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Comment by jdavid | Hacker News Reader

This is so lame. It means the end of encryption for honest people. This is dumb for 2 reasons.

#1 the backdoor secret will FAIL, as it has for every DVD, BLU-RAY, XBOX, PS3, etc... DRM device. So criminals will be able to read all encrypted (obfuscated) data.

#2 people who want to hide illegal data will.... use real encryption.

This is like banning guns. Which oddly has the opposite effect in reducing crime. I wish Lawyers and Politicizations had to pass engineering school first. I swear, passing the LSTAT doesn't seem to prove anything about ones actual logic skills.

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I think you're confusing HDCP with Blu-Ray. There is no "backdoor secret" for Blu-Ray. Technically, there isn't for the X360 either, and to the extent the X360, PS3, and BluRay platforms are fundamentally vulnerable to breaks, we're all vulnerable to breaks --- our banks, credit cards, personal computers, email, all of it --- because there are platforms where the fundamental security decision was to rely on platform integrity instead of e.g. broadcast cryptography.

He's obviously talking about AACS and BD+. Which have also been cracked.

AACS, yes. BD+, no. People like to say BD+ has been cracked because most BD+ disks have been ripped by now, but that's the whole point of BD+; whenever Rovi wants, they can renew the scheme and force people to painstakingly re-break it.

And it's done frequently, and keys are cracked in anywhere from a week to a couple months for each disc. That, to me, is a sign of a broken scheme, semantic arguments notwithstanding.

This is about as bad an analysis of a DVD content protection scheme as can be offered. Publishers are trying to protect the release window, immediately after the publication of a disk, where they make the majority of their money. A scheme that costs rippers weeks-to-months to crack a disk is a spectacular success for them.

The "break" in BD+ will be when someone finds a way to write a ripper that seamlessly handles BD+ refreshes, just like the players do. It'll happen eventually, but it hasn't happened yet.

Then apparently it was a bad analogue to encryption schemes by jdavid, since the incentives behind each are clearly very different.

Are you sure about the guns? Britain doesn't seem too bad in terms of crime to me, despite not having a lot of guns around here.

The same argument could be made for the reverse side and against your proposal. For instance, Canada and Switzerland have a liberal gun policy, and Brazil has a somewhat restricting policy. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics

Indeed. So maybe there's no correlation whatsoever? I guess it does not matter to the argument about encryption, though.

Guns are also a social issue, where in the United States it is our right to own guns and nothing can take that away, except using them as a tool in illegal acts. Queue the downward spiral where non-felon criminals already use guns excessively, so felon criminals obtain guns illegally to use excessively.

Guns aren't the problem. It is how us Americans perceive guns and our rights to own and use them that makes an issue out of owning them.

There might be a loose connection with crypto, where if all schemes have backdoors, only the criminals and "bad guys" who wish to send messages securely without government eavesdropping will implement or obtain ways to do so without backdoors.

But they don't call it "Knifecrime Island" for nothing.

What? People get stabbed on public (videoed!) buses for asking someone to stop throwing trash at them.

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