The copy protection technology used by Blu-ray discs has been cracked by the same hacker who broke the DRM technology of rival HD DVD discs last month. The coder known as muslix64 used much the same plain text attack in both cases. By reading a key held in memory by a player playing a HD DVD disc he was able to decrypt the movie been played and render it as an MPEG 2 file.
If you already have a Blu-ray drive, you can poke around the MakeMKV forums(Opens in a new window) to see if it's usable for 4K Blu-rays, or you can buy one of their recommended drives. You may have to flash custom firmware(Opens in a new window) or roll back to an older firmware version in order to read those 4K discs. This can be a bit nerve-wracking, but I've done it twice without breaking anything, so it can be done.
Blue-Ray DRM Cracked Already
Keep in mind that MakeMKV is not guaranteed to rip every disc, and your mileage may vary depending on the disc, your drive, and the rest of your setup. Some discs may have newer copy-protection schemes that haven't been cracked yet, or your disc may be too damaged to rip.
Given that the Blu-ray Disc data layer is closer to the surface of the disc compared to the DVD standard, it was found in early designs to be more vulnerable to scratches.[111][112] The first discs were therefore housed in cartridges for protection, resembling Professional Discs introduced by Sony in 2003. Using a cartridge would increase the price of an already expensive medium, and would increase the size of Blu-ray Disc drives, so designers chose hard-coating of the pickup surface instead. TDK was the first company to develop a working scratch-protection coating for Blu-ray Discs, naming it Durabis. In addition, both Sony's and Panasonic's replication methods include proprietary hard-coat technologies. Sony's rewritable media are spin-coated, using a scratch-resistant acrylic and antistatic coating.[113] Verbatim's recordable and rewritable Blu-ray Discs use their own proprietary technology, called Hard Coat.[114] Colloidal silica-dispersed UV-curable resins are used for the hard coating, given that, according to the Blu-ray Disc Association, they offer the best tradeoff between scratch resistance, optical properties, and productivity.[113]
The new AACS 2.0 encryption method used to protect Ultra HD Blu-rays from unlawful copying may have been cracked for the first time. A report from Torrent Freak brings word that a copy of The Smurfs 2 has been posted to the BitTorrent tracker UltraHDClub.
There is no government unless those things are already taking place. The government subsits on expropriating the products of other people, thus it has no existence unless a market is already functioning.
As population grows, the trend has definitely been towards establishing relatively-unified control over ever-larger sections of territory. Those who resisted this trend (for example, the city-states of Ancient Greece) tended to get overwhelmed by those who were already applying this principle.
That article is totally biased in favor of the modified view of monopoly advanced by the economics profession since the 1920s as an ex-post-facto rationale for government intervention that was already in place for decades.
Also, in order for this charismatic leader to succeed he already must have his hands on a couple of tools that have been created for him in the past. In other words, the State must already exist for him, in order for him to exploit his population by duping them into supporting a war with a bestial enemy outside the nations borders.
My contention is that those nations with a decentralized army, and a cultural respect for self-defense are much more difficult to conquer because there is no central authority that speaks on their behalf. A centralized authority can be conquered by acquiring the property this authority claims to itself. So if you can get the capital city, you already have all the tools you need (that the central authority put in place for you) to exploit the population to your advantage.
Although its already been stated countless times, I too will not be purchasing a W$ OS ever again. I will however still have to obtain knowledge of its inner workings in relation to my work. So Bruce is completely right im am in fact stuck with M$.
Circumventable DRM is not all that outrageous. It already happens with DVDs, think of all those multi-region DVD players. Opposition to DRM is not an opposition to copyright, in fact it is a call to strengthen the role of copyright. DRM often restricts the users rights in relation to media in ways that are explicitly allowed in copyright.
Windows Media DRM is designed on the assumption that it will be cracked and must be constantly updated. Windows Media Player 10 does not exist for the Mac means that Mac users have no way of playing DRM-encrypted WMV and WMA files and given that Microsoft has ceased development of Windows Media Player for Mac it is unlikely they'll ever be able to. Using Windows Media DRM runs out the battery on mobile players 25% faster.
This ability to invent new and exciting copyrights for themselves, to write private laws without accountability or deliberation, that take over your rights in your physical property to their favour are already limiting your use of your stuff. Region-coded DVDs are an example of this: there's no copyright that says that an author can control where you enjoy her creative work once you've paid for them. You can buy a book, throw it in a bag and take it anywhere from Toronto to Timbuktu and read it wherever you are. You can even buy books in America and bring them to the UK, where the author may have an exclusive distribution deal with a local publisher who sells them for double the US shelf-price. DVDs, on the other hand, use a DRM system that prevents you from watching a movie bought in American in the UK. Although copyright law does not give the movie studio any rights in law to impose this restriction directly, the combination of DRM technology and anti-circumvention law make it illegal to bypass this protection.
So am I understanding this correctly? The blue-ray player that I just purchased last week is incompatible with playing Avatar--one of the biggest movies of the past 10 years? There is absolutely no way to update my player to play the new discs that will be coming out over the upcoming months? This seems like a very bad business decision on the part of Insignia as this player is now an obsolete piece of equipment just like my VHS player. I suppose I shall be returning this product to the store tomorrow and purchasing a player that will do it's job.
Futurists and sci-fi writers talk about a "post-scarcity" society, meaning it's like Star Trek, where matter replicators and fusion reactors have ended all shortages. On one hand, that now looks like a ridiculous pipe dream, but in a lot of areas of our life, we're already there. Think about the porn. There's more porn than air now. Literally -- air is limited, but we have machines that can convert energy into .jpegs of titties from now until the heat death of the universe. Titties are post-scarcity.
The latest version of the copy protection scheme used by 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray discs has been cracked, according to the Russian company that makes the software DeUHD.AACS (Advanced Access Content System) is the name of a digital rights management (DRM) scheme that has been in use on Blu-ray discs since the optical format's inception. An updated version of the scheme was put to use for the Ultra HD Blu-ray disc format, and has so far proved to be harder to crack than the original version.The latest version of this copy protection scheme, version 2.1, was only put into "service" last month for the release of the tank battle movie 'Fury' on UHD Blu-ray. The previous iteration, version 2.0, had remained resilient until a crop of ripped UHD Blu-ray discs started to surface on the piracy scene, suggesting that a workaround, if not a full crack, has been found. A commercial ripping tool called DeUHD was then released by a Russian software company called Arusoft that took advantage of AACS 2.0's weakness to allow at-home ripping of UHD discs.AACS 2.1 was an attempt to address version 2.0's weaknesses, but it too appears to have been cracked only a month after it surfaced. The makers of DeUHD officially announced that the latest version of the software will now support the ripping of 'Fury' and AACS 2.1, claiming that the software now rips more than 1100 UHD Blu-ray discs (as of June 11).TorrentFreak reached out to Arusoft to ask them to explain how AACS 2.1 worked, and how a crack was devised. Arusoft was surprisingly forthcoming and explained that AACS 2.1 now used an encrypted m2ts file that now contains "forensic information". "It is not too difficult to bypass this protection, just takes some time to do it," Arusoft told TorrentFreak.The addition of "forensic information" suggests that studios are now trying ascertain the source of leaks via digital watermarking, which could make ripping and uploading 2.1 protected discs a risky proposition. However, Arusoft assures users that "redundant data has been cleared from the disc", suggesting, but not confirming, that forensic tracking data appears to have removed.[via TorrentFreak]
Cool. Video on CD was a pre-Win95 thing, though! :)In Win 3.1 the and System 7 times (early 90s), we already had CDi, Video CD (mpg, dat) and mov/avi etc.There also were remote-controlled Laserdisc players..And they all had no DRM, gratefully.
The real winner in the HD DVD vs. Blu Ray format war was clearly so-called "piracy." Rather than choosing a restrictive HD disc format more consumers are of the mind to avoid restrictive DRM. Sony's Blu Ray compromises users' fair use rights to media they own. Each time Blu Ray encryption is cracked thanks to BD+ firmware updates, Sony and other DRM-laden vendors of Blu Ray can disable a Blu Ray player and/or movie from playing. 2ff7e9595c
Comments