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'First Pirated Ultra HD Blu-Ray Disk' Appears Online (torrentfreak.com)
Has AACS 2.0 encryption used to protect UHD Blu-ray discs been cracked? While the details are scarce, a cracked copy of a UHD Blu-ray disc surfaced on the HD-focused BitTorrent tracker UltraHDclub. TorrentFreak reports: The torrent in question is a copy of the Smurfs 2 film and is tagged "The Smurfs 2 (2013) 2160p UHD Blu-ray HEVC Atmos 7.1-THRONE." This suggests that AACS 2.0 may have been "cracked" although there are no further technical details provided at this point. UltraHDclub is proud of the release, though, and boasts of having the "First Ultra HD Blu-ray Disc in the NET!" Those who want to get their hands on a copy of the file have to be patient though. Provided that they have access to the private tracker, it will take a while to download the entire 53.30 GB disk. TorrentFreak reached out to both the uploader of the torrent and an admin at the site hoping to find out more, but thus far we have yet to hear back. From the details provided, the copy appears to be the real deal although not everyone agrees.
That sounds like a decent scheme for cinemas, but for home viewing it's not going to work. Unless it is deemed acceptable that my entire bluray collection is bricked when I replace my TV, or that I have to go and obtain new keys for everything in my collection. Sounds like a lot of hassle... and here I'll repeat an age old bit of wisdom regarding cumbersome DRM: many people pirate stuff not because they don't want to pay, but because pirates offer a better product: Free of DRM and ads, often in a choice of formats and bitrates suitable for playback on a variety of devices (including offline playing), available for immediate download. With DRM you are not protecting your content effectively, but you are punishing your legitimate paying customers. Hell of a way to run a business.
Though I agree that the idea of some form of tamper proof DRM scheme for home viewing still appears to be the industry's wet dream. They really ought to take a cue from the music industry who have embraced the idea of convenience first, and in a lot of cases have agreed to do away with DRM
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Hell 4k can't even encode all of the data in good 35mm film. I speak as someone, a dedicated amateur photographer, who owns a nice film scanner and took the time to master it as well as the camera and lenses I own so take that at what it is worth.
Using good quality 35mm film with good high quality lenses with multiple scans of a frame one can approach the claimed resolution of the scanner (10,000DPI) which after some cropping of the image stack produces an image of around 130 megapixels at 16 bits per channel of color depth of which there is about 80 mega pixels of data there. While I do upscale the images I always down scale them back as the scanner is diffraction limited below its output resolution so I use super resolution to work around that and get as much actual information there as I can.
In theory if I had a scanner that had better resolution (very difficult to find) and really took the time to setup a shot in a perfect environment (no movement, perfect focus) and had lenses that were perfectly sharp at wide open aperture of f/1.4 (I don't) I could get close to 400 megapixels but likely only out of B&W film but this is just theory. Going up to 120 or 70mm film and you are now looking at single frames that have 400-500 megapixels of actual data in normal circumstances.
Time to offend someone
My favorite was the one banner ad that would actually move your cursor out of the comment box while you typed, making it impossible to type more than a character or 2 at a time. Oh, yeah, and that damn tikka masala that took up half the page, scrolled, and you couldn't make go away. And every now and then on my work laptop, when using a mouse, Slashdot won't scroll when using the scroll wheel. Any other website works, just slashdot. They have ads that literally break their website and they don't care.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil