS3 can run Linux. Stock PS3s run Sony's XMB OS, not Linux. I wouldn't doubt the Blu-Ray player using a hardware decoder, or at least the RSX (graphics) chip.

Re:As the article says...

[Briareos]

...start reading on page 15,[...]

I only have 9 pages, you insensitive clod!

Re:As the article says...

[squiggleslash]

And here's the hilarious part: as soon as they (the movie publishing industry) do start trying to be clever with BD+ attacks trying to find the Doom9 VM and variants thereof, they'll screw up discs so they're unplayable on numerous legitimate players. Pretty much the only thing that hasn't sunk BD+ so far is the fact that there are very few different models of player in circulation. As it is, it's still fallen over before.

Re:As the article says...

[aliquis]

Uhm, does it? I know you can run Linux on it, but does it really use Linux for basic usage such as running a game or the media players?

Use the word Cell multicore processor if anything because it's not multiple PPC cores, just one.

Re:As the article says...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up, it was very obvious that he of course knew when software players was used.

Re:As the article says...

[aliquis]

"lol, you don't even trust Sony!?!"

Re:As the article says...

[Paradigm_Complex]

Presumably at some point its BD+ program is cracked and sales will fall as high quality rips show up on the internet

Or, ya'know, the opposite. True, there are those who want the copy protection lessened so they can pirate - but there are also those (including myself) who want to be able to do things like play the disk on Linux, make legitimate backups (fscking kids keep scratching my disks), and ripping the movies to play them on portable devices (at lower resolutions, anyway).

Yes, yes, I know I'm part of a sufficiently small minority to be largely ignored by people who impliment things like BD+, but there has got to be plenty enough people out there like me to make your simple equation far less feasible. No sharp drop if the crack leads to a somewhat counterbalancing increase in sales.

Re:As the article says...

[swillden]

I honestly have no idea what proportion of BluRay watchers watch via their PCs, but the equation is simple - take a graph of disc sales. Presumably at some point its BD+ program is cracked and sales will fall as high quality rips show up on the internet - I'd imagine the graph looks like a sharp rise upwards on release week followed by a gradual decay into nothingness over time, with a sharp drop around the time the BD+ program is cracked (assuming it lasts long enough that you can even get a sales baseline, ie, not within a few days).

By this theory, you should see DVD sales drop to nothing almost instantaneously.

Even if Blu-Ray copy protection were as utterly broken as DVD copy protection is, the disks would still sell fine. Of course, then there are the people like me, who don't pirate anything, but refuse to buy media they can't copy at will. I'll stick with DVDs until the Blu-Ray cracks are so automated and key distribution infrastructure so well-developed that I can do what I want with Blu-Ray media.

Re:As the article says...

[Draek]

Now let's say 10% of BluRay watchers use a PC, so reduce your project sales by 10% but remove the sharp drop due to piracy, take the integral of both graphs and see if the difference is positive. If it's big enough it might be worth abandoning PC playback to avoid the piracy (or shift that sales cliff to a point where sales were low anyway).

Not really. Media formats are one of those markets where network effect has a very strong effect, so while all those PC Blu-Ray owners may prefer ThePirateBay for all their needs instead of Blockbuster, they still help maintain the perception that Blu-Ray is a solid format with strong lasting power, which in turn increases sales of both players and media.

There's a reason why Economics is its own special field, y'know. It's completely fucking nuts.

Re:As the article says...

[Jorophose]

Um, wat.

I'd expect bluray sales to start skyrocketting soon. At least for blank media and burners/drives, and a lot of people ready for bluray as long as the players are not overly restricted (ie think a bluray player in your car limited to today's grade restrictions).

Right now I'm willing to buy a bluray burner when the prices approach 50$-60$ for a drive. I'm sure I'm not alone, and plenty others might go for 100$ drives.

Now, the question is, do we play the nice card, and buy up bluray drives to drive down the price and make them more popular compared to players... Or do we play the evil card, and refuse to buy into bluray and simply start organising "darknets" based on a bunch of people with eSATA hard drives, killing off whatever chance they had of us buying bluray like we did DVD? I could easily imagine a whole bunch of people getting together, sharing their rips of movies in get-togethers, passing them along. Internet speeds may not be fast enough but cars are.

Personally I'd go #2. This time they can go fucking die. But I don't know. And should they decide to be dipshits and break compatibility for more restraints, #2 is definately the way to go.

It would be nice, for once, to fuck them over. But if they don't harden encryption, if they leave it as is, I think it's fair to buy burners; if only for data.

Re:As the article says...

[afidel]

Internet speeds are plenty fast for trading BD rips. Even at full quality they are only about 30Mbps on average. My download speed is 10Mbps so it would take me about 6 hours to download a 2 hour movie, certainly not realtime streaming but fast enough to not be too annoying. Just start the download one day and watch it the next.

Re:As the article says...

[meimeiriver]

BD+ was itself a 'firmware' hack. They try to cover that up a bit, putting texts on your Blu-Rays, like: "Even though Blu-Ray gives you the highest definition video, your player may need an update to play properly." I reckon you can do this exactly once; but I doubt they can pull that stunt again: people pay good money for their players, and want to be able to play their discs sans having to do firmware upgrades, or running back to the store every six months to get someone else to do it. So, yes, I think they're pretty much stuck with BD+ for a while.

Re:As the article says...

[Z00L00K]

Thanks - you have now revealed a new security hole for malicious software to use.

OK, it wasn't unexpected, and now we have a new potential security threat to take care of. Infected Blu-Ray disks.

Re:As the article says...

[kitgerrits]

Yes, the PS3 decodes BD in software (they used it as an example of parallel processing on the Cell).
Unfortunately, the PS3 runs -either- Linux -or- the BD decoding program (inside its own O/S).
This makes tracing the BD program from inside Linux impossible.

Re:As the article says...

[IamTheRealMike]

I'm surprised this even still comes up. By definition sales fall when copy protection is cracked, otherwise nobody would bother developing it in the first place. A system like BD+ isn't cheap to create or maintain so I'd imagine the losses are significant.

Unless you actually believe all the executives at all the movie studios and their major shareholders are so stupid they can't read a graph, of course. In which case I don't know what to say ... none of us here have the information needed to know the economics of BD+ or similar systems but it's reasonable to infer the entire industry isn't staffed by financial illiterates, otherwise movies would never get made at all.

Re:As the article says...

[IamTheRealMike]

By this theory, you should see DVD sales drop to nothing almost instantaneously.

Even if Blu-Ray copy protection were as utterly broken as DVD copy protection is, the disks would still sell fine.

If you read what I wrote more carefully, you'll see it says "sharp drop" not "drop to nothingness". Obviously there are always some people who will buy the discs. The question is how many sales did you lose because obtaining a free copy became so easy. By the way, your belief that without DRM the discs would sell "fine" is pretty weak - who decides what "fine" is? You know most movies lose money and are subsidised by the blockbusters, right?

Re:As the article says...

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if they do stop supporting software players, it would only be a temporary obstacle. Presumably you could emulate the processor from a hardware player and run it's BD+ VM. If done right this would be undetectable.

Re:As the article says...

[Jorophose]

But even then, it's crap quality (compared to the original 54mbps), and you're at your ISPs' mercy.

Not all of us are so lucky, either. I think the fastest I can get is 18mbps; but I'd be capped so hard it would not be worth it. (I think it's only about 120GB-200GB per month. I'd expect 300GB+ for the crazy prices they're asking)

Re:As the article says...

[RCL]

I think it's more about fear of losses than actual losses itself. Most people who buy pirated stuff cannot afford buying (the same amount of) legal stuff, so it is incorrect to count all the counterfeit sales as "losses".

As an example: people in Russia earn about $400/month on average - do you think it increases the chances for Linux/free software popularity? No, everyone just buys counterfeited Windows, which costs about 2-3$ in semi-legal shops. You can even find custom Windows "distros" on the net. Does that count as "loss of sales" for Microsoft? I doubt that.

Re:As the article says...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the differene between "hardware" and "software" BD players is rather small. Apparently all the "consumer" players run Windows CE (or whatever it is called today), Linux or some other embedded OS, I believe it's mostly the final video codec (mpeg2, vc-1 or h264) that's running in 'hardware', the rest is software just like on a PC.

Re:As the article says...

[amorsen]

Unless you actually believe all the executives at all the movie studios and their major shareholders are so stupid they can't read a graph, of course.

AFAIK the movie studios don't pay all that much for DRM. Most of the cost is, AFAIK again, borne by player manufacturers.

Re:As the article says...

[ceoyoyo]

I'd actually be more worried that the movie studios or Sony might give in to the temptation to make use of that little security hole. But they wouldn't do anything like, say, install a rootkit on your machine when you played a disc, would they? Nah.

Re:As the article says...

[swillden]

If you read what I wrote more carefully, you'll see it says "sharp drop" not "drop to nothingness".

Was there a sharp drop in DVD sales after DVD copying tools became available? By your theory, there should have been.

The truth of the matter is that DRM has little to no impact on sales, and this will be particularly so for Blu-Ray, because even if the DRM were never broken, lower-quality copies would still be available for piracy and the people who really care about getting the highest quality are also those who want to have the box and the extras. And that completely ignores the fact that at present broadband speeds, downloading 30GB images is not very appealing.

You know most movies lose money and are subsidised by the blockbusters, right?

That is only true if you look at box office receipts. When you add in DVD sales, and correct for the industry's strange accounting methods, most movies make money, even those that skip the theatres entirely.

Re:As the article says...

[DinDaddy]

I would bet the number of people who watch blu-ray on a PC of some sort, would give a greater return than the losses to copying by a large margin for some time.

My rationale being, trading and downloading 20-40GB files is going to be a marginal activity for a while yet, and blu-ray authoring plants are a bit out of the reach of "real" pirates. So fully cracked blu-ray losses don't seem like they could offset increased sales and boosting of the format by consumer portability for some time.

But maybe I am missing something.

Re:As the article says...

[devjj]

That's well and good, but how else are you going to get very high quality HD content? To my knowledge (and if someone can prove me wrong, please do so!), BD is currently the only means for acquiring HD content with relatively low levels of compression. Compared to the content I stream on my Apple TV from iTunes, or stuff I may download via BitTorrent, BD provides a vastly better image quality thanks to its capacity.

I think that's why the work of the Doom9 guys is so important. Most HD content downloaded or streamed is extremely compressed, and watching such content on a nice HDTV is painful because such TVs are good at highlighting the flaws in the source material. BD is currently the only way to get truly high quality HD material, so while you're free to skip the format, I'll personally continue to buy BD and hope that the Doom9 guys eventually get to the point where MacTheRipper can simply be upgraded to support it.

It's an unfortunate situation, to be sure, but I'll be sad if BD dies. It's simply not possible to get visually appealing 1080p in a file that'll fit on a DVD.

Re:As the article says...

[ceoyoyo]

I guess for me 1080p with a low level of compression just isn't worth giving Sony and the movie studios the keys to my computer. I didn't say you shouldn't buy blu-ray disks. Go for it.

I don't think it would be sad at all of BD dies. If there was a demand it would be replaced by something. If the demand were contingent on the format not having back doors then the new format would not. Yes, you might have to do without your low-compression high def for a little while.

Re:As the article says...

[afidel]

There are almost zero BD disks at 54Mbps. Only ones using MPEG2 would use the full possible bitrate. The much more common titles using MPEG4 or VC1 cap out at around 30Mbps.

Re:As the article says...

[Miseph]

"I'm surprised this even still comes up. By definition sales fall when copy protection is cracked, otherwise nobody would bother developing it in the first place. A system like BD+ isn't cheap to create or maintain so I'd imagine the losses are significant."

No, sales do not, by definition, fall when copy protection is broken. Sales only fall when sales actually fall, and until then they're blowing smoke. You know what happened to DVD sales after CSS was broken? Sales increased. Perhaps it hasn't occurred to you that the reason they bother making copy protection in the first place is that they are wrong, and that whole thing is a waste of time and money in the first place.

Copying is a cause, copy protection is an effect, but there is very little evidence suggesting that there is an intermediary effect of falling sales between those two, only evidence of increased viewing.

Re:As the article says...

[multisync]

Internet speeds are plenty fast for trading BD rips ... Even at full quality they are only about 30Mbps on average

I think you meant to say they average 30 gigabytes. Sure, this torrent of Pirates of the Caribbean At World's End is 30.38 gigabytes.

So 30.38 gig is 31,109.12 megabytes. If you are really getting continuous download speeds of 10 Mbps, that works out to 1221 kilobytes per second, or 1.2 megabytes per second. 31,109.12/1.2=25924 seconds, or a little over seven hours.

Not bad I suppose if you are getting those speeds. You could get it while you sleep.

The local cable monopoly provider gushes in the marketing materials for their "Extreme" package "With an extremely fast download speed of up to 10 Mbps ..." which - again - would be 1221 kilobytes per second, but I have that package and I never see speeds like that. What I do get is pretty consistent 150 - 300 KB/s, with bursts of up to 450 KB/s, usually at the beginning of the transfer. Other's mileage may vary, but I would be surprised to see 1221 KB/sec sustained for the duration of a 30 gig download, my ISP's marketing propaganda notwithstanding.

Oh, and they cap me at something like 100 GB of throughput per month. The (slower) DSL alternative I was using before gave me more (I think 200, maybe?) but even that would get you fewer than seven movies per month, if you did nothing else on the Internet.

Storing them would be costly, too, unless you delete them as soon as you watch them, or burn them to discs (are there even burners out there yet? I'm not really up on the subject). I don't know. Maybe there are faster options with higher caps that I am not aware of, but I don't think it's quite there.

Re:As the article says...

[GodKingAmit]

I'm surprised this even still comes up. By definition sales fall when copy protection is cracked, otherwise nobody would bother developing it in the first place. A system like BD+ isn't cheap to create or maintain so I'd imagine the losses are significant.

Or the people ordering/paying for for the development of DRM systems are idiots who don't understand a) technology and b) fairuse.

Re:As the article says...

[afidel]

I get consistent 750KB/s on popular torrents but that's because I limit it to that speed to leave enough upload for good VoIP performance, overnight I could leave it full blast and get a bit over 1MB/s. Storage is cheap, a 500GB drive is $59 on sale, a 1TB drive is around $129. I wouldn't call 300 movies for about half the cost of a BlueRay player expensive =)

Re:As the article says...

[multisync]

Wow. Who's your provider?

Re:As the article says...

[afidel]

Wide Open West, they just upgraded me from 4/.5 to 10/1 =) Of course at work we have one site that was on Fios and they had 15/2 for $35/month!

Re:As the article says...

[Anonymous Coward]

fscking kids keep scratching my disks

Now if that is not good reason to stop fscking kids, I do not know what is!

Re:As the article says...

[IamTheRealMike]

The whole point of BD+ is to change that, because player manufacturers have a built-in incentive to produce weak protection. The idea is to let the studios decide how much to invest in protection.

Re:As the article says...

[IamTheRealMike]

The trick is not, did sales grow? It's what was the derivative of the growth. If sales were growing at a steady 10% a year and the year CSS was cracked it dropped to a steady 3% growth, sales still grew the year it was cracked, but it's fair to assume not as much. But I don't have those figures - can you cite?

Re:As the article says...

[MrResistor]

I'm surprised this even still comes up. By definition sales fall when copy protection is cracked, otherwise nobody would bother developing it in the first place.

Does it? I'd love to see some actual numbers to back up that claim.

Unless you actually believe all the executives at all the movie studios and their major shareholders are so stupid they can't read a graph, of course.

Have you ever worked in the corporate environment? Executives make stupid decisions all the time, even when there are pretty graphs available to show them that the choice doesn't make sense for their business. So yes, based on what I have personally witnessed, I have little trouble believing that.

Re:As the article says...

[Ghubi]

You know most movies lose money and are subsidised by the blockbusters, right?

I guess my boycott is working then

Re:As the article says...

[TikiTDO]

Ask, and ye shall receive:

http://www.dvdinformation.com/news/press/CES010807.htm

Sales of DVDs began in 3rd quarter of 1997.

DeCSS was released on Oct 9, 1999.

Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to get the actual data of how DeCSS affected DVD sales, since DeCSS came out when DVD producers were just ramping up. We do see a drop from 4x growth to 2x growth, but the question remains, which is the anomalous result. It could be that the 4x increase from 1998 to 1999 is a matter of suppliers adapting to consumer demand from a slow start, on the other hand the 2x decrease could be the result of DeCSS.

Re:As the article says...

[amorsen]

Nevertheless, all the studios have to provide is a bit of software. The player manufacturers have to license the patents and add the necessary hardware features. It sounds like a free ride for the studios to me.

Re:As the article says...

[zmollusc]

Your reasoning only works if the industry is staffed by decision-makers acting in the best interests of the industry, rather than themselves and their own careers.

Re:As the article says...

[Sloppy]

Presumably at some point its BD+ program is cracked and sales will fall as high quality rips show up on the internet - I'd imagine the graph looks like a sharp rise upwards on release week followed by a gradual decay into nothingness over time, with a sharp drop around the time the BD+ program is cracked

Those rips are already out there. People could use Slysoft's ripper, or sneak the plaintext right out of the studio. Those approaches are more of a pain in the ass than a general BD+ defeat, but only one person has to do it, and then thousands of people spread the resulting file.

What is changing is that Blu-ray is going to become playable on more personal computers and other "unapproved" devices. People who weren't able to use the shiny discs will now be able to do so. The market for the discs has just increased, not decreased. Sales will go up, not down. Anyone who would have pirated, was already pirating.

Re:As the article says...

[Sloppy]

By definition sales fall when copy protection is cracked, otherwise nobody would bother developing it in the first place.

Like what happened with DVDs? ;-)

I didn't buy any DVDs until CSS was cracked. Once it became playable, by definition, DVDs entered the market and they were able to start receiving my money -- and that's exactly what happened.

If DVD sales had fallen once CSS was cracked, the studios wouldn't even be around today. With more people going high-def, Blu-ray's DRM was a serious threat to the studio's revenue, since piracy was the only option. Now (well, once this crack gets widely deployed; e.g. I "emerge mplayer" and I have it) people can buy the discs instead.

Re:As the article says...

[Sloppy]

That's well and good, but how else are you going to get very high quality HD content?

Over the air TV. Any maybe some day: cable TV.

Re:As the article says...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, if you create a VM that doesn't look like an existing software player, it won't pass validation, and it won't work.

You have to do the exact opposite: make it look like an existing software player that you can emulate successfully. (And obviously it has to be one you have a key for. And a key that hasn't been revoked and doesn't have a very short renewal date.)

Either way, of course it's doable. The question is, how long will it take?

The studios don't demand perfect DRM. They demand "good enough" DRM. If it takes someone 15 seconds to crack a disc, every disc in the world will be cracked. If it takes someone three weeks of sweat and Jolt, then only a handful of movies (probably the ones most important to cracker geeks) will be cracked.

And Sony, Universal, etc. are fine with that. So a few movies (mostly cult movies, but occasionally your Star Wars blockbuster) lose value 3 weeks after release, but the other 130 movies released that weekend are unaffected? Who cares?

Re:As the article says...

[Anonymous Coward]

But they don't have to do that.

If you're using a key that identifies the PS3's VM, or some other hardware device that hasn't been cracked, it can just trust the key and move on.

If you're using a key that identifies the VM in PowerDVD x.y.z, then they have to break out the cleverness. They don't need it for anything else, even PowerDVD x.y.z+1, if Doom9 doesn't have the key for anything else.

Eventually, the cleverness will get too hard. Maybe they just can't think of a way to be clever enough to defeat Doom9's emulator that won't break their earlier cleverness. Or maybe their clever code has some obnoxious bug that makes PowerDVD crash 0.1% of the time, and they can't figure out why.

That's a disaster, right? People's legitimate players are broken, so they'll rise up with pitchforks and torches and start using VHS again....

No, only PowerDVD x.y.z is broken. They stop renewing that key (which is also the one Doom9 was using), and everyone with PowerDVD x.y.z has to upgrade to PowerDVD x.y.z+1 before playing new movies. (In fact, most people already got the free upgrade to PowerDVD x.y+1.0 a month ago, so they won't have to do anything at all.)

Eventually, someone will break the whole class of VMs like the one implemented by PowerDVD. (Someone also has to figure out a way to extract or fake the PowerDVD key immediately after each new version is released, but that's probably an easier problem.)

Whenever that happens--maybe every 2 years, maybe every 5 months, maybe even every 6 weeks--there's a cleverness arms race that they only have to win until they can come up with a new VM implementation for PowerDVD.

Of course they have N of these made in advance, so the only real delay is that PowerDVD wants to charge people for the "major upgrade" while Sony wants people to get it for free, and Macrovision wants PowerDVD to buy 3 of them in advance "just in case" while PowerDVD just wants to pay for the first one, and so on. So, the companies play chicken with each other until they have to do it one way or the other. But they will do it one way or the other.

Re:As the article says...

[nEJC76]

You are not alone.
And don't forget: if you bulid it they will come

Not quite the last barrier for linux

[morgan_greywolf]

For reading BD+ BRs on Linux, the problem is they had to use patched firmware. This doesn't bode well for widespread adoption on Linux by non-technical users. Patching firmware is scary for most consumers, who will face the possibility of bricked drives.

The key will be to either bypass the drive's firmware with virtualization or to somehow have the firmware patch to happen safely and automatically on as many drives as possible. Hopefully something that could be done in the Linux kernel drivers for the BR drives and/or the SCSI drivers.

Re:Not quite the last barrier for linux

[jedidiah]

Patching firmware is alrealy something that any BD user needs to get used to.
This has nothing to do with Linux. All of the HD video technology from cable
to high definition DVD formats are all inherently problematic and thus
ultimately user hostile.

Re:Not quite the last barrier for linux

[the_other_chewey]

For reading BD+ BRs on Linux, the problem is they had to use patched firmware. This doesn't bode well for widespread adoption on Linux by non-technical users.

The fact that BD playback works with unpatched drives on Windows means that this
limitation will probably fall in the not-so-distant future.

Neat, I will finally be able to buy a BR drive.

Re:Not quite the last barrier for linux

[Ant P.]

Or you could bypass the drive and the rest of the problems with a network connection and a P2P application. This method also has the advantage of not funding organised crime.

Re:Not quite the last barrier for linux

[Neon Spiral Injector]

The patched firmware was only to extract the volume key from the disc. Those are easy enough to find from other sources.

Re:Not quite the last barrier for linux

[morgan_greywolf]

Or you could bypass the drive and the rest of the problems with a network connection and a P2P application. This method also has the advantage of not funding organised crime.

That's gotta be the most ironic statement I've read on Slashdot in a while. So ironic because it's true.

As always with DRM

[symbolset]

The content must contain sufficient information for the content to be decoded. Anything one software can do, another software can do (see Knuth, et seq). Therefore if there's an available software that can decode the encrypted content it must be possible for open software to decode the encrypted content. Removing the encryption using open software eliminates the protections against copying provided by the closed software and the game is over.

Thus DRM is a fool's errand. It always has been.

The illusion of protectability is however easy to sell for vast sums of cash to content owners who desperately want it to be possible.

Re:As always with DRM

[Bender0x7D1]

Therefore if there's an available software that can decode the encrypted content it must be possible for open software to decode the encrypted content.

Possible != Feasible. It is possible for me to brute force AES-256 but it isn't feasible for me to do so.

Re:As always with DRM

[dotancohen]

The content must contain sufficient information for the content to be decoded.

You do remember that we are talking blueray discs here? What user content could possibly be on them that is not available in a cheaper, already broken format? Brand-spanin' new movies?!? If those movies were worth watching, people would be paying for them. People are not paying because all the new movies are garbage. A single, random good movie (Dark Knight) will not be enough to get people to move to this quagmire of technology.

Re:As always with DRM

[thaig]

Sure, but if your blu-ray player can decode the disc then there must be a fixed key stored in it's memory. It would have to be the same key for all players too. That would mean that one only had to find the key once to be able to play all discs.

It would be rather nasty if the players didn't store the keys but downloaded them. It will probably be a long while before consumers are prepared to accept a player that has to have a net connection to work.

Re:As always with DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

good one, pirate justification that reads like it was written by a 16 year old. add that you're going to stick it to the evil corporate man and it's a hat trick

Re:As always with DRM

[jlarocco]

There's sufficient information available so that the "authorized" players don't need to brute force AES-256, so it must be possible for open players to find that information and play the movie. There's nothing "magic" about the authorized code.

Re:As always with DRM

[sjames]

Therefore if there's an available software that can decode the encrypted content it must be possible for open software to decode the encrypted content.

Possible != Feasible. It is possible for me to brute force AES-256 but it isn't feasible for me to do so.

The point is, the 'legitimate' (w/ DRM I use that term loosely) doesn't brute the key, and the legitimate software can be watched in action. That means that reverse engineered Free software can be created to do the same thing.

Hardware trickery to make it harder to do that also increases the incentive to find a way. Somebody somewhere will find a way to dissect it.

The job is even harder since it will always be a plaintext attack.

Re:As always with DRM

[evilviper]

It would have to be the same key for all players too. That would mean that one only had to find the key once to be able to play all discs.

Completely wrong.

There are innumerable different player keys, which can be individually disabled on all future discs. Every different brand of player uses a different key, and presumably, different models from the same brand likely use separate keys as well.

It's a fairly simple trick to do. The disc is encrypted with a "disc key". That disc key is stored on the disc, but AES encrypted, using millions of "player keys"... Your player uses its player key to decode the disc key, then uses the disc key to decrypt and play the disc.

When Sony notices that your player key is being publicly distributed, they stop using your player key to encrypt the disc key... Your player (or ripping software as it were) then can't play any future discs, until you upgrade it to a new key.

Re:As always with DRM

[Tony Hoyle]

So you use the PS3's player key. Sony aren't going to disable that in a hurry - not that it's Sony who disable the keys.. they're just the maker of the most popular player.

Re:As always with DRM

[IGnatius T Foobar]

The content must contain sufficient information for the content to be decoded.

People do not buy "content." They buy movies, music, software, etc. "Content" is a weasel word that transforms someone's potentially beautiful creative work into a mere commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and generate revenue. For more on this, read the FSF's "Words to Avoid" document.

Re:As always with DRM

[Kjella]

Sure, but if your blu-ray player can decode the disc then there must be a fixed key stored in it's memory. It would have to be the same key for all players too. That would mean that one only had to find the key once to be able to play all discs

It's a long story but there are different player keys, that'll be able to decode the disc key but the disc's key is different from disc to disc. There's an intermediate and semi-permanent processing key, but that too can change and there's has been at least three different such keys. So no, you can not find the key just once and be done with it. However, as long as people have a method of deducing one key, it'll keep working until they ban whole models of players. Something tells me that won't happen any time soon.

Re:As always with DRM

[Constantine XVI]

Sony can probably change the PS3's key (and surrounding security features) in software. One update, done over the net (or packed on new BRDs), and the PS3 has a new key, and is 10% harder to break out.

Re:As always with DRM

[karnal]

I'd have to imagine that if you happened to compromise a PS3 key, Sony could push a new one - at least to the internet connected ones; maybe via game discs/firmware updates in the case of non-networked PS3s.

Re:As always with DRM

[evilviper]

So you use the PS3's player key. Sony aren't going to disable that in a hurry

There are enough keys that every individual PS3 could have it's own key... Not to say that is actually done, but it could happen with a simple firmware update. With so many PS3's internet connected, it shouldn't be difficult.

And I wouldn't be surprised to find that Sony has a mechanism in place to upgrade the firmware from commercially purchased discs... Throw that payload in a few popular movies, and everybody is updated in a matter of months. Then you can disable the old key.

Of course, the real issue is that it's simply far easier to rip the key out of PowerDVD, or some other PC program that you can transparently debug on your computer.

Re:As always with DRM

[Mistshadow2k4]

A single, random good movie (Dark Knight) will not be enough to get people to move to this quagmire of technology.

Very, very aptly put. There are far too few good movies out on blu-ray that aren't available on DVD for me to make the move. Even if you gave me a blu-ray player, I'd still buy movies on regular DVD when possible. Why? Because the studios have made such a mess of this, with the heavy-handed DRM and high prices (blu-ray is high considering how not-so-hugely-better than DVD it is), that I'm not even convinced yet that blu-ray is here for good, not matter what corporate execs claim. To most geeks that sounds like an old fogie griping about new-fangled gadgets, but blu-ray isn't better enough to warrant upgrading and there is simply not enough good content available only in blu-ray to make enough people upgrade. It doesn't occur to most geeks that a new format that actually is superior might tank, but I'm starting to wonder. I think maybe the only reason it has survived this long is because of Sony pushing it so hard. Will that be enough three years from now, when people are still buying DVDs and downloading movies to their computers? I guess we have to wait to see, but I'm glad I don't have any money invested in blu-ray.

Re:As always with DRM

[supervillainsf]

The PS3 has firmware updates. If you read this page: http://www.us.playstation.com/PS3/About/SystemUpdate they are quite upfront about the fact that without updating there are features which may be unusable. They will have no problem changing the PS3 BD+ key and pushing it out if that means shutting down undesireable software players

Re:As always with DRM

[rugatero]

But not all BD players (or even PS3s) are connected to the net. Updating the firmware would be far less trivial, especially for the average user. I understand that content providers seem to get a kick out of inconveniencing consumers, but they'd be facing a major backlash if they suddenly froze out a particular player.

Re:As always with DRM

[__aagmrb7289]

"Thus DRM is a fool's errand. It always has been. " The purpose of DRM isn't to stop copying altogether - it's to increase the difficulty to the point where the amount of copying is trivial. "Thus DRM sometimes works - and certainly can work. It always has."

Re:As always with DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

...It will probably be a long while before consumers are prepared to accept a player that has to have a net connection to work.

Probably not as long as you think. Take the average consumer of blu-ray that just spent $200+ on a movie player, toss in a handful of $25+ movie titles, and slap a nice big fat 1080p HDTV cherry on top, and I'd say you're looking at a consumer that likely has broadband, and is probably geeky enough to WANT that 'Net connection to their player to download the other 74 hours of "bonus material not seen anywhere else!!!"

Re:As always with DRM

[innocent_white_lamb]

It will probably be a long while before consumers are prepared to accept a player that has to have a net connection to work.
 
I don't think so.
 
  Bell Expressvu, a satellite dish televison service, requires that their decoder boxes be plugged into a telephone line for reasons unknown to me.
 
I doubt anyone who wants the service has balked at that. "Input from dish plugs in here, video output to tv plugs in here, telephone cable plugs in here." Very few people would question that procedure or think about its implications.

Re:As always with DRM

[Chaos Incarnate]

I suspect it's software bugs rather than key issues, but many titles have required users to update their firmware before they'll play (including the recent Bond movies released this month, with my original firmware having been from August).

Re:As always with DRM

[jonbryce]

So all you need to do is examine the update and pull the new key out of it.

Re:As always with DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because precisely this type of key revocation has worked so very well to keep Windows piracy down.

I'll just point out the half-dozen VLKs floating around for Windows that still pass WGA. If MS revokes ALL of them tomorrow, another will be leaked by day's end.

Barn door, meet horses.

Re:As always with DRM

[rdnetto]

Depends on your requirements and resources. For example, it may not be feasible to brute force it if you need it within a week, but it may be feasible to brute force it over a year using distributed computing. e.g. a server farm or botnet

Re:As always with DRM

[compro01]

That's for PPV (pay per view) stuff. Starchoice has the same thing on their boxes, but it's not required unless you want to get PPV stuff.

Re:As always with DRM

[davolfman]

So what you do is shotgun it. You hack away at memory until you find the player key for every software player you can, and see if you can get a few hardware player keys while your at it. You then build a failover into your code so they have to disable play on a significant useful fraction of the players out there in order to keep you from copying a disk.

Re:As always with DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

When Sony notices that your player key is being publicly distributed, they stop using your player key to encrypt the disc key... Your player (or ripping software as it were) then can't play any future discs, until you upgrade it to a new key.

The big advantage the BD+ offered, that a compromise would affect only one disc and one player, cuts both ways. It also means that there will always be plenty of keys that haven't been revoked for an open source player to choose from.

Remember that keys can be extracted from some hardware players, not just software players.

Re:As always with DRM

[fizzup]

I remember when I first heard about zero knowledge proofs of knowledge. I was astounded. Even now that I understand how they work, they still seem like black magic to me.

If DRM inventors were more honest, they would call the schemes "zero knowledge transfers of knowledge". At least then it would be more obvious how broken they are by design. But think about it for a moment. A PHB probably has the same reaction to a zero knowledge proof as he does to DRM, "Really, you can do that?" A lot of remarkable things are possible using cryptography. How would you articulate the impossibility of effective DRM to a decision-maker?

Re:As always with DRM

[penguinchris]

I don't know if you've actually seen blu-ray movies in comparison with DVD movies, then, because it is actually a huge improvement. Blu-ray movies look amazing - if you need proof, go to pirate bay and download one.

You of course won't notice a difference on non-HD TV, but on a computer monitor or HDTV the difference is quite large and well worth the upgrade in my opinion.

The difference in quality is so apparent on an HDTV that even the many people who didn't notice a difference between VHS and DVD immediately see the massive improvement.

Re:As always with DRM

[mrchaotica]

But, of course, the patch containing the new key would have to -- you guessed it -- contain the new key! So then you just compromise the new key (ad infinitum) by intercepting the patch. If the PS3 can read the key from the patch, so can you.

Re:As always with DRM

[prisoner-of-enigma]

So all you need to do is examine the update and pull the new key out of it.

If you'd think about it for a moment, you'd realize that if it were that easy, BD+ would've been cracked long ago. It wasn't, so clearly it is not "all you need to do."

While Sony is demonstrably stupid in believing DRM cannot be bypassed for at least ten years, they are not stupid enough to send out an update where the new keys can be easily snagged. I'm sure you can get the technical details of why what you propose is folly if you head over to the Doom9 forums. You probably need to read up on the basics of encryption and keys first, though, since your knowledge in this area seems a bit lacking.

Re:As always with DRM

[prisoner-of-enigma]

The point is, the 'legitimate' (w/ DRM I use that term loosely) doesn't brute the key, and the legitimate software can be watched in action. That means that reverse engineered Free software can be created to do the same thing.

What you say is technically correct but grossly underestimates the complexity and effort involved. BD+ obfuscates itself under layers upon layers of encryption, misdirection, and self-checking for tampering and observation. Admittedly, it is all for naught if you have the time, tools, and knowledge to peel back all that obfuscation and find the real code, real keys, and so forth in operation. But the effort to get to the point where we can bypass BD+ has taken the concerted effort of hundreds (perhaps thousands) of hackers and perhaps 300-500 man-years of time to break. And it's still open to Sony coming back and breaking it dependent upon how desperate Sony wants to be.

Please, try to appreciate a little more the incredible milestone that's just been achieved. It was not even remotely easy to get this far, and we can't even say for sure the journey is finished.

Re:As always with DRM

[swillden]

Every different brand of player uses a different key, and presumably, different models from the same brand likely use separate keys as well.

I don't know if manufacturers are actually doing it, but the system is designed so that every single player has its own, unique keyset. The math that makes this work is rather cool.

Re:As always with DRM

[sjames]

But the effort to get to the point where we can bypass BD+ has taken the concerted effort of hundreds (perhaps thousands) of hackers and perhaps 300-500 man-years of time to break. And it's still open to Sony coming back and breaking it dependent upon how desperate Sony wants to be.

I certainly didn't mean to imply that the task was trivial or to disparage the accomplishment.

I only meant that DRM is a fool's errand because reverse engineering it can't be made impossible and there are people (such as the ones who cracked BD+) who are quite capable and sufficiently motivated.

Part of it is that some people enjoy the challenge of it. Back when I was in high school and had plenty of time on my hands, I found that hacking the various copy prevention and verifications out of a game was more fun than actually playing it.

From that perspective, the harder they make it, the stronger the motivation to crack it.

Re:As always with DRM

[symbolset]

I doubt anyone who wants the service has balked at that.

Tech support: Hi, may I help you?

Customer: I'm having trouble with the install instructions. It says I have to plug in some telephone cable thingie.

Tech support: Yes, you plug the telephone cable into the unit. The spot is clearly marked in blue.

Customer: Yeah, like I tried, but I have two cables for the phone. One goes to the wall and the other goes to the PC. Neither one fits.

Tech support: Two cables?

Customer: Yeah, they're for charging. Oh! I have another one for the car... no, the car one doesn't fit in the hole either.

Tech support: Are you using a cellular phone?

Customer: Yeah. That's my home phone.

Tech support: You need to use your land line.

Customer: I don't have a LAN line here. When I get online I plug the PC into the phone.

Tech support: I'm going to have to escalate this to my supervisor. Please hold...

Re:As always with DRM

[symbolset]

They believe what they want to believe. Sell them what they want or find a better market for truth.

Re:As always with DRM

[Killer Orca]

Yeah I don't know, maybe if they made their prices realistic or at least take the slowing economy into account on pricing I will not be inclined to repurchase my 50+ DVD disc collection in Blu-Ray. Especially my TV shows, god that would be awful (would The Simpsons even look better in HD? It's just a cartoon). If they(Sony) offered an HD download of DVDs you already own when you buy a PS3 or any other Blu-Ray player then that might be some incentive, but I doubt it would ever happen.

Re:As always with DRM

[symbolset]

I do respect the good professor, and admire his work. Don't take this as a dissent from anything else he's written.

My nick here is symbolset. I'm mindful of what symbols are and what they do. The word is a tool to convey meaning - a link from the idea to the thing referred. From your reply I can sense that this word did a yeoman's work for you.

Often we seek to gain control of discourse by manipulating the symbols until thy perform work for which they're not intended -- certainly IBM tried this in our field by trying to rename hardware like hard disks to fixed disks and motherboards to planar boards. It didn't work for IBM and it's not going to work for Professor Lessig if he pushes his idea into the narrow course of calling things what they are.

In this context "content" is all of music, cinema, software, and many other things once recorded and contained within distribution media - but not live performances nor ideas themselves. The subject of our discussion is BD media and its contents, the encryption methods applied thereto. That's content. The artists themselves, whether writing performing or editing, have litte to do with this. I seriously doubt any of them retains an ownership interest in the "content". And if they don't, is it even still art? Have you seen most of this stuff? It's mostly bad.

Re:As always with DRM

[symbolset]

Don't worry. One of the most wonderful things about the government is that it's ineffective at managing things on a fine scale. This battle will be long over before they even realize it's started. And then they'll be for the result, of course, in recognition of the popular will that this is the way things are. In the mean time the special interests will be occupied buying senators and whatnot without realizing that the battle is being lost in the living rooms, not in the conference rooms.

Re:As always with DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

No, people mostly buy "content". Very few products from major publishing houses, movies and television especially, are "someone's potentially beautiful creative work". They are in fact commodities designed by committee solely to appeal to the largest possible audience. "Content" is the perfect word to describe them.

Re:As always with DRM

[Kadin2048]

That would be one solution, and a good one at that, but it's non-trivial. The hardware players have their keys stored in secure memory and I'm not sure what it would take to extract -- maybe you could do it in a good university lab somewhere.

So far I think there has only been success in extracting the keys used by software players, which can be disabled in later disc pressings. (The GP's description of how key distribution and encryption works is a little simplified from reality; there's a truly bizarre revocation scheme shoehorned in there that's quite complex.)

In fact I think that the granularity of player keys is significantly higher than just one key per model of player. It may go down to the level of individual players, akin to serial numbers, although I'm not entirely sure there.

Re:As always with DRM

[Splab]

That would require you to brute force the other players player key, which is of course pretty much impossible...

Re:As always with DRM

[dotancohen]

good one, pirate justification...

I don't pirate for the same reason that I don't buy: the movies suck. The fact that you assume "not buying" means "pirating" shows who the pirate is.

Re:As always with DRM

[jonbryce]

Yes, but having cracked it once, it is surely a lot easier to crack it the next time round.

Re:As always with DRM

[complete loony]

That disc key is stored on the disc, but AES encrypted, using millions of "player keys"

Just to be a little more pedantic. The disc key is only encrypted a very small number of times on each disc using different keys.

There are (I think) 512 master device keys stored in a vault somewhere that we don't know. Each device key can be used to generate 2 more device keys and one decryption key. This process can be applied recursively to generate a tree that contains 2^32 unique decryption keys.

Each hardware or software device is given a list of keys within this tree so that they can generate some fraction of these the unique keys. With the way the tree is divided between players, there is at least one key that every device can generate, one key that half the devices can generate, .... one key that only two devices can generate, one key that only one device can generate.

To revoke a device, all they need to do is pick the smallest number of keys that the supported players can all generate, but the compromised players cannot.

Initially all disc keys were encrypted with a single decryption key, you know the one that started with 09 F9. That key was revoked to be replaced by a key starting with 45 5F. Which has in turn been replaced by a key starting with 7A 5F.

Re:As always with DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

Brute force != decode, Mr. Nitpicker

Re:As always with DRM

[nbert]

You of course won't notice a difference on non-HD TV, but on a computer monitor or HDTV the difference is quite large and well worth the upgrade in my opinion.

It really depends on display size and viewing distance. The human eye can only distinguish points which are 1 arch-minute apart (it's actually more in the center, but less around). Here are some ratios for distance times display size (at 16:9):

1280x720 2.33
1366x768 2.19
1920x1080 1,55

So in order to see "everything" on a 50" display running full HD, one's maximal distance to the screen is 1.97 m (or 6.46 feet). Of course the picture will still look better/sharper at higher distances. But there are lots of usage scenarios in which Blueray makes no sense at all.

At home I watch TV on a 25" screen at around 3m (10 feet) distance. Since I do not want to sit closer and I don't like to buy a larger screen (dominating the room) there is not much benefit Bluray can provide. I'd rather invest my money in a media server and some construction which hides the device inflation below my TV.

Re:As always with DRM

[davolfman]

I was assuming there might be an accidental vulnerability in at least one player. Although said vulnerability might involve buying the player and hacking out the ROM chips to dump with a PC. The point of this isn't to have software that's actually legal, but to force the BD guys to permanently screw their own adoption by creating incompatibility with early players.

Re:As always with DRM

[evilviper]

But, of course, the patch containing the new key would have to -- you guessed it -- contain the new key! So then you just compromise the new key (ad infinitum) by intercepting the patch.

Once SOny notices that happening, they'll make sure to give every PS3 (or small groups of PS3s) it's own key. Then, when one is compromised, they know more or less who did it, and don't provide an update for those PS3s when they revoke the key.

How many PS3's are you willing to buy?

Re:As always with DRM

[ravenshrike]

While what he proposes is folly if they intercept a single patch, the more patches they intercept the more feasible it becomes. So if they can intercept 100 patches, it becomes much easier to crack individual keys for that firmware update.

Re:As always with DRM

[WiseWeasel]

There's probably a significant number who live out in the sticks, who don't even have the option of broadband internet, and who would be terribly inconvenienced by having to download updates over the internet. That number is significant enough to create a terrible PR situation for the format as a whole, as large numbers of people complain that their several thousand dollar investment in home entertainment is effectively inoperable as new releases keep refusing to play. If the update isn't pushed on the new release discs themselves, then it's dead from the start.

Re:As always with DRM

[CableModemSniper]

I don't know that the player keys are symmetric. If they are, you are of course right. However if they're asymmetric keys, then you need to compromise the manufacturing process to use the PS3's player key (in which case you can probably skip messing with the keys altogether).

Re:As always with DRM

[Sloppy]

People do not buy "content." They buy movies, music, software, etc. "Content" is a weasel word that transforms someone's potentially beautiful creative work into a mere commodity whose purpose is to fill a box and generate revenue.

We need a general and brief term that covers movies, music, software, etc -- anything that might be stricken with DRM. "Content" serves that purpose.

If you think it implies something distasteful (personally, I don't see it, but if some people do, ok) then propose an alternative.

Re:As always with DRM

[harl]

You completely missed the point. I think you fail to understand how AES or BluRay encryption works.

The example you give you're trying to decrypt without the key. Your example is entirely unrelated to BluRay decryption or DRM in general.

The thing that makes BluRay, and in general most DRM, decryption both possible and feasible is that all info needed to decode is right there on the disk.

To summarize:
Decoding BluRay - Has all info needed
Your example (AES) - Does not have all info needed.

Forget copying, I want to play my BR under Linux

[janek78]

I don't really care if I can copy my BluRay disks or not (I'm too lazy to back up my movies - if I break a disk and I like the film, I get a new one).

But I would love to be able to play my legally bought films under Linux without having to reboot (or having to go to jail for that matter). Maybe one day. :)

So this might be the breakthrough for BluRay?

[Teun]

Maybe this breakthrough will finally make BluRay a popular format, so far I haven't seen much (or any) pick up.

Or a reputable Linux user could...

[symbolset]

Skip the BD player deal, buy the Disc at retail and then download their platform shifted unencrypted movie backup through P2P*. The full BD+ library should be available within a few days, if it wasn't already.

* Even though it's inherently fair, this method may not be legal in your jurisdiction. Consult your attorney before using.

Re:Or a reputable Linux user could...

[a_nonamiss]

So... what you're saying in reality is that DRM will now only currently hinder law-abiding non-technical users. Hmmm.... Weird that nobody's thought of that before...

Re:Or a reputable Linux user could...

[Pentium100]

Skip the BD player deal, buy the Disc at retail and then download their platform shifted unencrypted movie backup through P2P*.

Until you find out that it is also possible to skip the "buy the Disc" part.

Re:Or a reputable Linux user could...

[symbolset]

Until you find out that it is also possible to skip the "buy the Disc" part.

You're going to find this hard to believe - certainly I did, once upon a time. Most people are decent folk. They don't cheat at solitaire. They give back the excess change the clerk gives them by mistake. Given a choice, they try to do the right thing.

Re:Or a reputable Linux user could...

[Haeleth]

Until you find out that it is also possible to skip the "buy the Disc" part.

Why would I want to do that? I don't want the movie companies to go bust -- I want them to keep making a profit so they keep making movies for me to watch. I am very happy to give them money in exchange for products I can use in the ways I want to use them. Currently that means I buy DVDs, because I can watch those on my Linux PC and copy them onto my netbook.

I won't adopt the suggestion of buying BDs and downloading ripped copies, because that is illegal in my jurisdiction (UK) and they've just started suing P2P users over here too. Instead, I'll continue to cheer on these reverse-engineering efforts, and one day soon I hope it'll be possible to do everything with BDs that I can do with DVDs today.

Re:Forget copying, I want to play my BR under Linu

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep!, hope MPlayer team could include the codes, in their next release :)

How does it work?

[tangent3]

Hoping some expert can describe how this all works to the masses out here. From a quick glance through the forum, this is what I think is happening...

BD+ movies are released with corrupted data
A conversion table is required to fix the corruption
The conversion table is built using code on the BD+ disk that runs on the BDVM.

The bulk of the work on the forum thread seems to be an effort to reverse engineer the opcodes and libraries (called TRAPs?) available in the BDVM, and to reimplement the VM.

I'm not a security or crypt expert, but I can't imagine how anyone can expect this kind of security to remain secure for 10 years.

Re:How does it work?

[HappySmileMan]

I'm not a security or crypt expert, but I can't imagine how anyone can expect this kind of security to remain secure for 10 years.

Because they want to sell it, and want the movie industry to use it, the movie industry won't use it unless it's secure. So they say it'll be 10 years before it's broken.

No-one can prove them wrong until AFTER it sells enough to be worth breaking.

Re:How does it work?

[Kjella]

The short answer is - think of it as a computer application, a simple one can simply to its job. An advanced one can try to determine if it's being debugged, running in a VM clone or whatever. They can still pull new rabbits out of the hat that can cause problems. As usual though, the pirates will share the good copy and the "casual" guy trying to use alternative OS/software will have a broken player. What you're seeing here is not new by any standard, AnyDVD HD was there first and obviously output from it has been doing the rounds on P2P. This is mostly a battle to make it so that you can pop in a BD, fire up an open source player and have it work.

Re:How does it work?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is only "phase 1" of BD+. It gets worse.

BD+ is designed to be deployed in three phases. The first phase is the Media Transform function described here. Phases 2 and 3 are countermeasures for compromised playback environments. If a player is known to be compromised, BD+ can be used to deploy code that can counteract the compromise. This capability is referred to as renewability. It is not necessary to revoke the compromised player; it can simply be updated to renew its content protection environment.

Phase 2 of BD+ deployment is called a basic countermeasure. Once a compromised player is identified and studied, it may be possible to develop content-specific code, with the cooperation of the player manufacturer, that subverts the hack. This content code is player-specific and can be deployed on the BD-ROM disc. If the compromised player is detected during the discovery process, the player-specific content code can be run in the VM to subvert the hack and allow the compromised player to play back the content. On all other playback platforms, the normal content-specific code described previously is run. Player-specific content code is also non-persistent.

Phase 3 countermeasures may be deployed when Phase 2 countermeasures are unsuccessful. Native code developed specifically for the compromised player environment can be developed and deployed via BD+. This native code runs as part of the player's native operating environment and is developed with the cooperation of the player manufacturer. If the compromised player environment is detected by BD+ at playback, and native code is available, it can be used to update the playback environment, rendering the hack ineffective.

(Source: http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/vectors/brcp.pdf)

In other words, future discs will attempt to detect the "hacked" VMs and will actively fight back. A "Phase 3" disc would be able to run arbitrary code on the host machine... think Sony rootkit.

Knowing this, I personally would never trust anything other than a fully free-software player. They will still have bugs, though, and the disc manufacturers will be doing their best to exploit them.

Re:How does it work?

[noidentity]

Yes, that's my take (not that I RTFA or anything):

• Content on disc is encrypted.
• Disc includes program that generates decryption key.
• Program itself is highly obfuscated, and generated specially for each decryption key, so there only way to determine the output is to run it.
• Virtual machine's instruction set and behavior are now known.

Re:How does it work?

[bill_mcgonigle]

This is mostly a battle to make it so that you can pop in a BD, fire up an open source player and have it work.

Note to studios: I'll start buying your content when I can do this ---^.

Re:How does it work?

[pacinpm]

I'm not a security or crypt expert, but I can't imagine how anyone can expect this kind of security to remain secure for 10 years.

Well, should they used Brainfuck as a base language for VM than it would take a lot longer than 10 years to decipher.

10 years? Yeah if you are on WASP-12b

[davidwr]

Blue-Ray copy protection lasted a bit more than 10 years, if you are on this planet.

Your secure edifice...

[nzgeek]

I think a quote from a famous internet wordsmith is in order here:

Someone needs to emphasize this in such a way that the right people see it: people who pirate software enjoy cracking it. The game itself is orders of magnitude less amusing. And their distributed ingenuity will smash your firm, secure edifice into beach absolutely every Goddamn time. There are no exceptions to this rule.

Re:Your secure edifice...

[drunkennewfiemidget]

Yup. The crackers will find out a way past it, the normal users will feel hindered and annoyed by it, and the very people you were trying to stop will be completely unaffected and find a way to pirate it anyway.

Re:Your secure edifice...

[Bert64]

Worse than that, the normal users who *may* have bought your content will now find the pirate copy more appealing, some of them will move over to reap the benefits of the pirated copies.

Re:Your secure edifice...

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember back when flashy intro screens from [k]rews were all the
rage, and that scene took an interesting turn when the "demo"
scene arose. The flashy intros from games became a thing unto
themselves, and turned into multimedia demo releases, not
attached to warez anymore.

Re:Your secure edifice...

[innocent_white_lamb]

The first people to figure out how to print into the screen border on a Commodore 64 were the crackers who used that technique in their impressive "Cracked by" demos. In fact, I'm not sure if any commercial games actually used that technique. One of the disk copy programs used the effect in their menu and while the disk was actually being copied (the program that could copy between two 1541 drives without needing the computer).

In many cases, the initial "Cracked by" screens on a lot of C64 software had better graphics and music than the actual games they were attached to.

Physical access FTW

[Gothmolly]

Which just goes to show that the analog hole is alive and well. If you give someone something that they can touch and feel and experience, it can be recorded or cracked, its just a matter of time and effort.

Re:Physical access FTW

[evilviper]

What? Cracking DRM has NOTHING to do with the 'analog hole'.

Re:Forget copying, I want to play my BR under Linu

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulation the team.
Hope MPlayer Team can integrate the codes to their next version of Mplayer.

I have a blue ray drive

[aepervius]

and the stupid DRM never worked (it just go on reading and reading and do nothing). Maybe now I have hope to read my legally owned discs, I hope this come as some sort of reader for windows.

Like those uesless bank vaults

[Anonymous Coward]

When will banks learn, if you make a vault, someone can break in.

By freetard logic then, Don't use bank vaults is The Answer

Re:Like those uesless bank vaults

[Anonymous Coward]

Except bank vaults don't also vastly decrease the usefulness of banks for legitimate customers...

Re:Like those uesless bank vaults

[geckipede]

If banks had to hand out a copy of their vault and it's contents to all their customers, they would be very silly to use them.

Re:Like those uesless bank vaults

[Pentium100]

When will banks learn, if you make a vault, someone can break in.

And that's why you do not leave the vault unattended and have additional security so that nobody unauthorized can come near the vault. Otherwise it would be a matter of time before someone burned his/her way to the cash.

The same can be applied to movies. Place all existing copies of the move to a secure location, so that no one can come near it and nobody will be able to copy your movie. Nobody will be able to watch it either...

The end of DRM is good news for content owners

[symbolset]

A lot of people are just not buying content - even though they would like to buy content - because they know that money spent that way is wasted and they don't want to throw their money away again. Of these I believe that many are just avoiding the content rather than downloading it through any of the myriad options for that, and that's demand destruction. Once the content is available unprotected, a huge market of people is opened up who would prefer to pay for what they get if they can pay for it in a way that's not stupid. See the MP3 sales of Amazon and iTunes and even Walmart.com.

Making content available DRM-free is actually a huge win for the content industry, even if it makes it harder to prove unauthorized distribution. Hopefully soon they'll see this.

OTOH, brick and mortar content sales outlets are pretty much toast. They sell a digital product in a digital age with an analog method. And, they close. The Internet doesn't close.

Re:The end of DRM is good news for content owners

[samkass]

A lot of people are just not buying content - even though they would like to buy content - because they know that money spent that way is wasted and they don't want to throw their money away again.

At the risk of my karma, I'm going to mention that no one I know seems to fall into your generalization of people not buying Blu-Ray discs or players because of DRM. The most commonly cited reason for discs is lack of ubiquitous players (in cars, portable players, friends houses, etc) and the most common reason cited for players is the expense of a Blu-Ray mechanism. In fact, breaking the DRM makes Blu-Ray riskier for investors and therefore likely will increase costs (higher risk means higher cost) in the short term.

All in all, because Blu-Ray is 10x the bandwidth of any online "HD" movie source (and I use that term loosely for online offerings) and because online DRM is so much worse, I don't see it going away. Instead I see it likely to win over DVD-- DRM or not-- but not until manufacturing costs ramp down due to better technologies and economies of scale.

Consider this. Is a DRM-free H.264/AAC mp4 file more convenient, or is a DRM-laden disc that you can play in your car, computer, PS3, portable system, or friend's house by carrying around a 16 gram disc? I suspect for geeks it's the former, but for most consumers it's the latter, and it's really just about making players ubiquitous. The odd player out is, of course, the iPod. It's the one thing that is both ubiquitous and doesn't favor the disc. If the Blu-Ray consortium came to some agreement with Apple there it would go a long way towards gaining acceptance.

Re:The end of DRM is good news for content owners

[blahbooboo]

Consider this. Is a DRM-free H.264/AAC mp4 file more convenient, or is a DRM-laden disc that you can play in your car, computer, PS3, portable system, or friend's house by carrying around a 16 gram disc? I suspect for geeks it's the former, but for most consumers it's the latter, and it's really just about making players ubiquitous. The odd player out is, of course, the iPod. It's the one thing that is both ubiquitous and doesn't favor the disc. If the Blu-Ray consortium came to some agreement with Apple there it would go a long way towards gaining acceptance.

People said the same thing about MP3 and ACC. Jump forward a few years after their initial release and the device support for these formats was plentiful! First CD players that handled Mp3, then car stereos, then dvd/cd players, etc (get the picture). Heck the Zune even supports ACC now.

I suspect the video formats will follow the same course...

Re:The end of DRM is good news for content owners

[ceoyoyo]

"Consider this. Is a DRM-free H.264/AAC mp4 file more convenient, or is a DRM-laden disc that you can play in your car, computer, PS3, portable system, or friend's house by carrying around a 16 gram disc?"

Consider the reality: is a DRM-free H.264/AAC mp4 file that you can transcode to whatever you want using free and easy to use software (and more importantly, load on you iPod) more convenient, or is a DRM-laden disc that you can play in your home theatre setup and MAYBE your notebook more convenient?

The Pirate Bay isn't popular because of it's high quality and reliability.

Re:The end of DRM is good news for content owners

[Bert64]

What's to stop you putting that DRM-free file onto a 16 gram disc...
Or onto a memory stick for that matter...
Or a portable hard drive that will store a large number of movies...

DRM-free gives you a lot of freedom, you can do whatever suits you best, your choices are not taken away from you.

Re:The end of DRM is good news for content owners

[Bert64]

Yes, look at the success of the ipod...
Does anyone still use portable CD players any more?

I doubt it, big clunky device with a spinning disc inside that skips the music when it's jolted too hard, and only stores 80 minutes of audio unless you carry around a big stack of equally clunky discs for it.
Compare that to an ipod or similar device, which can store hours of audio on a device little bigger than a credit card in some cases.

Re:The end of DRM is good news for content owners

[Anonymous Coward]

Consider this. Is a DRM-free H.264/AAC mp4 file more convenient, or is a DRM-laden disc that you can play in your car, computer, PS3, portable system, or friend's house by carrying around a 16 gram disc?

Now there's a false dichotomy. Why can't we have a disc containing the DRM-free H.264 file?

Re:The end of DRM is good news for content owners

[BPPG]

I do, it's five years old, and needs duct tape to keep the door open. It can read mp3 files from CD, so that's less than a gigabyte of mp3 music, which is more than enough as far as I'm concerned. It's outlived the crap overpriced flash based mp3 player (not ipod) that I bought two years ago.

I don't know if I'm a special case or anything, but I never see these things in stores anymore, so I'm keeping it for as long as I can.

Re:The end of DRM is good news for content owners

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have a car, BD drive, PS3, portable system, or friends, you insensitive clod!

Re:The end of DRM is good news for content owners

[mrchaotica]

At the risk of my karma, I'm going to mention that no one I know seems to fall into your generalization of people not buying Blu-Ray discs or players because of DRM.

Hi, I'm mrchaotica.

Now you know at least one person who falls into that category. Have a nice day!

Incidentally, now that it's cracked (and the method released publicly), I may very well start using it in the near future.

Re:The end of DRM is good news for content owners

[symbolset]

I don't know if I'm a special case or anything, but I never see these things in stores anymore, so I'm keeping it for as long as I can.

You can find 'em. I have a couple. They moved them over to toys. That's kind of appropriate, I think.

My set-top DVD player plays DVD-R with MP3s. Far more content than I would ever need. I don't think it's been turned on this year though. We stream from the server now.

Re:The end of DRM is good news for content owners

[Bert64]

And yours plays mp3 files, so you are already half way towards the utility of an ipod, and you are already benefitting from a drm-free system.

Re:The end of DRM is good news for content owners

[devjj]

I don't think DRM has anything to do with it. People aren't buying BD because A: the players are more expensive, and B: the discs are more expensive. Unless you have a 1080p HDTV - a good one, at that - most people just don't feel the quality is worth the price.

If Sony had any sense of a brain it'd realize there's nearly no way they're going to recoup their investment and the best thing they can do at this point is try to capture the marketshare and try to make something happen in volume. US$34.99 BD versions of DVDs you can find for under US$15 is not going to accomplish that.

Re:Forget copying, I want to play my BR under Linu

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I don't really care if I can copy my BluRay disks or not (I'm too lazy to back up my movies - if I break a disk and I like the film, I get a new one).

Clearly you have no children living with you.

Turing machine

[symbolset]

Some pedant like me is going to bring this up so it might as well be me. The abstract machines such as the "Turing Machine" defined this before Donald Knuth was even born, but the revered doctor has contributed much to practice with theory and example.

Great

[corychristison]

I'm sick of my VirtualBox/WinxP/AnyDVD-HD setup. I'd MUCH rather a native Linux command-line tool to automate the process when inserting the disc. ;-)

Thank you to all developers! Great work!

Re:Forget copying, I want to play my BR under Linu

[dotancohen]

I don't really care if I can copy my BluRay disks or not (I'm too lazy to back up my movies - if I break a disk and I like the film, I get a new one).

But I would love to be able to play my legally bought films under Linux without having to reboot (or having to go to jail for that matter). Maybe one day. :)

Tell that to Sony then stop buying the discs until you can.

And the Cold War continues......

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that the studios can't give away films they'll simply come up with even more draconian crippling measures. I already can't play Blu-Ray disks on my computer drive because they are afraid of rippers. It's easy to blame the studios and distributors but I blame the pirates for making my life miserable. When the format wars started there was no copy protection. It wasn't until large numbers started pirating that it became an issue. DRM would stop if piracy stopped but no one wants to stop pirating and the studios are funding by selling films so they can't stop. The ones hurt are the fair use people in the middle but most of those blame the studios for spoiling things. It's a stand off and it will only get worse so the only end that is possible is the studios come up with a rock solid security system but the only way to do that is to severely limit what they will play on which largely kills off fair use which will eventually be a victim of the Cold War. Can't happen? I wouldn't bet on it. I've already seen proposals for uncrackable systems but they aren't pretty. The move so far had been to make movies more computer friendly but Blu-ray already reversed that trend. One obvious victim will be playing on computers. The future is likely to be dedicated players that either have bundled screens or are locked to a compatible screen so that the signal is useless outside the pairing. People may want to see Blu-ray die because of DRM but the next format is likely to be far less friendly.

Re:And the Cold War continues......

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I think that you have your history a bit confused. All digital video formats have, and have always had, DRM. Before that, there was macrovision for the analog ones. Hell, the first tape-based video players made rewinding impossible, to keep people from watching the tape more than once without paying again.

Re:And the Cold War continues......

[tkrotchko]

"When the format wars started there was no copy protection"

DVDs always had copy protection (CSS), and the copy protection on HD-DVD's was a generation ahead (AACS), with BD+ even more extreme (VM to validate the player was legit on top of the AACS encryption). Before that, VHS tapes had Macrovision. At what point do you recall no copy protection on these formats?

"I've already seen proposals for uncrackable systems but they aren't pretty."

Well BD+ was supposed to have a 10 year shelf life, and it took less than that. But that's largely irrelevant. Blu-Ray may have won the format wars, but nobody is sure what they won. There simply isn't a big uptake of the Blu-Ray format, and that has nothing to do with piracy. If they introduce more complexity and yet another new format, the chance of success would be extremely tiny.

If the studios don't sell product, they can't make money. The studio that figures out that people should be allowed to move films to their iPod, or laptop, or phone without trying to institute a pay-per-view model the quicker they'll be able to grow the market. Right now, they're so greedy they're forgetting sales 101... a satisfied customer comes back again.

The truth is, there is *too much* content out there right now. I purchased 100's of DVD movies, and I've yet to watch 25% of them, so when Blu-Ray came out, I decided not to buy any. I rent them at Blockbuster. I realized that there is hardly any more worth watching more than once. And if I do, it's cheaper to rent it a 2nd time.

Re:And the Cold War continues......

[Blue_Wombat]

I don't agree with your analysis and (by implication) slurs on many of our characters. Personally, I own over a large number (4-500 of them: haven't counted exactly) of DVDs. In this country (region 4) we get a much worse deal than the US, in terms of pricing, release window, and the trouble they take to do a proper encoding for a much smaller (PAL not NTSC) regional market. I want to plunk down dollars to by real (not pirated) discs from Amazon et al. DRM is all about stopping - segmenting the market so they can gouge consumers. I'm not a pirate, I just want to BUY the genuine article and play it. Personally, I can't see how they get away with all the regionalisation under the Tword Trade Organisation rules - it looks like a non-tariff trade barrier to me. Personally, I don't see why bypassing the DRM (I have a region selectable DVD player) makes me evil, a pirate or a thief. If the good folks at Doom9 mean that I can once again by legit discs in the knowledge that I can actually play them, kudos to them.

These are important points for dialog

[symbolset]

no one I know seems to fall into your generalization of people not buying Blu-Ray discs or players because of DRM.

We shall see. Most people don't know really why they're not trusting of innovation in content technology. The advantages of open content though are immediately obvious and so when the content owners open up the content it starts flying out the door.

All in all, because Blu-Ray is 10x the bandwidth of any online "HD" movie source (and I use that term loosely for online offerings) and because online DRM is so much worse, I don't see it going away. Instead I see it likely to win over DVD-- DRM or not-- but not until manufacturing costs ramp down due to better technologies and economies of scale.

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes." Technology has passed this one by, but the truth of it remains. Content providers would do well to sell the right to the content separately, and let people figure out how to get the content on their own. If they must, they can offer content at kiosks you take your external hard drive to. The tree huggers should like the idea of transport-media free content distribution at the very least - that's less mylar disc in the landfill.

Consider this. Is a DRM-free H.264/AAC mp4 file more convenient, or is a DRM-laden disc that you can play in your car, computer, PS3, portable system, or friend's house by carrying around a 16 gram disc?

For the car and portable system a downrezzed movie that fits on an 8GB SDHC card are sufficent, and that form factor is considerably more convenient than a disc that doesn't even fit in your pocket - and is too fragile to carry that way anyway. People do this on their EEE all the time. A 360GB external 2.5" USB drive is bigger and heavier but smaller than a BD with case so it still fits in your pocket, is less susceptible to scratching, fits multiple movies on one disk, and has many other advantages.

Open content means you can make backups. You can convert to your target platform. You can move your content to where you want it and any technology that can play it will continue to play it for all time. DRM content does not have any of these advantages. Most importantly that last one.

Re:These are important points for dialog

[abigsmurf]

My DivX playing DVD player struggles with fast movement when read from a reasonably high bitrate SD video. I'd imagine even high speed SD cards wouldn't be able to cope with using around 8 times the bandwidth.

Re:These are important points for dialog

[symbolset]

The data is 8MB/s. You'll want at least the 100x SDHC card - that's 10MB/s. There is no corresponding storage data rate because the current max is class 6: 6MB/s. SDHC is not for recording BD data rate movies but can be fine for playback. Your hardware has to support the data rate also, of course.

Re:These are important points for dialog

[prisoner-of-enigma]

We shall see. Most people don't know really why they're not trusting of innovation in content technology. The advantages of open content though are immediately obvious and so when the content owners open up the content it starts flying out the door.

I truck heavily in the home theater market, and I can categorically state that about 80%-90% of consumers don't even know what BD+ is, much less let it affect their buying decision. They are interested only in the following factors (usually in this order):

1. Price of the player.
2. Availability of titles.
3. Price of titles.
4. Quality versus DVD.

That's it. Rarely if ever will you find anyone who cares at all about anything not on this list.

The average buyer -- which is not, despite popular /. opinion, anything like your average slashdotter -- doesn't give two damns about DRM in the slightest. If they did, would iTunes be the huge consumer-based cash cow that it is? Of course not.

Me? I own a PS3 and use it about 80% of the time for watching Blu-ray movies. I've never once been inconvenienced in the slightest by the DRM. The only thing I might want to do that I can't is format shift. While that's mildly annoying, it's really moot given the huge size of HD content. I could resample at a lower bitrate, resolution, or both, but that would defeat the purpose of having HD in the first place. If I was going to go that route, I'd just DeCSS a DVD and have done with it. But I don't, and it honestly hasn't bothered me at all. Nor has it bothered most of the people I know who have Blu-ray players. They watch their movies at home. They swap them with friends. Some play them on laptops. Nobody that I know of has any idea the DRM is preventing them from doing anything at all...and that's because they're just watching their movies and enjoying them.

Really, I think this whole reaction to DRM is a bit overblown. Yes, I'd much prefer it if it wasn't there, but people make far too much noise about how it's supposed to be preventing them from doing something that they want to do with the disc. As far as I can tell, the DRM is only adversely affecting one group of innocent people, and that's users of open-source operating systems like Linux. You could make a corner case argument that format shifting is also impeded, but I'll again bring up the difficulties of storing hundreds of Blu-ray titles unless you resample, thus devaluing the HD you're trying so hard to get to. But I think the real reason folks are up in arms about DRM is that it prevents them from pirating content. I just wish folks would be honest enough to admit it.

Re:These are important points for dialog

[symbolset]

There's a lot of truth in what you say. My mom had HD for half a year before I went over to her house and noticed she was watching HD through component video cables, and so she was seeing SD even though her TV, video player and cable box were all HD capable. They complained the aspect ratio looked funny (not how they put it, but I knew). I went out the next day and got her an HDMI cable and installed it.

Mom & Dad stared at it for a moment and then went "oh" together.

A lot of people don't know - and I can include in that many of the people who fill your role. The cluelessness at most HD video vendors is endemic.

But the fact remains that all the available HD video can fit on your home server, and you would probably agree that all of it that's worth watching is a fraction of that. A lot of people do care, and many of them know.

That I can watch content on any platform I want does matter. That the vendor can't take my money and then revoke the keys does matter. I have transcoded a video to my phone. More and more people want to do this for their iPod Touch and their PSP.

DRM doesn't work, and that's irrelevant because content providers don't have the security in place to prevent the dissemination of content before it's in theaters or published to encrypted media. DRM is an unnecessary nuisance that degrades the value of the package below what the vast majority of the market is willing to pay. So uptake is low, not because we don't want hi-def, but because we don't want to steal and we won't accept crap. The people I'm talking about are the people that don't come while you're standing around waiting for something to happen. Guess what. They're not coming. Ever. The great HD revolution is on hold indefinitely. You'll get the curious, the early adopters, the rich and the proud. But you won't get Ethel and Earl. Joe sixpack isn't coming. They have common sense, and it's not time yet for HD media content. Cable? Yes. Displays? Yes. Players and content, decidedly no.

As usual, I do have some guidance for Sony on how to turn this around, but I'm not giving it for free. They could figure this out if they read this topic and did some analysis, but they haven't got the wits God gave a possum and they don't want to hear the right answer anyway.

Re:These are important points for dialog

[DinDaddy]

For the car and portable system a downrezzed movie that fits on an 8GB SDHC card are sufficent, and that form factor is considerably more convenient than a disc that doesn't even fit in your pocket - and is too fragile to carry that way anyway.

The BD assoc. has figured that out. A small but growing percentage of BD releases now come with "digital copy", a disk with a DRMed WMV or iTunes copy of the movie. Disney's Sleeping Beauty release even came with the film on a regular DVD, "for the kids' room".

Downside is, some studios (Disney) are charging extra for the digital copy. I hope that practice dies. But it won't.

DNS

[speedingant]

Yeah, they may have found out how to remove the DRM from BD+, but they still don't know how to configure their bloody DNS properly!
http://doom9.org/

Re:DNS

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a thread about it: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=126569

Re:DNS

[WK2]

$ ping doom9.org
PING doom9.org (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.073 ms
64 bytes from localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.061 ms

--- doom9.org ping statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 2 received, 0% packet loss, time 1000ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.061/0.067/0.073/0.006 ms

Weird.

direct link

[ivlad]

Direct link to announce: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1207578#post1207578

Congratulations!

[AmigaMMC]

I own over 500 DVDs, I love to collect movies and my favorite shows and I look forward to collect BD as well, but I will never support any kind of "protection" that punishes a honest person. I travel all over the world and I often pick up movies from other countries, why shouldn't I have the right to play them back at home, in my living room? The region protection was stupid and any protection is stupid because it doesn't keep pirates away but just honest people like myself who paid dearly for their discs. If my DVD Player had not been unlocked I would not have spent a good chunk of that money on DVD. And I'll go even further: I should be able to send my original DVD of movie XY (not related to Kyle ;) ) and upgrade for a reasonable cost to the same movie on BD, after all it's movie studios that pushed the new standard.

WIPO

[Anonymous Coward]

Member of WIPO? Then yes you do.

Did anyone else...

[Anonymous Coward]

Did anyone else read this and think some future sequel of a popular video game needed more space than would fit on a BD?

Obviously, "10" was in binary...

[Cyberax]

Subj.

Re:Obsolete the installed base? I think not.

[PingXao]

Nah, this DRM nonsense is just starting to heat up. There's a new Copyright Czar on the job now, and Hollywood will throw more cash than ever at lawmakers to try and shore up their busted protections. This will continue since US export numbers are propped up by Hollywood's entertainment distribution network. They'll see this as a "must-protect" industry. In the end they'll fail, but anyone who thinks the supporters of DRM are about to give up should think again.

OT

[PingXao]

Whoever modded that post "Troll", thanks for letting me know it's OK to troll-rate a post for absolutely no reason other than "I feel like it".

Re:OT

[Anonymous Coward]

or for the reason that your post reads like a troll

Re:OT

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

thanks for letting me know it's OK to troll-rate a post for absolutely no reason other than "I feel like it".

... or if the person is a deluded acerbic asshole. Sure, you're more of a flamebait, but I don't think we need to nitpick that much.

A fly on the wall with brilliant minds!

[Z-MaxX]

The Doom9 thread is a really fascinating read, and worth checking out. It's really cool to follow how they reverse engineered the BDVM instruction set and built a tight C++ disassembler for it. Since I usually don't get to sit in on this kind of awesome discovery/development, following the thread is like sitting in the room with these brilliant hackers.

Explain to me why we are giving these guys props

[Anonymous Coward]

When Slysoft did this in March. I've had those versions of AnyDVD and CloneDVD for several months. Why is this news? Seriously, not trolling here, but even the submitter mentions this and links to the original Slashdot article on it.

Oh lol

[skulgnome]

They estimated that it'd last for 10 years. It took the Doom9 forum people 5 _weeks_ to hack it. That's like, less than a hundredth of the estimate (i.e. 5/520).

I wonder. They must not have heard that architectures with an obfuscated instruction set are also reverse-engineerable? I distinctly remember reading an article on the Transmeta VLIW machine's opcode and instruction packet format... and that one has never been officially released at all.

Re:Shouldn't that be Congratulations to Slysoft?

[TrekkieGod]

A hearty congratulations to the brilliant programmers of Doom9, including Oopho2ei - who claims not to be a "professional programmer".

I mean, it seems their programmers did it first, and then helped out the Doom9 people by providing hints here and there.

Not to diminish the value of the doom9, who gave us an open solution to the problem, but let's not forget the other guys.

Why we are giving these guys props

[symbolset]

When Slysoft did this in March. I've had those versions of AnyDVD and CloneDVD for several months. Why is this news? Seriously, not trolling here, but even the submitter mentions this and links to the original Slashdot article on it.

Because their software is open. Their developments are contributions to the pool of human knowledge. Slysoft's achievement is also deserving of praise, but they while they showed us it could be done (which most of us assumed), these developers showed us how.

Re:Forget copying, I want to play my BR under Linu

[glwtta]

Why do you hate America?

After more reading...

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems this is a Linux implementation, whereas Slysoft sells a Windows client. So open source plus linux client is the difference. OK, but isn't the submission a bit misleading? - Grandparent poster.

Re:After more reading...

[Jorophose]

Not necessarily.

We wouldn't be able to study Slysoft's implementation. As much as I love 'em for showing us it can be done and spitting in the face of DRM, they provide a closed platform (that relies on a driver IIRC) so it is news that Doom9 cracked BD+ and splayed its guts over the internet.

Re:After more reading...

[howlingmadhowie]

it has nothing to do with linux vs. windows. instead it is 'secretive company trying to obscure how something works and keep it expensive to copy bluray discs' vs. 'format now freely understandable and playable on any computer'.
slysoft basically just tried to divert the revenue stream for bluray discs to themselves. these people have allowed you to understand what bluray is, how it works, what it is doing to your computer and to share this knowledge with others. a necessary corollary is of course that the information is no longer locked inside the disc.

Support the forums

[eiapoce]

I am proud of having been a contributor of the Doom9 forums. Go and pay you tribute: they demonstrated to the industry once again that DRM is a sick idea and will NEVER work.

P.S. Now I can go and buy a BD recorder. Just as I did with the first DVD Writer after deCSS.

Re:Forget copying, I want to play my BR under Linu

[Creepy Crawler]

We dont.

American politicians and media conglomerates hate us. That includes Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, and a slew of other minority parties.

This country is ownership taken to the extreme. There's no happy medium, so we break the law for our rights, because the law is wrong.

The more things change...

[Mspangler]

"The content must contain sufficient information for the content to be decoded. Anything one software can do, another software can do (see Knuth, et seq)."

From the copy of "Beneath Apple DOS" (copyright 1981) that happens to be on my shelf, page B1;"It seems reasonable at this time to say that it is impossible to to protect a disk in such a way that it can't be broken. This is, in large part, due to the fact the diskette must be bootable; i.e. that it must contain at least one sector which can be read by the program in the PROM on the disk controller card. This means it is possible to trace the boot process by disassembling the normal sector or sectors that that must be on the disk."

So they have been flogging this dead horse for 27 years. High marks for persistence, low marks for, well, everything else.

quote from forum

[Anonymous Coward]

quote from the linked forum:

I don't "do" Windows.

...Of course not! Windows "does" YOU.

lets send a message

[Anonymous Coward]

everyone should run out and buy a BD+ disk
and test this code out.

see what kind of bump we can put in their sales.

Re:Forget copying, I want to play my BR under Linu

[init100]

if I break a disk and I like the film, I get a new one

You are exactly the kind of customer that all big movie and music companies would like every customer to be. DRM is a way to make that happen. That way, they can make customers pay for the same content multiple times, growing their profits by leaps and bounds. While you pay through your nose, they laugh all the way to the bank.

Re:Forget copying, I want to play my BR under Linu

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read the thread, you'd know that playback under Linux is precisely the reason why they did this. If you can rip it, you can definitely play it...

PS3 Ubuntu/Intrepid Package?

[Doc Ruby]

Anyone want to package this tool up with the PS3 mplayer vo driver for the PS3 Ubuntu Intrepid release?

Re:Obsolete the installed base? I think not.

[dontmakemethink]

It's more likely that we're nearing the end of this DRM nonsense forever. Finally! Or am I too optimistic of their intelligence? History does weigh heavily against my hopefulness here.

Intelligent or not, either they will cave to market pressures, or the format will vaporize and another will take its place.

And there are benefits to a pirating marketplace. I am one of those people who would never buy a movie, but would rent/copy if the means are available to do so, rather than download. By doing so I am supporting the format and at least paying a royalty. I don't want the box or any extra crap anyway, just the movie to put in a binder, so I'm saving the cost and waste of the packaging, which are the most expensive components to manufacture (printing the artwork is #1).

I don't see why they don't just authorize the copying of rentals. Suppose a movie rental generates 30-40% as much revenue as a movie purchase for movie studios and the format developer. The format developer gets another piece when I purchase the blank media to copy onto. The studios could compel rental companies to let them track rentals to form a database of consumer activity that could be sold to marketing companies. Distribution costs would also come way down. Add those revenues and savings together plus a small rental fee hike, and you end up with the same revenue as hard-copy purchases, all without stuffing landfills with unwanted discs and cases.

Also, by owning a playback device of the movie format, I become a welcome recipient of bought movies as gifts. Over the years I think I've been bought about 30 DVD's, more revenue they would never have gotten if I did not support the format.

Think about it. Did DVD reach its peak profitability before or after CSS was cracked? I believe I'm one of a large enough market segment that will never buy a Blu-Ray player until I have the means to copy them, nor will I upgrade to an HDTV until then. I bet a movie media format cannot survive without supporting us, and TV manufacturers should really get behind this.

Seriously...

[Da VinMan]

I don't know why the hacker community keeps bothering with breaking these DRM schemes. It's clear that most people aren't going to use BlueRay unless it's significantly more accessible/cheap, more ubiquitous, and (by extension) much more open. You're just doing the hard work for them by enabling the dissemination of a technology which you actually oppose.

Re:Seriously...

[eddy]

>I don't know why the hacker community keeps bothering with breaking these DRM schemes.

It's an extremely rewarding intellectual pursuit. Some people do crosswords, some do pure math. Reverse-engineering, to me, is the pinnacle of engineering. The purest form.

There's never just one reason, nor one idea of whether or not it 'helps' the format (in this case), but you don't do it if you don't enjoy it, cause the pain (frustration) and suffering (hours and hours of tedious work) during the bad parts... you don't suffer through that if you don't get the high when you break through.

These DRM schemes especially are like challanges, calling you out. "Here's what we want you TO NOT DO.", nay, "Here's what you CAN'T DO."

Such challanges seldom go unanswered. It's human nature to answer the call.

(Good work, Oopho2ei et.al, I applaud you)

Re:Seriously...

[Tzarius]

And to supplement eddy's comment, breaking the DRM schemes ensures there will always be a way to redistribute the media in an unprotected format - if it were never compromised, there would be no alternative (for people who want the content) but to buy it, DRM and all.

Re:Forget copying, I want to play my BR under Linu

[glwtta]

Ok, next question: have you ever heard of "sarcasm"?

Interactivity defeats the analog hole

[tepples]

If you give someone something that they can touch and feel and experience, it can be recorded or cracked

This is true of the main title of a BD movie. But it is not true of anything interactive, be it a PLAYSTATION 3 game or just the quiz game in a BD movie's special features. A recording of one play-through of a game is not a substitute for the game itself.

Huh, what?

[symbolset]

The purpose of DRM isn't to stop copying altogether - it's to increase the difficulty to the point where the amount of copying is trivial.

... and you're going to claim success for DRM after this insightful observation?

Somebody will be along shortly to mod you funny.

Re:Huh, what?

[__aagmrb7289]

Do you understand that success can be defined differently by people with different goals? Or is that beyond you completely?

I don't think DRM is successful, when it comes to MY goals. But many of those who are employing it? Yes, I believe their goals are being met.

Would you like to add anything useful to this conversation, or are you just throwing stuff out there to see if anything sticks, oh wise and whatever one.

Re:Huh, what?

[symbolset]

Requote:

The purpose of DRM isn't to stop copying altogether - it's to increase the difficulty to the point where the amount of copying is trivial.

I replied to this before, but it was apparently lost. Your answer is here.

If copying has been made so difficult that the amount of copying is trivial, then why are 1TB SATA drives, 4TB NAS devices and such like moving so fast they don't even shelve them off the skids? Are people making more backups of their photos and email than ever before? Really?

Re:Huh, what?

[prisoner-of-enigma]

If copying has been made so difficult that the amount of copying is trivial, then why are 1TB SATA drives, 4TB NAS devices and such like moving so fast they don't even shelve them off the skids? Are people making more backups of their photos and email than ever before? Really?

Don't be absurd. For one thing, copying DVD's has been and continues to be incredibly trivial for anyone to do. With your average flick taking up about 8GB-9GB for a dual-layer DVD, you can fill up a 1TB drive pretty fast. And let's not forget Windows and its voracious appetite for gigabytes.

But there's a far less nefarious reason why large drives are selling fast: they are cheap. People usually spend somewhere between $100-$200 on storage. Right now, that will buy you a lot of space if you're not all that concerned about speed. Thus, people buy big drives because it's not noticeably cheaper to buy small drives.

Last, you mention 4TB NAS devices as if every home on the block has one. I can assure you they do not. Such items are hugely popular in businesses but they are next to impossible to find in the common household. You and I may not be common (I have about 8TB online at my home), so citing your own situation hardly validates your point.

Re:Huh, what?

[ultranova]

I don't think DRM is successful, when it comes to MY goals. But many of those who are employing it? Yes, I believe their goals are being met.

Seeing how my first reaction to hearing about, for example, Spore's DRM was "just get it off BitTorrent", I find that very unlikely. In fact it seems that nowadays there's less risk of getting something nasty from BitTorrent than from the official game disks...

When attempts at copy prevention make the potential customer eye the game box in a store with suspicion - "Do I dare to buy this ? Has it been thoroughly investigated and found harmless to install ? Or should I get the torrent with all the nasties stripped instead ?" - they have not only failed, but are an epic failure.

Honestly. Do the people who come up with these things actually think of what they're doing ? Or are they too busy counting beans ?

Re:Huh, what?

[__aagmrb7289]

If you were the average consumer of games, then the game industry would reconsider DRM. You aren't. It's not hurting them enough, because the average user doesn't care. If we want DRM to "go away" (and I'd be quite happy to see that happen), then we've got to make sure the average user cares - and makes purchasing decisions due to the presence of DRM. Ignorance, laziness, and lack of perspective.

Re:Huh, what?

[DinDaddy]

Anecdotal, but yeah. I just bought 2 1TB drives for my home because I have 200 GB of music (all ripped losslessly from my CDs), my wife has a 30 GB photo library, mine is 15GB and growing fast (10 megapixel RAW files are large) and we have home video in the many dozens of GB.

Many of my typical suburban neighbors are the same. In fact, I know at least 20 people who have recently bought 1TB+ drives, and none of them are doing any file trading, or even ripping legitimately owned DVDs. So I guess we'd need to know what percentage of theose drive sales are going to people like me, or people who just buy that size drive because, hey, they're cheap now!

Re:Huh, what?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Do you understand that success can be defined differently by people with different goals? Or is that beyond you completely?"

          Do *you* understand that people can be technological dinosaurs, not understand how things actually work, and define "success" incorrectly? They can and are. DRM does NOT work, and is NOT successful. Anyone who says it is is wrong.

          It doesn't stop copying; look online for HD rips of ANYTHING sometime, you'll find them. All this does is stops people from being able to watch their own videos how they'd like, if they have DRM problems. And due to cross-platform incompatiblity reduces sales.

Re:Huh, what?

[symbolset]

Honestly. Do the people who come up with these things actually think of what they're doing ? Or are they too busy counting beans ?

They want to believe in DRM because they honestly believe their content won't maintain its value if it's not protected. People are eager to sell them DRM solutions because they have huge piles of money and they're willing to believe in the DRM fairy. This keeps going on because we continue to pay and pay and pay, proving the point.

Now excuse me, I have to go buy the White Album. Again.

When is the DRM industry going to just give up?

[Anonymous Coward]

They must realize any victory they may be able to obtain will only be Pyrrhic in that the consumer will just not purchase the product. They would have to pay for an entirely new dedicated console built under US military style production security (unlike typical financial/banking or personal electronics security). Hell, they might as well just contract to the NSA for COMSEC devices. You'll have to get special top secret clearance and make trips to the local security office to install a game module. The hackers/crackers would die out and the Chinese economy would crumble.

Patent trouble

[mgiuca]

IANAL.

It seems (from reading the thread) that they got some of the ideas out of the patent description. Can anyone explain the legal ramifications of this? It's one thing to "reverse engineer" a technology (as they have mostly been doing, using compromised players and other cleverness). But does it make it legally "trickier" having implemented some of this straight from the patent?

Perhaps not ... of course, unlike regular licenses, patents don't really care if you've read them or not. You're still violating them. So I guess it's the same either way.

Comments?

Re:Patent trouble

[localroger]

First, you need to understand what a patent is; it is legal protection, to be sure, but more than that it is a form of publication. Patents exist to encourage inventors to reveal what they have discovered so that others can build on it. Their reward for giving away their secrets is the period of artificial monopoly to capitalize on their discovery. But yes, you can read patents and glean what went into them and expand upon them, because that's what patents are designed to make possible.

Second, you need to understand what the remedy is for a patent holder whose patent is violated. There are no "patent police" who go out and look for patent violators. Patent owners have to keep their own vigilance, and when they think their patent is being infringed the remedy is to sue the infringers. The result of such a suit is usually an injunction to force the infringer to stop selling his competing products. (Probably the most famous case of this was Polaroid v. Kodak, where Kodak was forced to abandon their entire line of Polaroid-like instant cameras, of which they had sold millions.)

Now bearing this in mind, exactly what would Sony or Fox or whoever get by suing Doom9? They aren't making money off of this, they just gave it away. Injunctions notwithstanding it's almost impossible to stop the dissemination of software whose authors have deliberately tried to make it available for free. There are no profits to seize, and any effort to show a dollar amount for damages would be very iffy. Patent infringement is not fraud and is not criminal, so there is no risk of anybody going to jail. All in all, there's not much the patent holder can do in this case except suck it up and go on to the next project.

Human nature

[PCM2]

I think it's worth noting, also, that the compunction to meet such challenges is particularly strong where the proscription against the given activity doesn't seem fair.

People are not stupid. If an Authority tells me, "We do not want you to look into the laser beam. Nay, in fact, you are expressly prohibited from looking directly into the laser beam," I am probably going to nod my head and say. "OK, I will not do that." There is something in the core of my being that suggests to me that this rule is probably for my own good.

If you say to me, on the other hand, "We have sold you a copy of this data set, and despite the fact that manipulating data sets is precisely what computers are good at, we do not want you to use your computer to make yourself another copy of this data set. In fact, you cannot make a copy -- if you want another copy you must buy it from us" -- well, to me that restriction doesn't sound like it's for my own good. It sounds like it's expressly for your good only, while making life harder for me.

Scientific experiments have shown that even some animals possess a sense of fairness. They will help each other where the outcome is to their mutual benefit, and they will show hostility when another animal is rewarded more than themselves for the same activity.

People express a form of this idea when they say things like "the world doesn't owe you a living." Perhaps people need to say it to the entertainment industry more often.

Re:Shouldn't that be Congratulations to Slysoft?

[azgard]

Actually, the Slysoft guy didn't give out that much of a hint. It was more psychological help than anything else - along the lines "it's not as difficult as it seems to be".

Re:Obsolete the installed base? I think not.

[symbolset]

Intelligent or not, either they will cave to market pressures, or the format will vaporize and another will take its place.

I think this has happened, and they just don't realize it. This external drive box supports up to five of these 1TB drives. Net that's $800 for 5TB of storage, today. 5TB of storage at BD's 6MB/s is about 200 hours of BD video. Come to think of it, that's about all of it. Another one could store 2000 hours of DVD video, which is more than anybody should want to have on hand. Just one 1TB drive can store more high fidelity music than you could listen to in a lifetime. 1.5TB drives are already out, and these prices are expected to drop given the season and the market.

What exactly are people doing with this stuff if they're not storing content? Backing up their email?

The drives are moving so fast they don't even shelve them off the skids in some stores. Internals, externals, NAS devices and PCs designes with 8 SATA ports and bays are getting fairly common. There's a good chance that by the time Sony "gets it" they'll be selling into a market where everbody already "has it" because they weren't willing to wait - even though they were willing to pay at the time they're not going to pay to download a movie their friend already brought over to watch on a portable drive.

Solid state for the win

[symbolset]

I can confirm that both of the 32GB SDHC cards I just looked at are benchmarked at more than 10MB/s. They should be fine, and they have enough storage space for the 30GB file referenced in TFA, even before transcoding. Unfortunately they start at $125. You know how that works, though - the price always comes down. Besides, it's not a storage format, it's a transport format.

From my example, you could 'chip' a movie to take it home from the store on your chip, and then load it on your server at home. You could do the same thing to take it on the road if you have 1080p in your car (don't we all wish... maybe next year?) It still takes 3 hours to stuff the chip so some sort of exchange system would have to be worked out for stores, like they do with propane.

And if somebody is reading this thinking they can patent this they had better think again. I've been shouting this from the rooftops for years. There will be prior art.

Re:Forget copying, I want to play my BR under Linu

[m50d]

That's all I want, but it's necessary to rip before we can do that. Cracking live discs will be harder.

This horse is dead

[symbolset]

For one thing, copying DVD's has been and continues to be incredibly trivial for anyone to do.

And so is downloading HD content from the Internet. And still far more people just drag their external HDD over to a friend's and sneaker net it home. It's quicker and more convenient. One day soon the common man will discover the mysteries of the VPN.

Some people collect lint. Some others collect video and audio content -- far more than they would ever use -- not because they really intend to enjoy it, but oddly enough because they enjoy the practice of collecting and cataloging it. Some of these folks like to show off their collections, share them, and have the latest thing that's not yet generally available.

Last, you mention 4TB NAS devices as if every home on the block has one. I can assure you they do not.

They sure keep a lot of them in stock at Walmart, Frys, Office Max, and every department store I've been in lately. I would think they wouldn't do that for such rapidly depreciating merchandise unless it was moving quickly. Do you have figures? Citation please.

Re:This horse is dead

[prisoner-of-enigma]

They sure keep a lot of them in stock at Walmart, Frys, Office Max, and every department store I've been in lately. I would think they wouldn't do that for such rapidly depreciating merchandise unless it was moving quickly. Do you have figures? Citation please.

Can you not read? You stated 4TB NAS's are flying off the shelves, and you stated it while referring to home-based use of video. The inference you were trying to make is that 4TB NAS's are selling like hotcakes because people are busily filling up their drives with legal (and illegal) content.

I stated these NAS devices are flying off the shelves not due to average consumer demand but instead because of demand from businesses of all stripes. Small businesses in particular are snapping up NAS units at a record pace. I consult for a living so I see this, but if you want exact figures, Google is your friend. I found this in about ten seconds. There's far more where that came from if you care to look.

Re:This horse is dead

[symbolset]

Sorry, the uses you cite don't account for 5% of the volumes I'm seeing. And my reading skills are fine, thanks.

Re:This horse is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

They sure keep a lot of them in stock at Walmart, Frys, Office Max, and every department store I've been in lately.

You apparently shop in some sort of weird parallel universe version of those stores. I assure you that Wal-mart, Office Max and Fry's are certainly not moving huge volumes of large capacity NAS devices. You would be hard pressed to find one on the shelf at Wal-mart, that's for sure. I see you can buy smaller NAS devices on their website, but their in store selection consists, if they even carry a NAS, is only about 1TB. They mostly carry internal and USB drives up to 1 TB. Office Max and Fry's carry them, but relegated to a small section of the higher end business class equipment. Again, they're selling smaller 1TB and lower internal and USB drives.

I'm not sure where you get this idea that NAS devices are a hot seller for the general public. I work in IT and none of us in the office has one, and I'll bet if I walked outside out door and started asking random people in the office if they owned a Network Attached Storage device they would just stare blankly.

You seem to have confused "network attached storage" with just plain old "storage".

Re:Obsolete the installed base? I think not.

[symbolset]

I earnestly believe we'll see copyright protections scaled back to something more reasonable, like five years, before we see a DRM system that works long enough to protect a work until the end of its copyright protection.

Re:Obsolete the installed base? I think not.

[rastoboy29]

No shit man.  I figured non-profit file sharing would be legal or openly tolerated by 1998.

These guys inherited (as opposed to founded) an industry, they're not innovators, which is  a nice way of saying they really aren't very bright.  I mean damn I figured two years or so for them to figure it all out...good lord...*cries*

Re:Obsolete the installed base? I think not.

[dontmakemethink]

I think the problem is the immediacy of putting in a DVD vs even just booting up an HTPC (pardon the antiquated terminology, I'm a sound tech...). That's why it's so astounding to me that Blu-Ray movies have inescapable ads on insert. I'd much rather boot up an PC than watch any ad, much less one that's offensively obselete. 10 year shelf life my ass.

Re:Obsolete the installed base? I think not.

[symbolset]

I had forgotten that. Yeah, when you pay to see the movie in a theater it's ok to have some fluff up front in case you're late and to not sell that space is dumb for the theater owner. At home on media you paid full price for, it's galling. If I wanted ads, I'd watch TV.

Re:Forget copying, I want to play my BR under Linu

[Anonymous Coward]

you know I hear this a lot. Can you people not control your kids? I have a lot of brothers and sisters (some of them lot younger than me), and no problem not breaking the CDs.

Denial

[symbolset]

It's not just a river in Egypt

Re:Forget copying, I want to play my BR under Linu

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly you have no children living with you.

Clearly you have no idea of the concept of discipline.

BluRay Kill Planet

[bill_mcgonigle]

So at this point all it's doing is wasting lots of electricity. Another win for DRM.

Next...

[stalky14]

Somebody please crack 4C. Thanks!

The market broke Blu-Ray first...

[PinchDuck]

Blu-Ray has been broken since inception, everyone gets DVDs instead.

Re:Obsolete the installed base? I think not.

[DinDaddy]

I see this "dead before it gets started" a lot. Blu-ray is ahead of the adoption time curve set by DVD. It certainly has "gotten started". They'd just like it to be quicker, as the profit has gone out of the hardware side of DVD, and is weakening for software.

http://www.thedigitalbits.com/mytwocentsa161.html#bdrant

Re:Forget copying, I want to play my BR under Linu

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Clearly you have no idea of the concept of discipline.

Said the AC with no children...

Another point of view

[symbolset]

From The Register:

"The incentive structure under which media providers operate should be reconsidered and restructured,"

Although specific to music, it applies to other content.

Re:Obsolete the installed base? I think not.

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be the death of BluRay before it's even well started, and it wouldn't even buy them an additional year before it was cracked again.

It's more likely that we're nearing the end of this DRM nonsense forever. Finally!

Or am I too optimistic of their intelligence? History does weigh heavily against my hopefulness here.

Never assume that there is any intelligence in studio executives. They do not appear to be capable of responding to reality in any but the most primitive fashions--much the way an insect is programmed to respond to various stimuli with "canned" responses. Learning new behaviour is not one of their abilities.