Humor: Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD

Someone made this awesome clip about the latest happenings in the war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.

DRM - more choices for the consumers!

The content industry keeps saying that DRM (also known as CRAP or C.R.A.P.) is good for consumers because it creates more choice for us consumers. here is the latest "choice": To be able to play that new BD movie you just bought, you might need to upgrade your players firmware - if you are so lucky that the manufaturer has made an updated firmware available, otherwise you just out of luck!

How do you do a firmware update? Here is a bit of info:

Many of these players don't have Ethernet ports, as the Blu-ray spec doesn't require them. Updating the firmware on these units involves downloading an .ISO from the web site, unpacking it, burning it onto a CD-R or CD-RW, putting the disc in the player, rebooting, following the prompts, and hoping that all goes well.

I'm pretty sure my mom and dad wouldn't have a clue and would be out of luck until I made a visit and did it for them.

It is a fantastic business decision they've made: Let us annoy our honest customers the most.

Blu-Ray AND HD-DVD broken

Some time ago a guy posted the first crack to these new formats and now another improved crack have been made:

AACS took years to develop, and it has been broken in weeks. The developers spent billions, the hackers spent pennies.

For DRM to work, it has to be airtight. There can't be a single mistake. It's like a balloon that pops with the first prick. That means that every single product from every single vendor has to perfectly hide their keys, perfectly implement their code. There can't be a single way to get into the guts of the code to retrieve the cleartext or the keys while it's playing back. All attackers need is a single mistake that they can use to compromise the system.

There is a good quote (taken from schneier.com that I think fits quite well:

But there's an old saying inside the NSA: "Attacks always get better; they never get worse."

That quote is about breaking cryptography, but that is a big part of any DRM system too.

Arstechnica have written about this crack as well.