About Electronics

BBC: Two dogs trained in Northern Ireland are getting a break in the movie business, by sniffing out pirates.

Female black Labradors, Flo and Lucky, are being used by the authorities in Malaysia in the battle against music and film rip-offs. They are believed to be the first dogs in the world trained to sniff the chemicals used to make optical disks.

They can lead handlers to disks labelled as other items, but cannot tell which are real and which are fake. (…) The three-year-old animals – trained by a handler in Northern Ireland who usually teaches dogs to find bombs – can find, but cannot distinguish between, CDs and DVDs, burned and replicated disks, or legitimate and pirate disks.

The dogs take only 10 minutes to check boxes that security officials would have needed a day to examine. “It’s cost-effective, and in terms of time, it’s very effective too,” said Domestic Trade Minister Shafie Apdal, said. (…)

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Heise: Last year, Hollywood studios and technology firms reached an agreement for the storage of films downloaded legally from the Internet onto DVDs using the CSS encryption standard. At the end of January, the DVD Forum’s steering committee approved specification 1.0 of the “DVD-R for CSS Managed Recording” (also known as “Recordable CSS”). Furthermore, the steering committee also approved an official logo for legal movie downloads that can be burned onto “DVD-R for CSS Managed Recording.”
Although the CSS encryption system was cracked years ago, the industry apparently believes it is still sufficiently secure to keep most users from making illegal copies.

(more…)

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T3: Sony may claim that Blu-Ray is as impenetrable as Baghdad’s Green Zone. But the same hardcore hackers who managed to crack HD-DVD last week, have now done the nasty to its bitter rival.

Gleeful geeks say they have managed to take down the DRM wall and get to grips with the AACS encryption, just as they did on Tosh’s HD format. However, they’re yet to breach the inner sanctum of BD+ copy protection.

It may only be a partial crack, but it seems these boys don’t mess about when it comes to sussing out Hi Def’s secrets. We won’t be surprised if we’re talking about a full crack in a matter of days.

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ARS Technica: The first full-resolution rip of an HD DVD movie has appeared on BitTorrent. The movie, Serenity, was made available as a .EVO file and is playable on most DVD playback software packages such as PowerDVD. The file was encoded in MPEG-4 VC-1 and the resulting file size was a hefty 19.6 GB.

This release follows the announcement, less than a month ago, that the copy protection on HD DVD had been bypassed by an anonymous programmer known only as Muslix64.

The open-source program to implement this was called BackupHDDVD and was released in a manner designed to put the onus of cracking on the user, not the software.

To extract an unencrypted copy of the HD DVD source material required obtaining that disc’s volume or title key separately, which the software did not do. However, a key was later released on the Internet, and a method for extracting further keys is allegedly available as well.

Additional sources: HDTV Blogger

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