AACS in action

2007 April 12
by darkness
clipped from opinion.latimes.com

On Friday, Corel informed WinDVD users that they had to download a “security update” in order to continue playing high-definition discs. They’ll have about three months to do so; after that, all newly minted high-def discs will include a set of instructions that permanently disables the older, hacked version of the software. Users who put one of these new discs into their PC will not be unable to play that disc, but they’ll render the software incapable of playing any other high-def Hollywood movie — even the older ones in their personal collections. Ouch!

You can check out Wikipedia’s AACS entry if you want some more information on AACS. If I recall correctly, the way this works is that all computer drives that can read content (discs in this case) protected with AACS have to have some NVRAM in them. When a disc is inserted the drive–the actual hardware, mind you–scans a certain area of the disc to read a list of revoked player keys. Now, when the software player wants to talk to the disc drive, it has to identify itself with some encryption (and the drive also identifies itself back to the software, I think). So if you put a new disc in the drive, and that disc says your player’s key is revoked, that drive will never again speak to a software player that identifies itself with that revoked key. Pretty cool. (Assholes.)
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