The following report does not, as far as I can establish, describe an 
illegal or immoral activity and as such it is potentially suitable for 
publication on this list. There is no doubt that it does describe an 
activity that numerous people with large fortunes and the best lawyers 
that money can buy would rather people didn't talk about or know 
about.

A person who would have qualified for a job in a hut at Bletchley Park 
in another era has worked out how to de-DRM all existing ASCS HD DVDs 
by the establishment of the existence and value of a single 
"processing key" common to all such material to date. Very 
importantly, in his (presumably) (women usually have better things to 
do with their time) own words:

                    Nothing was hacked, cracked or even reverse 
engineered
                    btw: I only had to watch the "show" in my own 
memory.
                    No debugger was used, no binaries changed.

Even if you have no interest in the de-DRMing of AACS HD DVD format 
material you may find the following account of how it was achieved 
interesting. I find it of interest that there are people with this 
degree of comfort with the arcane workings of such systems willing to 
spend the time and effort that this person has sifting through other 
people's flawed attempts to make material uncopiable. Turing would 
have been impressed.

While this system reportedly works to de-DRM all existing material it 
can be defeated by changing the processing key in future releases.

        http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=952968#post952968

Also copied to here:

        www.others.servebeer.com/misc/aacsdrmprocessingkey.htm

I'd be interested in knowing if the first of these stopped working at 
some stage. I imagine I'll know if the second one does :-).

I do not support or encourage illegal and immoral activity and may 
even choose to work against such where it seems appropriate. However 
immoral and illegal are not the same (but often overlap) and then 
there's the whole other category "we don't want you to but have no 
moral or legal foundation for wanting this but we'll try hard to 
achieve it anyway".

I have no problems at all with people attempting to protect their own 
"intellectual property rights".
However, I am exceedingly annoyed at the manner in which DRM systems 
tend to trample all over the landscape and make what are or morally 
should be * attempts to do quite reasonable things hard or essentially 
impossible.

I have little doubt that the major use that the above information will 
be put to will be illegal and immoral. It's use need not be either 
illegal or immoral. It is entirely possible that I will use this 
information in future and, if I do, it's use will be at least moral 
:-). I am about to de-DRM some music for a friend, confident in the 
knowledge  that doing so is 'the right thing to do' [tm] and that it 
will not in any way disadvantage those who applied the DRMing 
initially, and that the ability to remove DRM will quite possibly lead 
to the person concerned buying more and not less DRM'd material in 
future.






            Russell



* the meaning of terms and concepts "morally" and "should be" and 
related terms above are not liable to be able to be agreed to by all 
involved :-).



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