Blu-ray Encryption Defeated


The hacker who cracked HD DVD strikes again by defeating Blu-ray Disc encryption

Late last year, a crafty individual who goes by the name “Muslix64” circumvented the copy protection scheme used to protect HD DVD.

dailytech.com

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Interview with Developer of BackupHDDVD


HD DVD and Blu-Ray were supposedly protected by an impenetrable fortress. However a programmer named "muslix64" discovered that this was not the case, and released BackupHDDVD. Now, Slyck.com has an interview with the individual responsible, who provides some interesting insight to his success.

slyck.com BackupHDDVD [Wikipedia] AACS confirms hacks on high-definition DVD players AACS - Advanced Access Content System

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BackupHDDVDGUI


I think most will agree that main BackupHDDVD thread is getting way too long so I decided to create a seperate thread for my GUI app.

I am glad that some of you liked this program and I will try keep improving it.

BackupHDDVDGUI (C# version)

doom9.org

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France and Germany join anti-iTunes crusade


France and Germany are joining the Scandinavian campaign to make content from iTunes work with players from companies other than Apple. In a statement released yesterday by the Norwegian Consumer Ombudsman, France and Germany joined Finland in calling for changes to iTunes.

theregister.co.uk

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Vista copy protection is defended


Microsoft has defended the digital rights management systems integrated into its new Vista operating system.

It follows reports that Vista would "downgrade" the quality of all video and audio, if they were not output via approved connections on the PC.

bbc.co.uk

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Blu-ray cracked too?


It's still early on to tell whether this is actually true, but 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.

engadgethd.com wired.com techdirt.com

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RIAA declares war on Rap mixes


The RIAA and the Atlanta Police don’t seem to understand the difference between promotional mixtapes which are sanctioned by the artists and actual counterfeit CDs.

You know that the RIAA, MPAA, et al. have gone much too far and have been granted much too much political clout when you see government sanctioned violence committed against a legitimate minority owned business and perpetrated on their behalf in the name of DRM and Copyright law.

RIAA

politech.wordpress.com Mixtapes branded illegalold shit

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The "Mac" Name Was Also Trademarked By Another Company


Steve Jobs' trademark spat with Cisco over "iPhone" isn't the first time Jobs has brought a product to market with another company's trademark -- he did it with the Mac.

According to the biography of former Apple CEO John Sculley, Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple, Jobs launched the Mac in 1984 even though the "Mac" trademark belonged to another company.

wired.com

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[Ffmpeg-devel] support for hddvd .evo files (mpg ps variant) in ffmpeg


I've attached an initial patch to support demuxing EVOBs - it will recognise and demux VC-1 and DD+ streams, although neither will play at the moment (AC3 streams with substream_id 0xCx should be fine though).

mplayerhq.hu

BackupHDDVD

A tool to decrypt and copy content from AACS-protected HD-DVD disks.

sourceforge.net

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A history of DVD copy protection


While I was out, I wrote many things. I’m still trying to find them all, truth be told, to cobble them together and weave them into some sort of Magnus Opus Lifework. I’ll let you know how that works out. In the meantime, here’s a history of DVD copy protection that I posted on Dave Shea’s blog in response to his first conscious encounter with DVD copy protection. Parts of this may be wildly inaccurate; other parts may be laughably incomplete. I make no claims either way.

diveintomark.org

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Privately, Hollywood admits DRM isn't about piracy


For almost ten years now I have argued that digital rights management has little to do with piracy, but that is instead a carefully plotted ruse to undercut fair use and then create new revenue streams where there were previously none. I will briefly repeat my argument here before relating a prime example of it in the wild.

The theory

Access control technologies such as DRM create "scarcity" where there is immeasurable abundance, that is, in a world of digital reproduction. The early years saw tech such as CSS tapped to prevent the copying of DVDs, but DRM has become much more than that. It's now a behavioral modification scheme that permits this, prohibits that, monitors you, and auto-expires when. Oh, and sometimes you can to watch a video or listen to some music.

arstechnica.com

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First pirated HD DVD movie hits BitTorrent


The pirates of the world have fired another salvo in their ongoing war with copy protection schemes with the first release of the first full-resolution rip of an HD DVD movie on BitTorrent. The movie, Serenity, was made available as a .EVO file and is playable on most DVD playback software packages such as PowerDVD. The file was encoded in MPEG-4 VC-1 and the resulting file size was a hefty 19.6 GB.

arstechnica.com

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