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Comment by hosay123 | Hacker News Reader

You cannot simultaneously crow "hurr, DRM is broken!" and act all smug about this discovery. Perhaps the original developer, like you, understood this, and did the absolute bare minimum necessary to fulfil commercial obligations, all the while making it easier for people like himself (i.e. you) to get what they want, and making a few bucks from the old and dying media industry all at the same time.

Given the evidence (complex integration with a non-standard set of open source libs, complex industry area in general), I'd say it's almost certainly an insult to imagine the developer could not have made your life harder if he'd chosen to.

Please, if anything commend the dear fellow, and shame on whoever considered a momentary glimpse of Google Plus limelight worth making this guy's Tuesday morning and ongoing professional reputation much harder earned than it otherwise might have been.

"No good deed goes unpunished"

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The developer(s) created a product that didn't do even 10% of what was advertised and now must face the consequences. Why is that bad? Their professional reputation should suffer if the quality of their work is poor.

That's a huge assumption.

Anyone with a few years of experience in the software field has heard the following: I'll pay you N dollars to X but you have to finish by unrealistic Y. I'm the sole provider of a household of 4, so in this kind of circumstances I'll agree to minimum features or specific features plus additional features if time allows. I'll make it very clear that the client can't have their cake and eat it too. Sometimes it's merely a matter of economics, so don't go hanging anyone yet.

the "proprietary video encryption" algorithm: for the first 15kB, each 1kB block has its initial bytes xor'd with the string "RANDOM_STRING".

Any minimally competent developer could have implemented this particular design during, and for the price of, their lunch.

Applying Occam's Razor, it is far more likely that incompetence is in play here, rather than a well organized conspiracy to weaken the DRM peddled by a virtually unknown company, thus Doing Their Part to bring easily decryptable media to the internet proletariat (and it would've worked, too, if it weren't for those meddling kids!)

You misunderstand. LeapingBrain dont need the DRM to be good, they just need to persuade the media industry (filmmakers) that they have DRM. Why bother to do more than that?

You don't go throwing around claims like "Fort Knox-Level Security", "near-ridiculous level of security", "We are not aware of a better DRM scheme than ours", "virtually uncrackable" etc, unless you're either the real deal or you're incompetent, because only a fool would assume that nobody in the whole of the internet would call their bluff and gleefully throw it in their face.

But maybe that stuff isn't for us, its for the film-companies that visit the site to check how it looks. Why would the end-consumer care about the level of drm?

Dishonesty is not more preferable than incompetence.

You're right, actually. I'm glad it's broken, because it's a lot easier for me to watch the videos I purchased without the DRM. I was just struck by the audacity of their marketing claims.

Way to miss the point. It's just as broken as any other DRM!

As a developer, it's your reputation to protect. If you choose to do substandard work, for whatever reason (be it for the money or for glory), you know the risk you take to your reputation.

If you're really doing it for moral reasons, you won't keep quiet and make a buck while doing it. If you're opposed to drugs, you don't become a drug dealer and make loads of money selling lower quality drugs.

i think you can be stronger than that. it's clearly written to show to the "discoverer" that it's only a gesture. i would have thought anyone with an ounce of compassion and empathy would have smiled and kept quiet.

broadcasting this, and likely harming the developer, for internet points, is a pretty poor move.

Agreed.

Looks like they know they cannot offer a video platform without providing DRM, because the media industry demands it, and they also know that trying to implement unbreakable DRM is futile. Therefore, they just need to implement the minimum needed to convince the media suppliers that their content is really DRM'd.

Yeah I think this is it. LeapingBrain has to show the media industry that they have DRM, but they don't actually need the DRM to be good or effective. Its just something they have to do. Why faff about putting lots of effort into it?

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