So I wake up this morning (like I do every morning, thankfully) and fire up Google Reader to see all of the news that missed while I slept. Lo and behold, people were busy on Digg. It turns out that Digg users are upset with the fact that the HD DVD Promotion Group sponsors Digg founder Kevin Rose’s Diggnation video podcast. In protest en masse, users posted the hexadecimal value that is used to decrypt the DRM scheme on HD-DVD discs. Said hex number is 09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0, 1.32562788879895E+37 in decimal. I believe that media that I buy should be mine to do with what I want – I’d like to think I’m purchasing and not renting. That’s the reason why I’m joining the crowd in posting the value, but…
Anybody who believes this effectively kills the encryption on HD-DVDs is totally wrong, obviously; they’ll just use a different hex value for future discs. The part that leaves me scratching my head is how did they, the HD DVD Promotion Group, come to the conclusion that a single 128-bit value is sufficient to prevent hackers from cracking this.
