Ed Felten reports on the high-def video cartel’s hopeless campaign to keep a 128-bit key that can be used to unscramble HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs secret.
I’m not going to post the key here, because I don’t especially want to get a takedown notice myself, but a little searching is likely to turn up dozens of copies posted around the web. As Felten points out, once the key has been posted to a significant number of websites (and “significant” here probably means about a dozen), it becomes counterproductive to continue to pursue it, because sending out takedown letters only generates more publicity (like this post!) which in turn causes more people to hear about the key and get a copy for themselves.
The whole incident makes me feel nostalgic for my college days, when I had friends who got T-shirts with the DeCSS algorithm printed on them. It took four years for the DVD CCA to formally concede that suppressing the DeCSS code was impossible. Hopefully the people in charge of the AACS keys will give up sooner than that.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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