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Comment by stefan_ | Hacker News Reader

You know we had that, they called it HDCP. It continues to frustrate users of beamers and what not today, despite the root key being leaked for many years now. Even before the key leak, it never did anything to stop shows appearing as torrents on day one. It will never work, if pirates have to replace the TV panel with an FPGA, they will happily do so.

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> It will never work, if pirates have to replace the TV panel with an FPGA, they will happily do so.

Evidence does appear to point to you being right, but I really wonder just who is going to these lengths to pirate things for other people?

A significant investment of time and money, from highly a highly skilled individual, for... bragging rights? Is there some financial motive I'm unaware of?

Fun technical challenge that many people will be grateful for.

> but I really wonder just who is going to these lengths to pirate things for other people?

Content owners really seem to underestimate how far people are willing to go for kudos alone on setup cost if the reproduction cost is zero.

Also for some people it's a point of philosophy / concern about future-proofing. Guy I knew back in the day was the biggest torrenter around... He was stuffing a hard drive full of '80s cartoons. His attitude on it was that the creators and owners did not care if those half-hour toy commercials would be around in 100 years, but he did.

This, I've friends of mine who do this for a myriad of media. And I absolutely understand their philosophy.

Looking at video games today, riddled with DRM reliant on the server infrastructure of a finite life company makes me sad.

An enterprising and skilled hacker or group of hackers finds rich financial backers to invest in the equipment and time necessary to build a solution. There’s probably a whole underground scene or multiple connected scenes working on this stuff, composed of both hackers and their supporters.

Often it’s people motivated to watch something otherwise unavailable to them. Then the technique is easy to use for other content, so why not?

> Is there some financial motive I'm unaware of?

As other people already said, some people do it purely "for the just cause". But the piracy is also a literal gold mine if you're able to manage legal risks. Basically, you take ripped content and either re-sell ad-free access worldwide (Netflix is really, really limited to the first world), or make it available for free with heavy ads, or both.

Or make it available on DVD.

I know this was the incentive behind a lot of the people financially supporting the warez scene in the past.

> Is there some financial motive I'm unaware of?

Precisely the opposite. We do it for free because other people do it for money.

I don't think it's that weird. People do stuff for free for a better all the time.

> but I really wonder just who is going to these lengths to pirate things for other people?

The people breaking the systems and the people doing most of the pirating are different.

DRM breaking is a fun challange to some people. You can find these kinds of people breaking all sorts of things. Browser sandbox escapes, remote code execution etc. The mindset is well described in the article here as I can only solve a problem if somebody else implies that I can't. It's a fun challenge! Plus if you do it before others, you get to feel really superior.

The actual pirating is however done by different people. Usually initially by close acquaintances of the DRM breaker, but the methods tend to spread/leak.

If I can crack any piece of DRM, or any digital restrictions, I will do it for free and release it for free. If publishers can't make paying for content more convenient than torrenting or downloading it from a random website, it is their fault. Also, the sense of accomplishment is too great to ignore once you finally crack it.

Nit, but I think HDCP 2 is still cryptographically secure? No leakage, no known crypto flaws on HDCP 2.3 if i remember correctly.

That being said, It's still utterly broken because you can buy HDCP 2 disabler from Amazon for 20 €

How do the cheap disablers work if the protocol isn't broken? Is someone signing devices that they aren't supposed to?

FYI, the German word "beamer" is a 'false' anglicism. The English translation is (video) projector.

Thanks! I was trying to figure out what the heck a beamer was. Didn’t seem likely to be a BMW which is the only thing I’ve heard folks in the US call a beamer.

Reminds me of when I visited friends in Germany and they kept talking about their handy and I eventually figured out that’s a cell phone.

Learned this via LaTeX :)

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