HD already cracked

[Race Car Driver]

Press play and find out

[RobP]

:lol:

[John Holmes]

Wow, that didn't take long!

[George Bellefontaine]

So much for that. Heh. Heh. :P

[jim777]

I guess Universal Pictures will be anouncing Bluray support soon now

[Nolan B]

Personally I dont believe its real, not totally anyway.

Here is a link to a thread on the AVS where it has been debated. It certainly wont take long howeer before its cracked. Blue Ray Too.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=776145

^^^ I just changed the link to a better thread on the issue. Read the posts written by Amir if you are interested in this topic.

[Lex]

Actually, if you read the text, it says Blue Ray uses the exact same encryption methodology...

[Kevin P]

They'll never learn. Copy protection in various forms has been tried from the late 70s onward, and every scheme that ever became popular was either cracked or made the protected product unusable to the point where it had to be abandoned. And it has NEVER made a dent in real piracy.

I'm deliberately avoiding the HD formats until/unless the schemes are either cracked or otherwise proven to not affect the normal use of the products--meaning, I can watch them on my CRT projector without resorting to expensive hardware upgrades or "illegal" black boxes...

[Nolan B]

Actually, if you read the text, it says Blue Ray uses the exact same encryption methodology...

That is correct, in fact im going to quote a post I read which I thought was very good at explaining the importance of this.

"I don't think this is going to affect the studios one whit.

Consider who DRM is really aimed at:

In the end, no matter how good the encryption, you can always crack open a TV and wire up an analog to digital converter directly to whatever outputs are driving the pixels on the display. Do it with high enough quality ADCs, and the capture will be nearly perfect. Once you've done that, it's a simple matter of streaming the data to a very fast hard drive array and then re-compressing it. Too much work for the average joe, maybe, but not too much work for a dedicated counterfeiter that intends to make 100,000 units and make a $300K profit. Yes, but what happens when the counterfeiter's player keys are revoked, you say? If you're making $100K+ from each title you counterfeit you throw away the player with the revoked key and buy a new one.

Thus, this exploit really means very little to a determined counterfeiter.

So if the DRM wasn't meant to stop a determined counterfeiter, then who was it meant to stop? Probably the average joe. And if that's the case, this hack probably won't mean much. Why? Think about what the studios really want... They want piracy to go away, obviously. But if you can't have your wish, what's the next best thing? To reduce it, of course.

The goal of this DRM is to make it more difficult for the average joe to copy his friends movies. With DVDs, you can download DVDShrink which "just works" pretty much all the time. That was a disaster for the studios because once someone was shown how to copy a DVD one time, they had no problem doing it over and over.

But there will (probably) never be such a solution with HDDVD because of the way keys are distributed. Sure, you'll be able to download the most current Title Encryption Key database that contains every key known to date, and there will probably be newsgroups dedicated to keeping up with the latest 0-day exploit, but a very large percentage of people who now copy DVDs will not be able to keep up with these tit-for-tat exchanges between the crackers and the publishers. They'll get shown how to copy an HD DVD by someone, and they'll be able to copy any HD DVD that was released prior to that date, but they won't know where to go to update their software with the latest keys or exploits needed to copy title released AFTER that date.

If instead of having one icon that you click on you have to go searching for the latest exploit on Google, that's a win for the studios because ANY added complexity to the process of piracy necessarily excludes those people without the skills to overcome that added complexity gap.

How much of a dent in piracy would it take for the studios to be happy? 5%? 10%? I doubt very much the studio executives ever expected this to make piracy go away forever. I do think they are hoping to see a small decrease in piracy because of it.

Blu-Ray is just as vulnerable to the FET-Driver to ADC hack as HD DVD is, so it wins no points there. Will it make a difference that the "advanced joe" can't copy Blu-Ray? Maybe. Hard to say.

I don't think studios will be jumping ship over this because I imagine they fully expect Blu-Ray to fall to the exact same kind of exploits. Blu-Ray also has a standard encryption scheme, and it's keys will likely be exposed by a bad Blu-Ray implementation as well. What's the point in spending all that money to convert?

Blu-Ray has has the ROM Mark -- but it's a pseudo advantage. If a title is released on Blu-Ray and counterfeiters capture the output via any exploit, they might not be able to release their re-compressed version on Blu-Ray, but nothing prevents them from pressing the exact same re-compression on HD DVD.

So if the watermark can't prevent the distribution of movies, what can it do? It's really only effective for one application... games for the PS3, which only uses with Blu-Ray. Given the PS3s lackluster acceptance, one has to wonder if that means anything anyway, and even if it does, we all know there are hackers out there hard at work trying to find a hardware mod exploit to circumvent that DRM too.

Blu-Ray's one real advantage is BD+ which lets them change the encryption method from AACS to something else.... but what are they going to replace AACS with? As far as I know, there is nothing better than AACS that could be used to replace AACS. It will probably be at least a year before they do have a decent replacement that COULD be deployed via BD+, and I'm not sure what they can come up with that doesn't involve some sort of key that can be revealed by faulty software just like AACS and DVD has.

In summary, no matter what you do as a studio -- release on HD DVD or Blu-Ray -- some professional counterfeiter can hack open a TV, digitize the output, re-compress the movie, and release the title on HD DVD (or dvd, or super-dvd, or whatever.) Because the profit margin is so high, they could afford to trash their revoked player and buy a replacement for every movie if they had to. Every (smart) studio exec knows this; there's no reason for them to bail out just because of this. The "average joe" is probably screwed by either DRM even if this exploit turns out to work. The "advanced joe" will probably still find a way to copy movies. Overall, the best the execs can hope for is a small reduction in "average-joe" piracy which might or might not translate into a small boost in sales, which, over the next decade, might eventually amount to something more than a hill a beans after paying for the development of the DRM.

You know what I really think? I think some of the less knowledgeable suits at the studios wanted a pipe dream, and I think some engineers were more than willing to be paid to work on that pipe dream. If someone waves money in your face and asks you to do the impossible, what's a man to do but take the money and do his best?"

Posted by Chiem AVS

[aud19]

Overall, the best the execs can hope for is a small reduction in "average-joe" piracy which might or might not translate into a small boost in sales, which, over the next decade, might eventually amount to something more than a hill a beans after paying for the development of the DRM.

This is exactly the problem. They waste money on anti-piracy which raises the prices of the discs....causing piracy :lol: Price the media at a reasonable dollar amount and the majority of average and advanced joe pirates wouldn't even bother. The big time pirates, you'll never stop anyway like you said. So if they want to put a dent in pirating to the average consumer price the damn things reasonably and quit with the anit-piracy crap that seems to go further and further in to screwing consumer rights with fair use issues and older (analog) connections problems with each generation.

[jim777]

Actually, if you read the text, it says Blue Ray uses the exact same encryption methodology...

But I also read that BR has extra encryption too,

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/drmhacks.ars/3

[Nolan B]

But I also read that BR has extra encryption too,
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/drmhacks.ars/3

the BD + does nothing if the AACS is cracked. I read a good analogy which said if you drive a car through a front door would the second lock really matter. Apparently BD + was presented to the DVD forum and M$ did a lot of testing with with. For what ever reason it was rejected to be used. The link I posted earlier talks much more about this.

[jim777]

the BD + does nothing if the AACS is cracked. I read a good analogy which said if you drive a car through a front door would the second lock really matter. Apparently BD + was presented to the DVD forum and M$ did a lot of testing with with. For what ever reason it was rejected to be used. The link I posted earlier talks much more about this.

I read the same thing. Looks like the keys can be read from system memory because they have to be decrypted by the software player to be used.

So if there is a software player for Bluray discs, I guess the same exploit can be done.

Looks almost too easy

[Hdale85]

They always find a very easy way to hack this stuff. I don't know why these companies make it sound like they have an unhackable encryption method. Those are the ones that are usually cracked the fastest. Like the new 20 dollar bill they said was not able to be copied and the very next day after the release there was a counterfiet 20 dollar bill.

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[Chris D]

Huh...

[maseline_98]

They always find a very easy way to hack this stuff. I don't know why these companies make it sound like they have an unhackable encryption method. Those are the ones that are usually cracked the fastest. Like the new 20 dollar bill they said was not able to be copied and the very next day after the release there was a counterfiet 20 dollar bill.

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99.9% of things that are hacked are hacked by their creator...if you know the key and wrote the code....how could it be 'unhackable'...lol

anybody try to burn these to a disk?...though i don't think HD-DVD burners are out yet...but I know blu-ray ones are...

[PewterTA]

Here's a wild and completely "out-there" idea. If they took the money they put into creating these DRMs and used it to make GOOD movies... maybe people would want to buy them?!?

It (still) frustrates me that they can complain about all this and about how much money they are loosing when 50% -- all the people that don't do the grunt work of producing the discs -- are living a wealthy life style. It just makes me sort of sick to know all the things I'll never get to see/experience because I don't have the money they have and have WAY too much of.

This goes beyond the movie industry and into all sorts of lifestyles...but don't b*&ch to me about loosing money when you already have more than I'll ever see in my lifetime (provided I don't win the powerball or something).

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As for them breaking all "copy" protection schemes, here's the real answer to this... it will ALWAYS be broken when you have a mere <4,000 minds inventing it and >4billion looking for a better way.

Greed is the root of evil as they say.

[Eric_C]

People all the time ask me how to copy a DVD. It just simply isn't worth it, financially.

You can find deals on DVD's, better yet you can find great deals on used DVD's. My local Family Video sells "new" releases 3-4 weeks after release for $6-$8 and if you look through the stack we often get DVD's that look like they were not even opened or played. We pick up a ton of DVD's that way.

If you find them on sale your paying $12-$14 and your getting original cases.

Break it down for my time to copy a DVD, the software, the compromise in quality unles you go for Dual Layer which ups the price, the crappy label, etc.

Just not worth my time and anyones who asks me.