OPINION: Hack by popular demand
By Paul Sweeting -- Video Business, 2/16/2007
FEB. 16 | FROM THE GLASS HALF-FULL department: The hackers currently mounting an assault on the AACS copy-protection system seem to prefer the HD DVD format to Blu-ray Disc. If you’re an HD DVD supporter, you could read that as a sign they expect HD DVD to be the more popular format.
Paul Sweeting is editor of Content Agenda
After all, hackers and crackers work mostly for glory. What’s the point of busting your keyboard just to become known as the guy who cracked a dying format?
True, AACS is used on both HD DVD and Blu-ray. But so far, at least, the hackers seem to be doing most of their work with HD DVD players and drives.
Muslix64, who mounted the first successful attack on AACS, used an HD DVD software player to discover where a movie’s unique title keys are held in memory during playback. He then figured out how to extract the key so the movie could be decrypted at will.
With the help of another hacker, Muslix eventually figured out how to extract title keys from Blu-ray as well, which uses a different file format to encode the movie. But his work was native to the HD DVD platform.
Although Muslix’s work poked a hole in AACS, his technique for extracting keys is still largely a manual process. It works only for a single title at a time.
Other hackers have since applied themselves to the grunt work, extracting keys and posting them online. A library of keys to about 100 Blu-ray and HD DVD titles can now be found across various sites. But an unscientific perusal of the major sites reveals HD DVD holding a commanding 80% or better market share.
More recently, a poster calling himself Amezami hooked up an HD DVD drive as an external volume and used Muslix’s method of examining a dump of the data passing through his PC to uncover the processing keys, which can be used to derive the title keys on any disc. That eliminates much of the manual work from Muslix’s technique.
Since there are no external Blu-ray drives on the market yet, it’s unclear whether Amezami’s method could be applied to attack that format as well.
In perhaps the clearest sign of HD DVD’s growing popularity among the hacker set, the Antigua-based software company SlySoft has now issued a beta version of an update to its AnyDVD program, apparently based on Amezami’s work, that extends the software’s copy-protection stripping capabilities to HD DVD.
A non-beta version of AnyHD DVD will be available “soon,” the company said. No word yet on a Blu-ray version.
IS IT FAIR, OR even appropriate, to infer anything about the fate of the two formats from the work of crackers?
To some Blu-ray supporters, one inference is both fair and clear. The attacks now being mounted against AACS, primarily from the HD DVD platform, are precisely the type they anticipated in pushing for the extra protection of BD+, and the results to date at least partially vindicate their efforts.
AACS Licensing Authority Michael Ayers said he is “not sure whether the addition of any additional element would have changed the outcome.”
None of the Blu-ray titles released so far contain BD+.
I look at it this way: Unlike many in the industry, format preference is not a religious issue for hackers. Approaching the question from a purely mercenary point of view, their goal, generally speaking, is to get the biggest bang for the buck.
That is, their aim is to provide a hacking tool with the widest possible application.
Whether viewed as white hats or black hats, their work can be seen as a nearly pure expression of the market’s expectations of supply and demand.
Just as virus and spyware writers tend to ignore the Mac operating system in favor of Windows, hackers are putting most of their efforts into cracking HD DVD because that’s what they expect most people to be using.
A similar dynamic is evident in the adult film industry.
Unconcerned with propriety—again, generally speaking—those who survive in the porn business tend to be keen students of supply and demand in their rawest forms. Where the market leads, they quickly follow, few questions asked.
And as with the hacker community, the adult market seems to be tipping toward HD DVD.
That may not be something to boast about for HD DVD supporters, or even an indication of the ultimate outcome of the format war.
But it is a sign that for now, at least, the most gimlet-eyed early adopters find HD DVD to be the more flexible, more consumer-friendly, more useful format.
For better or worse.
