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Hacking at entertainment

Why do many resort to hacking? Read on

Hollywood has been in shock for the last few weeks when rumours surfaced that the encryptions on high-definition DVDs were compromised. Their worst fears were confirmed when a hacker calling himself Muslix64 made his handiwork public.

Hackers have received a lot of bad press over the years and, in recent years, fingers have been pointed in their direction whenever an incident of online identity theft occurs. But the work by Muslix64 and his reasons for it really put hacking in a different perspective.

HD-DVD and Blu Ray were seen by Hollywood as the next big thing because consumers who splurged on high-definition television sets that have flooded the market, could be exploited. With normal DVDs failing to stop piracy, these new generation discs came with encryption keys both on the disc and players. Called Advanced Access Content System (AACS), it was supposed to be unbreakable, or at least till now.

Muslix64 defends breaking the encryption by saying he is "just an upset customer." He claims that he had a problem viewing a disc that he had purchased because his hardware was not compatible with what the disc manufacturer recommended, and he decided to crack it. "Not being able to play a movie that I have paid for, because some executive in Hollywood decided I cannot, made me mad." Muslix64 is not the only hacker who has been up in arms with encryption, which is part of Digital Rights Management (DRM). The entertainment industry woke up to DRM after Napster and thus emerged Apple's hugely popular iTunes music store and CDs and DVDs with embedded software in them that did not allow you to make copies.

Activists have been up in arms against these measures, which were further protected by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Hackers have been at the forefront of the agitation and every time a new encryption was released, it was cracked.

But the promoters of the HD-DVD and Blu Ray formats say that hacking their encryption is futile because the data on their discs is too huge to be copied and then sold for a profit.

The next few months are definitely going to be an interesting period for hackers, with the release of Microsoft's Windows Vista. Hackers will anyway mercilessly target Vista and the fact that it has enshrined DRM at its core will definitely not help matters.

ANAND SANKAR

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