Spread this number
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. Wanna know what’s so important about it?
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The movie industry is threatening
Spooky Action at a Distance for publishing that number, specifically with copyright infringement.
I had no idea a number could be copyrighted.
Anyhow, what is it? From the site:
It’s the HD-DVD Processing Key for most movies released so far. I was not aware that a string of numbers and letters was copyrightable. Perhaps its just my ignorance but it seems that someone is abusing the DMCA again.
This means the (admittedly long) number is precisely the key you need in order to decrypt and watch HD-DVD movies in Linux (oh, okay, maybe software is also required). And the fact that it’s out there, spreading like wildfire, is killing the types at the movie studios right now.
Now, even if this number stopped working (and it will, thanks to the revocation procedures in HD-DVD’s encryption scheme) or if it were a hoax,
the decryption system has already been figured out and is implemented in a software program called BackupHDDVD.
We did it with DVDs and DeCSS, and today I can use my trusty MPlayer to play any DVD movie. We will eventually (rather soon) view HD-DVDs in Linux as well (because the codecs are already there, even if they are illegal in some countries).
