All we hear from the entertainment industry is how precious their content is. Yet they protect it with the technological equivalent of the kind of lock found on a young girl’s diary. Perhaps you’ve seen a string of sixteen 2-digit hexadecimal values floating around the Internet. It’s getting pretty hard to miss lately. That’s all you need to unlock any and all HD-DVDs. The industry’s response? You better pretend that doesn’t exist or we’ll sue you!

Setting aside the fact that the cat is already out of the bag; and the method of encryption is laughable; Hasn’t anyone learned yet that this simply doesn’t matter? Years ago a young Norwegian named Jon Johansen cracked the CSS protection in standard DVDs. For years now we all have had the means to copy DVDs the same way we copied VHS. Oh yeah, copying didn’t hurt VHS either. So what is the problem? I’m really not sure, except that once again the market has to suffer not from customers but from producers.

Frankly, I whole heartedly believe that downloadable content is going to make the high definition disks the modern Laser Disc. But, just to prove the absurdity of this whole thing; I am presenting to you the infamous hex in the form of six colored squares.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 7:30 pm and is filed under Update. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.