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| It was bound to happen sooner or later - the DVD encryption scheme was cracked, allowing illegal copies of DVD movies to be made. The DVD protection is software based, a fact that made it vulnerable to reverse engineering. Though it's safe to assume the encryption scheme was cracked long ago by criminal elements, a group of Linux programmers recently published a simple tool that can read an entire DVD movie disk, strip its encryption, and save it (encryption-free) to the hard drive (where it can be converted to Mpeg or burned on a CD). |
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Credit:
DeCSS is available at: ftp://ftp.u-net.net/local/DeCSS.zip
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The author of this tool, called DeCSS, claim to have no criminal intent in the making of this DVD decryptor utility. The tool was created by a Norwegian group called MoRE (Masters of Reverse Engineering) in order to help other Linux programmers to make a Linux DVD player. Since only Windows DVD players are available, MoRE attempted to reverse-engineer those applications in order to learn how to read and play DVD movies. In the process of making the Linux player, they found how the encryption scheme works, and found the keys that are used to decrypt the movies. Apparently those keys are hard-coded in the software, but this means that once those keys were recovered, the DVD encryption algorithm is useless.
Most experts agree that the breaking of the algorithm was inevitable, and although the fact that DeCSS is the first utility to read and save an unencrypted version of the DVD movies, other such utilities were being developed in parallel.
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