MIT Hacks XKCD Talk With AACS key

Reader Hanji alerts us to a hack pulled off when Randall Munroe, author of the popular webcomic XKCD, spoke at MIT by invitation of the Lab for Computer Science. MIT hackers dropped hundreds of labelled playpen balls onto the audience from hatches in the ceiling. The labels bore XKCD's logo as well as the recently discovered 16-byte AACS processing key. At another point in Munroe's talk he was stalked by remote-controlled mechanical velociraptors; but fortunately he had been supplied with a squirt gun full of grape juice.

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[Mazin07]

It's a little late to be jumping on the spread-the-AACS-key bandwagon, isn't it?

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[inviolet]

Honestly, I wish the DRM enthusiasts of the world would get a clue. There is nothing you can try to protect digitally that someone can't break digitally. It's bits of data and there is always a combination of 1 and 0's that will open Pandora's chastity belt.

The greatest mistake anyone can make, is underestimating one's enemy.

The RIAA is not stupid. They, of anybody, have money to burn on purchased expertise. They already understand that bits are inherently copyable. And they've been told many times that crypto will always fail in finite time when Eve is given the ciphertext, the plaintext, and the key.

What DRM is, is their attempt to tilt the economics of copying in their favor. In the same way that we are attempting to tilt the economics of spam in our favor. In both cases, the root problem (copying or spam) is intractable... but it can be satisfactorily tamed by a change in the economics.

By raising the cost (i.e. the hassle, the legil peril, the hardware requirements, the software expertise, etc.) of copying, and of receiving copies, above the price of retail media, they'll solve the problem enough.

Yes, you've told us a thousand times that the problem cannot be conclusively solved, but everyone already knows that. They aren't seriously trying to do that. They're just trying to tame it, and they're succeeding. You are blind to this because you've underestimated them. You hang out here on slashdot talking about how stupid they are, but meanwhile BluRay is taking over the world, and most of your and my friends have closed down their bittorrent servers in fear.

Like Aram?

[Grendel Drago]

You mean like Aram from Men in Hats? Man, I miss that.

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[Fred_A]

The RIAA is not stupid. They, of anybody, have money to burn on purchased expertise.

However large amounts of money with no in-house expertise also tends to attract large numbers of sellers of snake oil. Which has been amply demonstrated by a number of rather silly DRM implementations we've seen floated around so far.