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Submission + - MPAA Fires Back at AACS Decryption Utility

RulerOf writes: The AACS Decryption utility released this past December known as BackupHDDVD originally authored by Muslix64 of the Doom9 forums has received its first official DMCA Takedown Notice. It has been widely speculated that the utility itself was not an infringing piece of software due to the fact that it is merely "a textbook implementation of AACS," written with the help of documents publicly available at the AACS LA's website, and that the AACS Volume Unique Keys that the end user isn't supposed to have access to are in fact the infringing content, but it appears that such is not the case. From the thread:

"...you must input keys and then it will decrypt the encrypted content. If this is the case, than according to the language of the DMCA it does sound like it is infringing. Section 1201(a) says that it is an infringement to "circumvent a technological measure." The phrase, "circumvent a technological measure" is defined as "descramb(ling) a scrambled work or decrypt(ing) an encrypted work, ... without the authority of the copyright owner." If BackupHDDVD does in fact decrypt encrypted content than per the DMCA it needs a license to do that.

Comment Re:Linux rootkits (Score 1) 142

If your system is compromised, nothing is trustable. Not the kernel, not the sync utilities (which on a FreeBSD system would be the first thing to alter), not anything. I did not miss the part about syncing to master. If there's a rootkit it will either make sure your sync still has its changes, or it will simply not install files silently. It could also modify your compiler to produce backdoors in your executables (For more on this one in particular, look at this http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/Turing Award Lecture by Ken Thompson, one of the original people involved with Unix. This has been done before, and can be done again.

I repeat--If your system has been compromised, you can only rely on things that are non-modifyable by the system (I.E. BIOS ROM, unconnected disks). Your filesystem driver cannot be trusted. Expect it to lie whenever it needs to. Assume that the rootkit will not do anything that will help you find it. Syncing your source tree depends on way too many things that would be compromised to rely on (filesystem, network driver, sync utilities, libc, etc). The same goes for any other software update of any kind (excluding livecds -- assuming said rootkit didn't change your BIOS).

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