Within the past month, both HD DVD and Blu-Ray's AACS protection scheme has been bypassed, and now news has broken of a researcher cracking Vista's DRM scheme. Mind you, Vista hit shelves all but one week ago. Boing Boing sums it up very nicely:"As with previous multi-year DRM development efforts, this one disintegrated like wet kleenex on contact with the general public. Now that Vista, HDCP, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are all broken, it seems like the millions of dollars and thousands of work-hours sunk into these systems was mis-spent. The only benefit that these anti-copying systems confer to the companies that developed them is the right to sue competitors -- and that benefit could have been had by shellacking a one-atom-thick layer of token DRM onto their systems, just enough to be able to invoke the DMCA. Everything else was just gold-plating, wasted money."
So the trend continues. Anything meant to be protected will always be cracked. Researcher Alex Ionesco's hack bypasses Vista's anti-copying technology and allows for full-res, unencrypted high-def video streams. Due to legal concerns, he has not yet released his code. Check out Boing Boing's summary for the full scoop.
(via Hacking Netflix)
