Useless protections

key

The "secret" encryption key that the major labels intended to protect the new high-definition DVDs (HD-DVD standard) from being copied has been decoded and published on the Internet.

As with the algorithm and the DVD key, the MPA (Motion Picture Association) rushed to issue warnings to block their publication, and as in that case, the warnings only served to spread the key to thousands of sites.
As in that case, the text of the key, consisting of a series of hexadecimal numbers, was encrypted so as not to violate the court order prohibiting the publication of the numbers. By the time of DVD, in fact, the algorithm and the key appeared in hundreds of formats: embedded in images, sung in a song, recited by a Shakespearean actor, printed on a T-shirt, transformed into a MIDI file that produced nonsensical music, but which, seen as a series of numbers, was the key, and so on, as this Gallery of CSS Descramblers maintained by Carnegie Mellon University testifies.

This is how it is now. One particularly perverse individual even noticed that, if you enter the incriminating key as a search term on the MPA website itself, a page containing the key is displayed, along with the text "No pages that matched your query [key] were found."
In this way, the MPA website itself generated a page containing the key whose dissemination they themselves wanted to block, and therefore is subject to a warning!.
But there are also those who maintain that this dissemination of a "secret" is actually controlled by the manufacturers of HD-DVD burners. The presence of a massive amount of unprotected films online, in fact, would give a decisive boost to this standard compared to its rival Blue Ray, significantly increasing the demand for burners, in an industrial war in which, as I have already pointed out, we users are simple hostages.

Back