Blackhacker

This article from the WSJ ran on the 9th. The most telling paragraph :

The talks are driven by media companies’ belief that the fast-growing YouTube has built a huge business off their video content. Although many of the videos on YouTube are homemade videos uploaded by users, some of its most popular clips are pirated copies of television shows. YouTube was acquired by Google for nearly $1.8 billion in stock last month.

I’m sorry but I missed it. Did YouTube turn a profit, before it was bought by Google ? Ars Technica thinks it is a case of corporate survival.

TV networks mulling YouTube rival
But with YouTube already so well established, is striking out on their own really a good idea for the networks? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean they won’t do it. If they allow sites like YouTube to become “the network” and companies like Google to become “the ad guys,” there’s not much left for the TV networks to do, and that’s a thought that must keep executives awake well into the balmy California night.

Sounds more like a case of corporate executive survival. The companies could still survive because each one has a resource that few other companies have, nor could develop easily: A news department. Think about it. Do we go to YouTube to see last nights “Greys Anatomy”, or “Seinfeld” re-reruns ? NO Mostly it’s stupid stuff that people upload, and sometimes its a news clip that a blogger wants to highlight. If the networks provide a central place for these news clips, freely accessible by the public and paid for by advertising, people could use these instead of uploading there own. If the clips where indexed and tagged properly, users could build feeds for news they care about, share it with others, and build communities around the clips just like YouTube, but in a way that makes money.

This piece from Engadget is reporting how a hacker broke AACS, the encryption that is used by both Blue Ray and HD-DVD.

AACS DRM cracked by BackupHDDVD tool? - Engadget
Can it be? Is Hollywood’s new DRM posterchild AACS (Advanced Access Content System, see more here) actually quite breakable? According to a post on our favoritest of forums (Doom9) by DRM hacker du jour muslix64, his new BackupHDDVD tool decrypts and dismantles AACS on a Windows PC. Just feed the small utility a crypto key.

I am hardly a rocket scientist, especially when it comes to cryptography, but how can any REAL copy protection be achieved, Assuming that every Blue-Ray or HD-DVD player has to decrypt every disc that it plays, The key(s) for the media has to be found somewhere on the disc or every possible key has to hardcoded somewhere in the player. Either way its like writing your PIN on the back of your ATM card. Like any cryptographic system, the vulnerability is not the cryptography but how to deliver keys in a secure way.

Dap: /.