Hacker News Reader

Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

Physical media (one that is left) is encrypted with remotely revokable licenses as well, so not sure what are you implying here.

View on HN

It's not, WTH are you on about. My old Blu-Rays, will still play in my old Blu-Ray player 50 years from now. Those keys are burned in the DVD and in the player's chip and can't be remotely revoked because they run on physics, not magic.

Technically speaking, even bluray degrade over time so those key might get unreadable, not sure of the average lifespan since there is conflicting info on it but it seems to be around 100 year (ideal condition).

That's assuming you only ever run old Blu-Rays on that player.

Blu-Ray has a thing called BD+ on it, which lets content companies run arbitrary native code on your player (among other things). It also lets you update your player's key revocation list for HDCP. So either of these mechanisms could be used to render your old purchased content unplayable.

That's fun... if you connect your DVD player to the internet.

No, they can ship updates on new disks and the player will read the code when it reads the movie.

So, pop in a new disc, and it comes with a new list of all the content that is not allowed to be played anymore? Ergo your old discs stop working because your player now knows the license expired or something stupid like that?

That's literally evil.

Yep, it was even part of CSS (the older DVD DRM), but there they could "just" prevent playback of a given disc on certain players.

AACS2 allows for carrying revocation lists on discs now.

Do you have any sources for this?

I did a work on DRM during my master degree. It's somewhat true, it's called Broadcast Encryption. They can stop your players ability to read new disks. They can't stop existing ones though, unless the disk requires online component or something.

DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, but I call it Digital Restrictions Management cause that's what it is from users point of view.

Interesting, thanks for sharing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BD%2B

The one thing I'm not 100% certain on is if HDCP revocation list updates go through BD+ or if there's a separate mechanism for those updates. However, BD+ code gets to inspect your player software and modify it, which is sufficient capability to do updates, even if they don't use it for such.

I also don't know if they continue to release updated BD+ code or if they've given up on that.

Where are you going to find a working 50 year old Blu-Ray player 50 years from now?

I have continuously rediscovered that files in inaccessible formats become inaccessible after time, time and time again.

Er, I own working DVD readers, CD readers, and cassette players, and I don't personally own anything that can play 8-tracks or records but I know other people who do. Why would Blu-ray be the first exception?

I have no arguments about Blu-ray specifically, but with no open implementation I have general concern for the viability of the files. And relying on hardware working at all is a fickle proposition, even across the span of months or years.

You do have the ability to strip the DRM from the BR and burn or archive a copy of the content sans DRM. Of course you still have to contend with maintaining the longevity of the medium that the data is stored on but at least the content is free and in the clear for eternity.

Did they crack AACS 2 yet? A couple of years ago it was still a problem to backup UHD BRs.

I've been able to rip 4K UHD but only using specific models of drive. (some LG drives). Would really like to use Pioneer as they are more reliable but they are not cracked yet(as far as I know).

AACS2 is the DRM scheme on BluRays (usually used on newer UHD ones) and has the ability to remotely revoke ability of decoding for players. That can either be done with payload on other discs or via internet connection if the player has it.

They already did that for PC playback for example, revoking keys for several players.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com