redelijkheid.com

Ever since I started uploading photos onto the Internet I needed a way of ‘protecting’ my images. I could choose to upload a very small photo, with terrible JPEG artifact, but that’s not the way you want to be remembered. Especially today. Today we have the bandwidth and the online storage to upload large images, so why not do that.

If you don’t want that other people (or companies) to (financially) benefit from your hard work (1, 2, 3), you may want to ‘tag’ your photos. Just to make sure who created the original image.

When you shoot lot’s of photos and share them with others on the Internet, you don’t want to manipulate each photo. You would want to automate this.
Thankfully, there are numerous programs out there that can do such a thing. Some are free (free as in speech, and free as in beer), and others are commercially available.

(more…)

The last couple of days were all about the leaked key for decrypting HD-DVD movies. This made me curious about the technology, so I headed to the AACS LA website.

There’s variety of white papers available, which explain the AACS concept. The same papers were used by musilix64 in making his first breakthrough on circumventing the AACS protection.
But there is more to be found on their website… There’s even a section which explains the Consumer Benefits of AACS.

• Support a superior viewing experience delivered by next generation media formats
  AACS is added to the content. The content itself will probably ‘work’ better without AACS.
• Enable greater flexibility to manage distribute, and play entertainment content on a wider range of devices
  This is a ‘feature’ for the publishing companies. Without the restrictive AACS protection, the content can be played on virtually every device. With AACS protection ‘they’ control on which device you can play the content.
• Enable groundbreaking home entertainment choices and the ability to use content on PCs and a range of CE devices
  AACS is added to the content. The content itself will probably ‘work’ better without AACS.
• Work across a variety of formats and platforms
  Five letters: L I N U X. AACS protected movies CANNOT be played on Linux. Only movies without the protection can be player on certain Linux players.

The MPAA will have serious problems removing the key from the Internet. Even Google has received a letter to remove the links from their databases. Somehow, these retards have the idea that you can copyright a number.

As the word spread yesterday the articles started showing up on Digg.com. Digg.com is a popular website where you can submit ‘news’, and others may rate it and comment on it. Within minutes the stories about this key got thousands of ‘diggs’.
This resulted in the fact that the moderators on Digg removed the posts. Result: Mass uproar.

Kevin Rose (the Digg founder) wrote the following on his Digg blog:

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

I think that’s the right attitude towards this. Hopefully, the MPAA will come to its senses (not likely), and stops harrassing the consumers with their lame-ass copy-protection.
It would even be better to abandon the ‘turn every consumer into a criminal‘ DMCA bill completely, but that’s another story….

Just to be sure you got the right key:

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B
D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

As some of you might know, the protection of Blu-Ray, and HD-DVD movies is based on a ’secret’ key. You need the key to watch protected movies.

The (software)players for these movies are able to ‘decrypt’ these keys from the disc containing the movie. So you already have these keys on the disc. They (the movie companies) just try to hide them from the user (security through obscurity).

This is not strange that they use this scheme. It’s just the way DRM works on these discs. Due to the lame-ass DMCA law in the United States, it’s ILLEGAL to try to find the key on the disc .

Somehow a HD-DVD key got discovered (or leaked), and it’s going around the great Internet. Several websites have been approached by lawfirms to take the pages down.

This key is represented by a hexidecimal code. How the hell is it possible to declare a hexidecimal string illegal?? The same string can also be represented by a different format (e.g. BASE64). Is this also illegal?

Since we dont know other hex keys for decrypting copy protected content, every other string of hex codes might also be illegal. Image this; what if the ‘next’ key might represent the number pi (03 14 15 92 6…..)? Does that mean that all math books need to be burned?

Just another example of the fucked up DMCA law in the US.

B.t.w. wondering what the last part is of the key… just use Google to search for “09 F9 11 02 9D”…. Google knows he rest.

EMI has discovered that DRM is hater by most of the consumer market, and therefor will release their music with the hated DRM.

Now it’s waiting for the other big players in the music industry (Sony, and Universal).

Apple’s iTunes will be the first to offer these unrestricted downloads. Note that the new downloads are a bit more expensive, but this includes much better quality (256kbps AAC versus 128kbps AAC).

The older versions (with DRM) will still be available, but are also 30 cents cheaper (99 cents versus 1.29). If you have purchased DRM protected songs (released by EMI),you can ‘upgrade’ them for a lousy 30 cents a song.

The Dutch download store download.nl closes its virtual doors. Reason; Too many complaints about the restrictive DRM. So it doesn’t just limit the average consumer in playing their favorite tunes, but it also puts people out of a job……

The dutch site isn’t the only online music download store. The German musicload.de reveiled that most of their complaints (75%) are about the restrictive DRM.

Will the music industry ever learn?

Switching to DRM-free music….I couldn’t agree more.

A couple of weeks ago was the HD-DVD protection officially circumvented. Now the Blu-Ray protection (which also uses AACS for protection) is a ‘goner‘.

I wonder how many trillions of dollars were spent on this protection (which is being paid by the consumers who buy these discs). I just hope that the movie industry follows the music record labels (EMI n this case) in removing protection on audio CD’s.

B.t.w. I saw the ripped HD-DVD movie ‘Serenity‘ on my PC, and must say that the HD quality is phenomanal. Time to become an early-adaptor on the HD format (again :-)). This means a new Full-HD TV, and an appropriate player.