Engadget has an article stating that the guy who recently released code allowing you to break the encryption on an HD-DVD disc has now stated that he can crack at least some of the encryption on a Blu-ray disc, the competing high definition format.
HD DVD cracker muslix64 is back, and with the help of another anti-DRM cracker, Janvitos, claims to have also broken the Blu-ray’s implementation of AACS. Although their protection does not yet account for BD+ copy-protection, they claim to have been able to implement the same key-grabbing known-plaintext attack as muslix64 used to crack HD DVD in order to successfully to crack Blu-ray without even using a disc or drive (apparently they just used a raw encrypted data file and nothing more).
I would imagine the rest will be broken shortly and so, again, we ask why the studios bother to add this level of protection when the only people it hurts are ordinary consumers. I suspect because it is the ordinary consumers they wish to hurt. I’ve seen a couple of articles recently that suggest Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a way for Hollywood to stop you from sharing movies and allow them to sell you the same content time and again in different formats. This is part of the reason Hollywood has been so slow to allow movie downloads, especially through iTunes. You can authorise up to 5 machines to playback iTunes content you see, and movie bosses think you might authorise a friend of two to watch the films only you bought (and vice versa). What they don’t seem to realise is that we all loan out DVDs at the moment anyway, and most people are happy to watch a film once and not need to own it (weird people, I know).
Anyway, nice to see that my limitations will be removed, now there’s just Vista’s built-in DRM functions to worry about.
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