AACS Cracked Again 306
EmTeedee sends us to a blog post for a summary of the latest results in cracking AACS, from the Doom9 forums (as the earlier cracks have been) — after the DVD Security Group said it had patched the previous flaws. From the DLTV blog: "This time the target was the Xbox 360 HD DVD add on. Geremia on Doom9 forums has started a thread on how he has obtained the Volume ID without AACS authentication. With the aid of others like Arnezami they have managed to patch the Xbox 360 HD DVD add on... It appears that XT5 has released [an] application that allows the Volume ID to be read without the need to rewrite the firmware. This would mean that anyone could simply plug in the HD DVD drive and obtain the Volume ID from any HD DVD without the hassle of flashing it."
Re:One word. (Score:5, Insightful)
I LOVE this! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet the movie industry pushed forward, and look where it got them... exactly where we said it would, nowhere.
I can't wait until they realize that it's not worth it, and just stop concerning themselves with copy-protecting their media and instead focus on creating good movies.
Re:I LOVE this! (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's keep things straight:
writers/directors/actors focus on creating good movies;
movie distribution/marketing companies focus on wasting money on copy protecting their media.
hackers concentrate ruining the cop protection efforts;
the general consumer looks at the easier way to get their movie, be it rental/torrent/buy DVD/p2p: whatever seems better value.
Re:Fine by me. (Score:3, Insightful)
However they do love to make it sound like DRM is essential for there to be any money in producing movies.
Actually a success (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ouch (Score:5, Insightful)
Encryption works because parties A and B exchange data that is encrypted with a key that party C does not have. In the case of DRM, you have the encrypted data and you have the keys that you need to decrypt and view the data. You are in essence parties B and C. They hide the key from you in the players and software, but it's there if you know how to find it. That's why DRM can and will never work. It's security through obscurity.
Re:That does it! (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm.. I'd think he'd smile tho. nice job security for a while.
Re:Nothing is Foolproof (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe there's still hope for the MPAA... *cough*
Re:I were one of the cracking groups... (Score:3, Insightful)
Add to this the fact that hacking these devices in general will go much faster if everyone shares what information they've obtained thus far (e.g. the open source philosophy). This also avoids wasted effort on duplicate hacks. For better or worse, it's a fact of life that these cracks will come early and often.
(Note: All of the above is pure speculation. If any of the members of said groups wish to clarify their motivations for releasing hacks early and often, please do so!)
Re:Actually a success (Score:4, Insightful)
Or buying a second copy on iTunes because they can't play the DVD on their iPod?
I mean, I'm sure these things happen, but I can't imagine that it's a significant percentage of the market. It seems to me that if they removed the DRM entirely and stopped trying to shut down P2P sharing software, so that you'd have no difficulty downloading anything you wanted, they'd lose far, far more potential sales to people downloading rather than buying.
Re:Fine by me. (Score:4, Insightful)
Keep cracking DRM schemes and all you'll get are more laws aimed at stopping you, more vigorous enforcement, and more DRM integrated into your hardware.
Stop buying DRM'd content in the first place and maybe you'll get somewhere.
Kudos! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Fine by me. (Score:4, Insightful)
no it's not. having overpaid prima donna union actors, union workers and extravagent locations, props and lunches IS expensive. making a killer good movie IS NOT expensive.
go watch El Marachi. It's better than most everything made at Hollywierd and was less than the cost of a cheap car.
a crapload of great movies are made for dirt.
Hacking (Score:3, Insightful)
How ironic that we need to hack hardware that we ourselves own.
Re:Fine by me. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fine by me. (Score:5, Insightful)
My signature or the GP's?
Anyway, I think it's important to work on both fronts. First, I agree that the best bet is just to not purchase anything that's DRMed at all. But since that means basically bowing out of a large portion of our culture -- I mean, no late-model VCRs (macrovision) or tapes, no DVD players or discs, no TiVO -- I think you're going to have trouble getting enough people to follow you to make it significant. There's no point in throwing yourself in front of a tank if they're just going to run over you and nobody else is going to notice or care.
Continually breaking the DRM schemes costs the studios a lot of money. It ensures that DRM is never "fire and forget;" and it turns DRM from being a one-time cost into a continual cost center, a black hole that they need to keep pouring money into. If you can make the cost of maintaining an effective DRM system higher than the cost of the piracy that it allegedly prevents, then it will eventually go away -- either the companies will see the light, or they'll be run out of business by other companies who do, and who are more profitable as a result.
The major remaining problem is that the entertainment industry in particular has so much political influence that it's going to require a lot of vigilance and advocacy to keep them from trying to use the law to buoy themselves as they start to sink -- or barring that, pull everyone else down with them. We haven't had much luck in this in the past, hence we've seen the AHRA, the DMCA, and lately the Mickey Mouse Protection Act go through. But if we can keep the visibility of their actions high -- which is aided by putting pressure on them and forcing them to be more and more outlandish and openly anti-consumer -- while at the same time denying them revenue by boycotting DRMed products and sucking their revenue through a guerrilla campaign against the DRM systems themselves, they'll eventually be forced to quit.
Don't use cracks (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I LOVE this! (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, and I watch 100+ movies a year (over 30 so far this year in the theater, another dozen on DVD). Most of those were independent films at festivals, but still, I'm the perfect market for HD movies at home: watch lots and lots of movies, invested early in hidef, etc. Instead they don't want to sell me product I can use.
Re:Fine by me. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not trying to be snide here, but I suspect you haven't seen very many independent films. Most of them *suck* *incredibly*, but the very best 0.1% are quite good indeed, competitive with the best stuff coming out of Hollywood. I think it's something like a Boltzmann distribution [wikipedia.org] -- Hollywood has a very steep curve, so there's not a lot of difference between their very best movies and their worst. Bollywood's best are about as good, but their worst are much worse. Chinese films, at their best, are superb, but the worst ones I've seen have been nearly unwatcheable. Then you go to an independent film competition -- I'm not talking Sundance, I'm talking some local art scene competition -- and you begin thinking to yourself "I'd pay $30 to not have to watch the rest of this."
Money doesn't guarantee a movie will be good, but it does heavily indicate the movie won't be appallingly bad.
Re:I LOVE this! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ouch (Score:3, Insightful)
I've heard that a lot and it does make sense to me that it would be a fundamental flaw if it was true. Unfortunately it's not. You're not both parties B and C. Your media player is party B, and it's responsible for showing (but not giving you a copy of) the unencrypted content to party C.
In terms of standard encryption, that's like you sending an encrypted file to me, with the understanding that Joe is in the room with me and will also see it on my monitor. I don't have to give the encryption key to show Joe what you sent me. I use my key, display the contents on my monitor, Joe sees it. He can take a picture, film it or whatever, but he can't get a perfect digital copy unless I allow him to get one.
Unfortunately, I do think we're getting close to unbreakable DRM. You can and will always be able to set up a camcorder on your living room and record the unencrypted content the player is showing you. Unfortunately, I think getting perfect digital copies will be a thing of the past until we have legislation to specifically protect our rights.
Re:I LOVE this! (Score:4, Insightful)
It's more like, if hacks like Joel Schumacher stop getting $200 million budgets to make the next crap Hollywood "blockbuster" that ends up bombing at the box office anyway, then other directors will have more resources to create better movies, or at least more of them.
The bottom line is expensive special effects don't make good movies. Never have. Ever heard of Citizen Kane? Casablanca? The Graduate? On the Waterfront? One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? Not a single explosion in any of those movies.
Movie budgets have basically no correlation to movie quality. It takes approximately zero dollars to write a good script. Maybe a couple bucks for some paper and a pen. Not even a computer's necessary - most of the best scripts ever produced were written in the days of the typewriter. It is true that there's a base budget that's necessary to actually produce an existing script - film/tape stock, equipment rentals, talent payroll, catering, etc. - but that is so far below what the average budget is these days that it's completely ridiculous.
In other words, the money spent on DRM has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of our movies. Writers, directors and producers have no constraints whatsoever put on them by DRM on the home video side. And if you want to complain about bad movies, it's probably because there's too much money flying around rather than not enough.
(That said, there are plenty of great movies being made today, including in Hollywood but also outside of it. If you're not finding them, then that's mostly a personal problem.)
Re:Fine by me. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fine by me. (Score:3, Insightful)
You're missing the point. You touch on it when you say "... the piracy that it allegedly prevents", but you make an argument about making it more expensive than they're allegedly losing to piracy.
They know they're not losing as much as they claim they are. The claims are just for the legislators. The point of DRM is not to stop piracy, but to monetize things that used to be free. Not even 'fair use', simply free, completely. You'll buy a movie, and you'll only be able to watch it on your main TV. If you want to watch it in your car, you'll have to pay for the privilege. If you want to watch it on your computer, pay them again. If you want to make a copy of it, well, too bad.
You won't make it more expensive. Reason #1: Part of the cost is being swallowed by Intel and AMD(And AMD/ATI and nVidia. And seagate and western digital. And Microsoft and Intervideo.)
Reason #2: they'll likely be able to DOUBLE if not TRIPLE their revenues by selling you playback rights you used to get for free. It won't be immediate, but they plan to grow their revenue as people become accustomed to paying for extra 'conveniences' with their DVDs.
Beeeeep (Score:1, Insightful)
Thanks for playing. Try again later.
Re:Fine by me. (Score:3, Insightful)
You are missing some key alternatives. I agree DRM will be a continual cost center, but for companies, the real issue is how much does it cost, *to them*? If hackers keep breaking DRM, the companies won't continue to burn millions of dollars into generating new DRM if there is a cheaper alternative -- and likely alternatives are:
1. Lobby Congress to pass additional laws (such as the DMCA) protecting their "intellectual property rights", as well as their business model.
2. Lobby Congress/FBI/enforcement agencies to crack down on those who crack the DRM, making it much more risky & costly to for hackers.
With option 1, they could effectively remove any threat of competition by a company distributing non-DRM material by lobbying Congress to pass laws that effectively require DRM on any commercial content distribution. And I have faith they'd be able to find ways to be able to do this and sell it to Congress in a palatable manner.
With option 2, we've already seen some of this with the RIAA. While there will always be hackers to break the codes, it won't mean much to the movie companies if those codes only remain broken in some foreign lab or parent's basement. It's not until such utilities or methods become more widespread that it causes harm to the movie companies, and for that to happen there have to be people out there looking for it. If you put enough fear into people, they won't go looking for it, and generating fear is comparatively cheap. Of course they have to be careful to not take it too far and generate a backlash, but a few rounds of DRM cracking and they'll have a good enough history.
Think about this scenario --
Movie industry introduces new DRM (probably knowing it'd be broken eventually)
Hackers break it
Movie industry introduces fix to DRM
Hackers break it
Movie industry goes to Congress -- "Look, we tried to put in strong technological protections, but these hackers just keep breaking it! We've tried multiple times, and they are relentless. We need your help tracking these people down and persecuting them, to make an example to dissuade others"
Movie industry pours a couple of million into re-election campaigns
Congress passes laws / supports resolutions to "crack down" on hackers
FBI busts a few people and prosecutes them very publicly, which generates a "chilling effect" on the general public related to "hacking" movies.
Want to hurt AACS? (Score:3, Insightful)
So if you really want to hurt them, pull out your soldering iron and pull those keys from the standalone players.
Van Helsing (Score:3, Insightful)
Except for Van Helsing. Sadly, I watched the entire thing because of a promise - trying to disprove a comment of "this movie has no redeeming value whatsoever"; I didn't think it was possible to spend $200 million and not have SOMETHING worth seeing.
I spent the last 90 minutes of that atrocity thinking up unique and interesting ways to gouge out my eyeballs.
Re:this is what we needed (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually if you were to follow the spirit of copyright law, they do not have that right at all.
After a certain time (Despite the fact right now its 100 years after the death of the copyright holder) their work MUST enter the public domain. That is the cost and price of getting a copyright on the work in the first place.
If they do not wish to pay the costs involved with getting a copyright, then I do not wish to grant them the rights a copyright would give. It's as simple as that.
Before DRM, it was morally tricky to assume that they had no intent to pay for their copyright by putting it in the public domain later. Unless you can see the future, there's no way to know for sure ahead of time.
DRM is exactly the proof that they have no intention to play by the spirit of copyright however, so they do not deserve a limited monopoly over distribution from the start.
If the public can not benifit from their creation, screw them, nether can they.
Re:That does it! (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile, the fat cat manger receives the report on how much it cost, a single tear is about to fall, as he thinks he can only buy 3 new yachts this year instead of 5, but then he remembers that actually, he can just shift the blame onto someone else and so still get his $20 million bonus, then he remembers how he would get it anyway even if he didn't fuck up. Then he cuts all all the cleaning staff's pay to make up part of the loss and he gets an even bigger bonus and can buy 7 yachts.
Then all the shareholders get their dividend report, all start crying uncontrollably as they realise their investment is paying out worse than a Scotsman on comic relief night. However instead of doing something like kicking out the board, they bleat along to the tune, The Haaaaaackers did it, BAAAAAAAAAAD hackers. Cut to fat cat manager, takes a break from Scrooge McDucking it in his pool of money and he cuts pensions and healthcare for all shipping and logistics staff. Cut back to original guy, who has to spend all his overtime money on buying his kid new braces, .
Meanwhile, the government outlaws, fair use, free speech, free thought, freedom, etc.
Capitalism at it's finest.
Re:I LOVE this! (Score:3, Insightful)
But imagine how much *better* a few... hundred... explosions could make those films. Imagine a Citizen Kane where Orson Welles screams "Roooooosssebuuuuuuudddd!", his hair poofs up Dragonball Z style, and he emits a shockwave of grief which levels Neo-Tokyo.
Seriously though, I don't think special effects are the problem. Movies like Sky Captain and Once Upon a Time in Mexico actually used special effects to save a great deal of money on production. It's more like blockbuster films involve spending a ton of money on everything - actors, vast crews, giant sets, location shooting, orchestras, etc. And really, given that they rake in a considerable amount of money, can you *blame* all of those people for insisting on relatively generous salaries? Would it somehow be more fair if the profit stayed the same, but the studio execs kept even more of it and everyone who actually made the movie got less?
Re:Fine by me. (Score:2, Insightful)
Additionally, the survival of a TV show requires repeat business on a scale of weeks. Character is the only consistent way to archive this. (I think Heroes is doing a terrific job of leveraging character and plot to keep me tuning in.)
-Peter
Re:Fine by me. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's many great movies without explosions. In fact most of the action packed movies with no dialogue except one line meat heads, sci-fi that's nothing but action with lasers, romance that's nothing more than repetition of Wedding Crasher, Meet the Fockers, and some crap with J Lo in it over and over again, all the CGI laden movies, with huge acting names in them.. tend to be really flat movies. They have no feeling, no passion, crap stories, crap dialogoue.
But ooh ooh.. look! Explosions! zomg. that's so cool.
Amazing movies were made on shoestring budgets. And not just cult classics. 12 Angry Men anyone? To Kill a Mocking Bird? These didn't exactly cost a fortune.Actors are overpaid, and Hollywood is too scared to try ideas that aren't sure things.
Sure we could have another 20 movies with Will Farrell or Ben Stiller in them, but I could really give a crap. Rodriguez and Tarintino could've made Grindhouse out of their pockets, and look how many actors and producers chipped in because they wanted to do something fun.
Movies need to get back to people who love to make them rather than these scientologiest nutbags who marry women doped up on too many prescribed pills while pregnant and not knowing who the daddy is.
Re:I LOVE this! (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, but the thing is that the DRM _reduces_ the value of the legitimate product.
In all of the above cases, the content producers are actually pushing me _away_ from the legitimate product because the illegal version is much, much better.
The only way you can get away with screwing your customers like that is if there is no way for *anyone* to copy the product. As soon as one person has copied it, anyone else can download the copy.
Most people _want_ to buy content legitimately, but DRM or extortionate prices prevent them from doing so.
Re:Ouch (Score:3, Insightful)
...Until Joe pulls out his baseball bat and threatens to break your kneecaps if you don't give it to him.
Which is about the closest analogy I could get to "you open the player up and start analyzing its guts with a multimeter and logic probes", which you can do with a media player, legally, with easily available tools and a moderate knowledge of electronics.
So yes, in fact, for all intents and purposes, you are both Bob and Carol, given a reasonable amount of time.
Dan Aris
Re:That does it! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:One word. (Score:4, Insightful)
Two reasons: 1 - Because if it's an existing scheme, SOMEONE owns it and likely it isn't the people inventing the new standard, nor can they charge "new technology" prices on the encoding/decoding hardware. You can't really go to a mfg and tell them they have to buy the same chips they've been buying for 10 years and tell them they cost more now. No, these are new chips. See the new logo?
And 2 - Because you need to give the content creators a reason to prefer your technology, enough to get them to make the initial investment in it. "It's way harder to pirate this movie. It's HD-DVD! Encryption the likes of which has never been seen. So will you use it to stop those big scary pirates?"
Hell of a sales pitch to a dying, scared industry.
Re:One word. (Score:4, Insightful)
USB/Firewire is a little different than DVD technology. With Firewire, you're paying to be part of a logo consortium. You guarantee that your product will work according to their standards and you pay them a bit of money. In exchange you get to put the "Firewire" logo on your stuff. Same goes for bluetooth, and for USB. But that's because no one company controls these. They're consortia and operate differently.
But how do you suppose they enforce that payment? It's very easy to see if someone's put your logo on their product. How do you know if they used your chips or someone else's? How do you sell them multi-million dollar encryption hardware if they could just go without it? You make it required to read the discs. You could produce a non-AACS compliant HD-DVD player. But it wouldn't play commercial movies.
The purpose is for Sony or Toshiba/NEC to control who can MAKE their standard's players, recorders, and authoring hardware. It's use as a copy-protection scheme is secondary.