Flood of 4K James Bond Leaks Further Point To iTunes Breach (torrentfreak.com)

AmiMoJo writes: All 24 movies from the iTunes exclusive 4K "James Bond Collection" have leaked online. This is further evidence to suggest that pirates have found a way to decrypt 4K source files from the iTunes store. How, exactly, remains a mystery. While most regular releases can be ripped or decrypted nowadays, 4K content remains a challenge to breach. Up until a few days ago, pirate sites had never seen a decrypted 4K download from Apple's video platform. However, a flurry of recent leaks, including many titles from the iTunes-exclusive "James Bond Collection," suggests that the flood gates are now open. It all started earlier this month ago when a pirated 4K copy of Aquaman surfaced online. The file is a so-called "Web" release, also known as WEB-DL in P2P circles. This means that it's a decrypted copy of the original source file. These were never seen before for 4K releases. Because the Aquaman release was only available on iTunes in this quality at the time, the most likely conclusion was that Apple's platform was the source. However, based on just one single leak, it was tricky to draw strong conclusions.

Comments

It had to happen someday

[Cajun Hell]

Pretty sure the number of surprised people is around 0.

I suppose this is good news for people who want 4k content but can't use proprietary stores or players. They might as well just pirate the stuff until/unless the industry starts selling standard files. (Who the fuck wants to have to use iTunes?)

Re:It had to happen someday

[AmiMoJo]

I wonder what the cost/benefit ratio for the DRM looks like.

Costs:
- Develop the DRM
- Manage the keys/accounts
- Protect secrets
- Piss off customers
- Lose sales to people outside your ecosystem/who hate DRM

Benefits:
- Lower piracy for a limited time
- Regional pricing for a limited time
- ???

Re:Not a coder, but .....

[DarkOx]

I'm sure there are challenges

Yes major ones. I don't know where you have been. Here is the not-to-technical-explaination: this is what all this trusted platform; EFI bios "secure mode" stuff is about. Its so primarily you don't have a way tell the Windows kernel that its alright to load an unsigned video driver. The signed drivers are all certified to not let you read those buffers when protected content is playing. This why you can't 4k commercial content on anything but Windows for the most part btw. (with some exceptions).

Now there are things you might be able to do. You could try to convince the content playing software that platform integrity modes were enforce when they are not; or you could try to use some kind of kernel exploit to gain access to modify the video driver stack with integrity mode enforce; load a fake video driver etc.. You could also possibly re-verse engineer the content players and patch them to not check for platform integrity, but they heavily obfuscated and usually use some kind of nasty VM layer.

The NSA was nice enough to release GHIDRA recently so if you are of for any of this sort of thing start there; you don't have to buy a copy of IDA pro anymore :-). Its not going to be easy though. A lot of really smart people have put a lot of effort into making it really really hard, they will fix whatever bug you find and probably find a way to force patches on most folks.. None of this is impossible but its hard enough that few people have the skills to approach it.

Re:Not a coder, but .....

[guruevi]

Which is an iOS device with an HDMI output. HDCP has long been broken (at least a decade), but the cost and effort vs profit has also been a major thing. If your movies can be rented for 99c why bother with a copy. But as the media conglomerates forgot that lesson in the last few years they've been putting "better" content (4K) under premium price ranges and even Netflix is raising prices to the point where pirating is once again viable.

Re: Did anyone...

[Sarten-X]

That's not usually true. Video codecs often place a lot of the computation work on the encoding side, since people generally only care about smooth decoding playback. That means encoding often runs far slower. I'm not sure what codecs are standard in the piracy world these days, but I'd be surprised if anything readily available to pirates can encode full-speed 4K with enough effect to make storage feasible.

To my knowledge, there are only some cameras that would have the necessary hardware, but they're rather ridiculously expensive to use for parts. What kind of budget does a pirate have, exactly?

Re:Not a coder, but .....

[AmiMoJo]

It was supposed to be impossible to get HDCP keys for devices that would let you make copies of protected streams. The standard even includes the ability to revoke keys if they are used for that purpose, and some older software and physical players need updates to replace the key with a new one due to revocations.

But of course it didn't work and there was high demand for devices which make copies or strip out the protection - not least from TV channels and streaming services. There is a Chinese company that makes a popular line which is used by Netflix and several TV networks to rip Bluray discs for streaming/broadcast.

I don't know what they thought would happen... I suppose it stops causal copying at home, but all that says is that they didn't anticipate the internet even in the post-Napster world.