SpawnPoint

A person going by the alias "Muslix64" on the Doom9 Forums has Microsoft and Sony (the proprietary creators of these HD technologies) deeply disappointed. He claims he has created a hack to defray the DRM (Data Rights Management) protection on both HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs. He has figured out how to decrypt the data rights management format on the discs so he is able to make a backup of the disc, thus pirating it. HD-DVD are encrypted differently from Blu-ray, yet, the “plaintext exploit” used in cracking HD-DVD was applied cleverly to Blu-ray’s similar encryption. This user, Muslix64 did this all without any Blu-ray equipment and only his knowledge of the technology.

What drove this particular user to want to spend all hours into the night cracking this DRM? This user’s balls were so frosted by Microsoft for turning Vista into an anti-piracy machine that he quite simply wanted to show DRM off! Vista has been turned essentially into a paranoid operating system. With Vista at every moment CPU cycles are being wasted to make sure you are not doing anything illegal pertaining to DRM with your PC. Hardware needs to be validated with Vista at all times, meaning if the drivers made by nVidia/ATi are not up to Microsoft’s standards with DRM then no HD content would be playable on your Vista machine. This would make the home builder very upset since he would have trouble getting his sound card valid, then video card, then monitor, and so on. It really is a shame Hollywood has Microsoft by the balls to protect all their content, when it really should be the other way around. While meanwhile HD-DVD torrents are showing up on torrent sites. I truly think that trying to protect DRM is moot. It really isn’t Microsoft’s job to do Hollywood's dirty work.
What really chaps my ass though with all of this DRM nightmare is all of this R&D money could have been put toward making an OS that is truly malware/spyware/virus free. If MS really developed a sophisticated kernel then at least the current paradigm would have changed and my OS wouldn't always be in imminent threat from a cornucopia of malicious code…at least for a few years.

I hope Microsoft heeds the call, I really do. Otherwise vista is going to be a nightmare to build a new machine with at home. I will wait for at least SP1 to be released before I experiment with Vista and I advise my fellow SpawnPoint users to do the same. Quite frankly, the only reason I won’t go to Linux before Vista is DirectX 10, the Crysis demo is truly breathtaking.