Blu-ray BD+ Cracked

An anonymous reader writes "In July 2007, Richard Doherty of the Envisioneering Group (BD+ Standards Board) declared: 'BD+, unlike AACS which suffered a partial hack last year, won't likely be breached for 10 years.' Only eight months have passed since that bold statement, and Slysoft has done it again. According to the press release, the latest version of their flagship product AnyDVD HD can automatically remove BD+ protection and allows you to back-up any Blu-ray title on the market."

Re: BD+ Cracked

I'm beginning to increasingly believe the old cliche, "Information wants to be free".

Re: BD+ Cracked

The whole problem with encrypted media is that in order for the customer to want to purchase it, they will need to access the media they have purchased. In order to access that media, they will at some point need the key(s) that unlock it. Simply put, the purchaser of the media has the locked media, but they will also have the key. If you give people the key to the lock along with the lock, it is only a matter of time before someone figures out how to get the key.

pwned

When will people learn that making bold statements about their technology's security will only make them look like a fool when it is finally broken?

Re:pwned

They know damn well that no DRM is ever really secure. But the bread and butter of these companies is to sucker the studios into thinking otherwise. So they don't make such statements because they actually believe them, but to sell their DRM scheme. By the time it gets cracked (usually about 5 minutes after anyone bothers to try), they've already made their money and can laugh all the way to the bank.

Re:pwned

Be assured it was this argument that Sony brought to the studios to get them to kill the (IMO better standard) of HD-DVD since it has already been cracked. Also, be assured that Sony knew their argument was bullshit. Sadly, it was this lie that killed the standard, not a few thousand people skewing consumer purchasing towards BD. Ca va...

Re:pwned

It was eight months ago. The crowd he delivered his statement to doesn't have that kind of attention span.

Re:pwned

why call it disaster? it's GOOD when any and all copy protection schemes are broken so I can get fair use out of my purchases. Those who are creating DRM are trying to take away my rights. When will they learn they may as well just abandon their wasted efforts and instead get smarter about how content is priced, sold and distributed.

Re:pwned

You bought a disk full of data.

DRM locks the data to the disk, requiring you to risk damaging the only copy of the data you bought in order to access said data.

Fair use is copying the data you bought to another device so you can access it from there.

I'm surprised you need it explaining to you, are you a bit dumb ?

Re:pwned

The copy protection is meant to prevent you from backing up your only copy of the disk to another device, which falls under fair use. Also, you cannot format-shift because of the copy protection. If you buy an HD movie and want to downsample it for use on your iPod, you can't unless you get past the copy protection.

The studio's line works just fine if you're okay only watching your movies in your Blu-Ray player and only if the keys to the disks are still valid and only if you even still have a blu-ray player years from now. If you buy a movie you should be able to enjoy it howsoever you see fit as long as that doesn't involve charging people money to view it or selling copies you've made from it.

Seriously. You must be new here 'cause I might just be modded redundant people have been over this so many times on Slashdot.

Re:pwned

this whole "blu-ray monopoly" thing is getting old. prices went up because they don't have to undercut their costs anymore. now, prices will eventually go down when the technology is actually cheaper. DVDs were expensive at one point too, but had no competition at the time (if you really want to count VHS, thats up to you). They started high (in some categories, higher than hi-def dvds), but due to never having to undercut their costs, they started as high as they could and then went down. Blu-ray didn't start as high as it could. It noticed it had to cut profits to try to win first. Now, they don't have to. Prices are now controlled by the actual cost of the equipment. Competing formats is *NOT* good for the consumer unless all content is available on all formats. The fact that one of the hi-def formats died is *GOOD* for the consumer. Competition isn't automatically good for the consumer and a so-called 'monopoly' (which is most definitely isn't) isn't automatically bad. When HD was around, it was a terrible situation. People were torn between choosing various studios. What if I liked movies from two studios that weren't on the same format? I'd have to buy a dual-player or even just two players. How can you justify saying its a good thing for consumers that they'd have to pay twice as much money on equipment?

Anyhow, on the topic at hand, is anyone really surprised it got cracked? DRM will eventually die at some point. Right now its just something that we gotta continue fighting until companies realize they lose more money by utilizing it. Music has begun dropping DRM. Some book companies have started releasing straight pdf's of books without any DRM. Video will eventually follow.

Not fully broken

Wikipedia states that it only enables backups, which are then played with a software player which is Blu-Ray compatible. It doesn't look like VLC will be playing BD+ protected media anytime soon.

The link is a trap

Its not really details of how it works, its a FBI sting to get people that are intent on learning 'forbidden knowledge".

Bogus claims

This is completely bogus marketing on Slysoft's part. They have "broken" the current titles by extracting the code from each one, but BD+ relies on code being downloaded from the disc itself to decode the data. The bar will just be raised now and new code will be added to newer titles.

I'll know it when I see it

Slysoft has made this claim before. It turned out to be bogus. The crack allowed a user to copy a BD to the harddrive and play it back from there using only a specific version of Cyberlink's PowerDVD (3319a), but not to transcode, otherwise manipulate the content or play it back from a burned BD-R or BD-RE. (Wiki)

Now I'd like everyone to remember that BD+ is not an `algorithm` per se. It's not a DRM one way function. BD+ is a virtual machine and a blu ray disk is a full fledged program that runs under the VM and can even run native code to patch and upgrade the virtual machine.

This is akin to running a java application that can inspect the java VM.

It's a cat and mouse game for now.

*Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BD%2B [wikipedia.org]

Re:I'll know it when I see it

If they can patch it we can re/unpatch it. Once the VM ends up being cracked we can do whatever we like with it, like install Linux on it.

Re:I'll know it when I see it

"we can do whatever we like with it, like install Linux on it."

24 Carat Pure Slashdot Gold.

We have a winner.

"Crack" Has Important Use Unrelated to Ripping

The crack allows you to play the media at full quality on systems that do not have a fully HDCP compliant chain. Example: If you have a home theater TV hooked up to an older HDTV that only has component inputs, or if you have a non HDCP video card, you can use this "crack" to play your discs at full quality.

Re:Barrier to Ownership

i completely agree... and i think that's the message that movie studios should be taking from this -- now that it's possible to create backups, more people are wanting to buy BD players when they wouldn't have otherwise -- not that the pirates have won again.

Re:unimportant

It however does a few things...

1. It tells that Blu-Ray is already supported enough to buy a player now
2. It allows you to even if Blu-Ray ends up failing, you can rip your Blu-Ray movies to the new format (and don't expect media storage to be made as long as VHS and DVD did anymore...)
3. It will allow various third-party projects to soon take advantage of this (even if right now it only lets you make backups) and add Blu-Ray support to media players on OSes such as Linux.

Re:unimportant

I agree that is the reason for the vast majority, but there are some cases where people have a legitimate reason. I'm in the process of ripping my 600+ DVDs to an increasingly large hard drive array so I can access them all around the house without the need to get the discs. I know it's unusual but there are legitimate reasons.

Re:unimportant

The vast majority of customers for blu-ray technology won't give a rats arse about this. I certainly don't

Well, I do. Let me tell you why:
I don't own a TV. I *do* however own a computer with a WUXGA display. In its current
config, my computer would not be "MAFIAA certified" to play BD discs, even if I hab a BD drive.

I want to be able to play the content on my computer.

With the OS of my choice. With a display of my choice. Without this HDCP crap.
I own a bunch of DVDs because deCSS has become ubiquitous today, and nearly every
computer with a DVD drive can play them, without any platform or software dependencies.

I'm waiting for the same to happen for BD - until then, no money from me.
Please make it happen soon, HD video looks great.

Re:unimportant

I own and rip my DVDs to put them on my media server. I pay, and I "crack", so I can watch DVDs on demand without hunting them down, sitting through ads, and even on the road on my iPhone. So where do I fit into your argument? I'll concede that some people will borrow / rent DVDs to rip them, but honestly, it's much easier to torrent the movie you want than to rip / encode for 99% of the people out there. I'd say at least 50% of rippers do so legitimately, DMCA not withstanding.

Re:why?

I am beginning to ask myself: why are we always happy because of such news? I mean yes, we are all little pirates at the bottom of our hearts and we all liked Robin Hood, but shouldn't we start thinking more responsible towards how technology advancement can occur?

We are happy because if we purchase a product, we feel we should be able to use it however we want to. DRM puts restrictions on how we can use the product we own. Removing those restrictions and allowing more freedom makes us happy.

Re:why?

1. This won't affect piracy, the places where you can get pirated movies are already full of BD releases so obviously those creating the pirated releases were already able to get the data (probably by ripping it out of the decoded video stream at some point).

2. Software patents or no, I believe that I should be able to do what I want with something I purchase as long as it's not harming others. Moving my movies from physical disks to my media server is not harming anybody.

3. As others have already said, DRM is fundamentally broken. To view DRM encrypted content you have to have the keys. If you have the keys then the encryption can't be secure. The sooner people (the content industries) realise this the sooner they can stop pissing off their legitimate consumers without actually denting piracy. This is a win for all. EMI have realised this, and I think a couple of other music studios, now it's just a waiting game until the rest of them get it.

Re:Well....

not every movie copied has to be stolen. and i doubt he was planning on stealing. especially since he said he also wants to wait for the prices of the movies to come down. which he has a point with. i mean, i've seen some movies go for $35.