StarDestroyer.Net BBS

RThurmont wrote:What (sending excrement) would do would be to reinforce the image that Sony executives doubltess already have about people who are opposed to this kind of DRM, that of them, essentially, being trash. As I see it, only trashy people, and biologists, put excrement in the mail.

Hamel wrote:

Psycho Smiley wrote:Hamel, your picture wants an FTP login before it will display.

My FTP space seems to have gone to shit. Never did that before. Gotta use ol retarded photobucket

edit: Fuck that, go to this page, it has a picture of the symbol you'd need to look for.

If you think Sony is not interested in the "trashy people" demographic, you have obviously not seen Resident Evil, Pumpkinhead, Bad Boys II, XXX, or White Chicks, among other fine high-class presentations from Sony Pictures.

Darth Wong wrote: What crime would that be? Bio-terror?

Maybe I shouldn't laugh; knowing the Bush Administration's combination of asinine "anti-terror" laws and rabid pro-corporatism, that might actually work.

Davis 51 wrote:*Checks Limited Edition Box Set copy of FFVII: Advent Children.*

*Sees symbol*

Strangely enough, this DVD ran fine on my computer. Must be a generic symbol.

Only a few days after Corel issued a WinDVD update to close the hole opened by AACS hackers, the folks at the Doom9 forums sent word that they have found yet another way around the copy protection for high definition discs. This time, the method involved the Xbox 360's HD DVD add-on drive to capture the "Volume Unique Keys" as they were being read by the drive itself. Rather than just point out the crack, we're going to take a closer look at how this crack was accomplished, because one of the hackers involved in the crack says that it's more or less unstoppable.
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The latest attack vector bypasses the encryption performed by the Device Keys—the same keys that were revoked by the WinDVD update—and the so-called "Host Private Key," which as yet has not been found. This was accomplished by de-soldering the HD DVD drive's firmware chip, reading its contents, and then patching it. Once that was done, the firmware was soldered back onto the drive.

Despite the technical difficulty of performing this hack, it does offer some advantages in the race to beat AACS copy protection. "They cannot revoke this hack," said forum member arnezami, who has been at the center of much of the AACS cracking recently. "No matter how many Private Host Keys they revoke we will still be able to get Volume IDs using patched xbox 360 HD DVD drives."

In addition to being irrevocable, the hack has the potential to make future decryption even easier. "This hack/technique enables us to figure out how the Volume ID is stored on the disc," arnezami explained. "It's very possible we would figure out [...] how the KCD is stored on the disc. Knowing that and being able to teach a PC drive how to read a KCD will open the door for what I called third-generation decryption."

While this type of decryption (reading keys directly off a PC drive by sidestepping part of the encryption process) is still not a reality, it may not be too far off. The main issue is the cost of purchasing standalone high-def players by the hackers, but as prices for these come down, this problem will slowly go away.

Although AACS has proven much more difficult to fully crack than the copy protection on regular DVDs, it is unlikely to remain only partially cracked for very long. The real problem with trying to create an "uncrackable" copy protection is that the media must come with the keys used to decrypt it somewhere on the device and the media itself. Hiding these keys in different places—security by obscurity—merely delays the inevitable. Of course, for the content providers, any delay is still better than no delay at all, so expect the battles between copy protection and hackers to continue.

Darth Wong wrote:Someone should file a class-action lawsuit. It is absolutely ridiculous that the company can pretend that a tiny little "do not copy" symbol is a reasonable warning to the consumer that the disc has been crippled so that it might not play in all DVD players.

In fact, the use of the official DVD logo may be fraudulent in this case. The DVD logo is not just a pretty symbol; it denotes compliance to the DVD standard, and these discs are not in compliance with that standard.

andrewgpaul wrote:I believe Philips have already insisted on this in the case of some copy-protected CDs. I don't know who owns the DVD trademark; I'd suggest contacting them, but I doubt they'd care.

Sony Films Won't Play on Sony DVD Players, Say Reports

Complaints have begun appearing on some tech websites that copyright-protection coding on new releases from Sony, including Stranger Than Fiction, The Holiday, Casino Royale, and The Pursuit of Happyness, has made them unplayable on certain DVD players. One person complained on an Amazon.com discussion board that when inserted in Sony's DVP-CX995V player, the disks "load up to the splash title screen and then load no further, then after about 60 secs the player turns itself off!" The writer said that when he contacted Sony he was told that the company was aware of the problem and that it was working on a firmware update. The writer then asked Sony, "Would it not be a good idea to test changes you intend to make on your DVDs at least on your own equipment so that if you find a problem you could have the firmware update available instead of not only inconveniencing, but alienating your own customers?"