From Yahoo News:

The movie industry may rue the day it challenged hackers to break its new encryption system for high-def DVDs, claiming it was bulletproof. The day after Christmas, a hacker known only as Muslix64 posted a hack to a Doom 9 forum that appears to shoot holes in their claim.

The hack consists of a program, BackupHDDVD, and a set of encryption keys that would allow users to decrypt, and thus copy, high-definition movies protected by the Advanced Access Content System (AACS), such as Full Metal Jacket, The Last Samurai, and The Fugitive.

AACS was designed to replace the aging Content Scrambling System (CSS) used on older, non-high-def DVDs. Industry bigwigs such as Sony, Disney, and Warner Brothers have adopted AACS to keep pirates from making and selling illegal copies of their movies.

Past Present, Past Future

Where there's a will, there's a way. This week's news is not the first time a hacker managed to break DVD encryption. CSS was itself famously cracked by DVD Jon, whose real name is Jon Lech Johansen.

Johansen now lives in San Francisco but was tried -- and acquitted -- for his work in his native Norway. That did little to stop him from training his talents elsewhere, of course. DVD Jon has since announced a way to defeat the protection systems that Apple employs in iTunes, the world's largest online music store.

Hello, Pirates!

Muslix64's hack is reportedly designed to enable users to copy high-definition films in Toshiba's HD-DVD and Sony's Blu-ray format. Whether or not it works has yet to be confirmed, but Muslix64 supplied his own bit of compelling proof: a brief YouTube movie in which he showed, in careful, step-by-step sequence, exactly how a high-def DVD of Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket could be decrypted, copied to a hard drive, then played.

That Muslix64 chose a homemade movie to market his movie-busting invention is an irony lost on no one. But even more intriguing is his tiny movie itself. True, it won't make a Spielberg, a Lucas, or a Fellini proud, but it's surprisingly well made -- a trailer for a hacker/director about to hit the limelight. The film has its own soundtrack (complete with ominous music), careful edits, and goading titles interspersed throughout.

Indeed, his last two titles might give the movie industry pause. They read: "Stay tuned for source code in January." And then: "Merry Christmas!"


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