Hans ‘The Beez’ Bezemer, a fellow sysadmin and consultant from the Netherlands, came up with a great story. He asked himself why watching Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ on DVD has to burn additional CPU cycles for decrypting, when the topic and author of what he’s watching are all against wasting energy. And he discovered that the crypto chain of HD-DVD has already been broken!
Wow!
Well, on a second thought, it was inevitable of course. In a former life, I tried to take off copy protection from software myself, and it is unbelievably easy, once you get to the machine code level.
So don’t read Hans’ story, don’t follow or read or even publish the link he provides, and never ever publish the number
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
on the internet - you could get into trouble if you do. Plus you’d better not search the internet for that topic.
What a joke! I will keep buying good movies, just because some of these movie-makers deserve to be supported. But once I’ve paid for the media, I don’t need any organization to tell me on which equipment I’m allowed to play it. If I want to watch them on my Linux PC, then so be it - it is my damned right to do so! Like the private copy I’m allowed to make, before our not-even-3-year-old accidentally destroys the original media. And no, I will not waste unnecessary CPU cycles with DRM, but remove it and save energy and thus carbon dioxide. I will not pollute this planet more than necessary, and take the right to remove the inventions of these locusts, which should have been forbidden in the first place.
Of course, that already published number will stop working soon, so if you don’t follow the mentioned stories, you won’t compete for long in this rat race. Means: go and spread the word…
Thanks to Hans for sharing these good news.
Have you collected any empirical evidence regarding the power consumption of playing back DRM and unrestricted content? What is the power delta between the two? What’s the power delta between decrypting a protected work into plain media, then playing it, and just playing the media in its encrypted state?
There may not be much difference if you only play the decrypted version once, but then why did you buy it?
I’ve measured this and its about 16W on my desktop system, playing an encrypted copy vs unencrypted.