Censoring a Number

Rudd-O writes "Months after successful discovery of the HD-DVD processing key, an unprecedented campaign of censorship, in the form of DMCA takedown notices by the MPAA, has hit the Net. For example Spooky Action at a Distance was killed. More disturbingly, my story got Dugg twice, with the second wave hitting 15,500 votes, and today I found out it had simply disappeared from Digg. How long until the long arm of the MPAA gets to my own site (run in Ecuador) and the rest of them holding the processing key? How long will we let rampant censorship go on, in the name of economic interest?" How long before the magic 16-hex-pairs number shows up in a comment here?

a few seconds

[kunkie]

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

All hail /.

[.Chndru]

For all its craziness, /. truly is da place to be! They walk the walk :)

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

[freakmn]

I was amazed at the quickness of the censors, when I clicked on the link here, and got the "Nothing to see here, please move along." message. I've often seen people say that they got that message, but was never quite sure if it actually happened. This time it did. In cooperation with the summary, here's the number: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Source

[W2k]

I would post the processing key, but I'll link to the original posting instead:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=121866&pag e=6 [doom9.org]

I recommend interested slashdotters read the thread, there's a lot of interesting context to the discovery.

Hex Art

[MythMoth]

I liked this version... [metaatem.net]

Decimal version

[pclminion]

Treating that number as a big-endian quantity, the representation in decimal is:

13256278887989457651018865901401704640

Re:Not very long...

[JensenDied]

actually it was posted before this article even came up. http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=233015&cid= 18945309 [slashdot.org]

Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

The server is probably going to catch fire soon, because it's sloooooow. Here's the text of TFA. Posting AC to avoid lawsuits :)

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?

...Welcome, Diggers and Redditors -- we're serving 15 hits per second, so try and be patient. If you have some extra time, here's how to make WordPress weather bad traffic storms (middle-click the link). Back to our regular programming...

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).

Let's show them no amount of DMCA will stop us.

Oh, do you crave for source code? Let the Doom9 forums answer your prayers. If you'd like an explanation in news format, WIRED may be what you were looking for.

Apologies to Diggers worldwide for the downtime. The traffic storm forced me to turn certain functionality off, yet I'm still seeing more than 40 hits per second at the console. I don't want to sound like a tinfoil hatter, but Digg censored my initial submission and nixed my user account (RuddO). Fortunately, charitable souls posted a new link. The Digg button at the right should work now. Thanks and keep the hits coming.

Alert! Digg.com is issuing 404 Not Found on all of its pages. Please confirm this independently, and keep spreading the word through other means. Everything is back to normal at Digg, but the original story just vanished.

People at the Digg story are suggesting a Googlebomb with the words HD-DVD and BluRay pointing to this story. Do Googlebombs still work?

Digg censored the second story submission again, and all others as well. For the record, the story was censored at around 15700 Diggs, and we suspect it broke several records. Anyway, the story got propelled to Reddit's front page and to Del.icio.us popular, so it's reaching people steadily -- all that's left now is to be Slashdotted. I'll publish an article telling the graphical story later today.

09 V4 8G 57 BK SD DT GG AM OL HL D2 60

[scottsevertson]

I wonder if they'll be searching for the number in different forms... Like base 32?

Aside: looks like *someone* killed the Digg story that included the number after a ROT-13 transform (http://digg.com/tech_news/A_useful_copyrighted_st ring_use_the_linked_URL_to_get_your_desired_target ). Anyone want to place bets on whether Digg preemptively killed that story versus received a takedown notice? I'm guessing the former.

I went to register the domain...

[Saint Aardvark]

...and I was too late [godaddy.com]. However, .net and .org are still open...

Re:Not very long...

[OECD]

Weird how those numbers get pulled from Digg ...

There's a very interesting story [digg.com] in the Health section of Digg. It's about improving your memory by memorizing a certain sequence of alphanumeric characters...

I wonder how long that one will last.

Re:Not very long...

[SL Baur]

That's been done before. Remember the RSA in 1 line of perl .signatures and t-shirts from the 90's?

More Information at chillingeffects.org

[Nosajjason]

More information about AACS's (Access Content System Licensing Administrator, LLC) take down notices can be found at: http://www.chillingeffects.org/index.cgi [chillingeffects.org]

and specifically: http://www.chillingeffects.org/anticircumvention/n otice.cgi?NoticeID=7180 [chillingeffects.org]

They give an example of AACS's take down notices and pretty good legal analysis of its contents.

Re:Tag It!

[Ralph Yarro]

Tags can contain numbers but mustn't start with a number. It won't give you an error but you'll see that it doesn't "remember" your tag like it normally would. Don't think the dollar sign works at the beginning of a tag either either. So the tag needs to be something like : hex09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0

Re:Wikipedia article on the number is down too.

[Phs2501]

Yeah, but the beautiful thing is that now the number lives on in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Protected_t itles/April_2007/List [wikipedia.org] , so it's still technically available on Wikipedia!

Art

[carabela]

Yes, hex is way more art than this: http://www.makezine.com/blog/MAKE_599.jpg [makezine.com]

The T-Shirt

[AoT]

Right here is the T-Shirt. [cafepress.com]

Re:Not very long...

[Anonymous Coward]

MPAA
New York (Anti-Piracy Office)
One Executive Blvd. Suite 455
Yonkers, NY 10701

Re:Ah My!

[BoberFett]

Locks are to keep honest people honest.

I've heard that saying many times before, and it's as untrue now as it was when I first heard it.

An honest man needs nothing to maintain his honesty. Honest people are honest by definition. Determined criminals will always get what they want. Locks only keep out the lazy criminals, which fortunately is most of them.

Re:Ah My!

[RMingin]

The real difference here is that when you crack one safe, they don't ALL open their doors. In 50 years we'll still be selling safes. In 50 years the AACSLA will be defunct and forgotten.

Re:Not very long...

[Adam Zweimiller]

Yes, they are both posted on this page [doom9.org] of a Doom9 thread. Look for the PDF's attached by Mistar Muffin, that's me.

Re:Not very long...

[James_Duncan8181]

A newly registered domain: http://09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63.com/ [09-f9-11-0...-c5-63.com] And yes, I own it. *grins*

Wait a minute

[LordSnooty]

I know this is fun an' all, but aren't the takedown notices directed at the program BackupHDDVD plus keys, and identifying them as such? Blathering on about a bunch of hex might be to their advantage since they won't be using that string again. Maybe it's our duty if anything to carry round that prog on our thumbdrives. But still, it's fun...

Kevin Rose Response

[loconet]

Here is Kevin Rose's response [digg.com] as to why they have been deleting the stories over at Digg. Will Slashdot follow as well? If not why or why not?

code

[Anonymous Coward]

// Processing Key
static unsigned char processing_key[16] = {0x09,0xF9,0x11,0x02,0x9D,0x74,0xE3,0x5B,0xD8,0x41 ,0x56,0xC5,0x63,0x56,0x88,0xC0}; // Encrypted C Value
static unsigned char encrypted_c_value[16] = {0x6D,0x02,0xCA,0xC6,0x7B,0x1A,0x7E,0x95,0xC2,0x16 ,0xEF,0xD4,0xC9,0x28,0x09,0xCF}; //Decrypted C Value
static unsigned char decrypted_c_value[16];
static unsigned char uv[4] = {0x00,0x00,0x00,0x01}; // Media Key
static unsigned char media_key[16]; //Encrypted Verification Data (King Kong)
static unsigned char encrypted_verification_data[16] = {0x87,0xB8,0xA2,0xB7,0xC1,0x0B,0x9F,0xAD,0xF8,0xC4 ,0x36,0x1E,0x23,0x86,0x59,0xE5}; //Decrypted Verification Data Should Be
static unsigned char decrypted_verification_data_should_be[8] = {0x01,0x23,0x45,0x67,0x89,0xAB,0xCD,0xEF}; //Decrypted Verification Data
static unsigned char decrypted_verification_data[16]; // Volume ID
static unsigned char volume_id[16] = {0x40,0x00,0x09,0x18,0x20,0x06,0x08,0x41,0x00,0x20 ,0x20,0x20,0x20,0x20,0x00,0x00}; //Decrypted Volume ID
static unsigned char decrypted_volumeid[16]; //Volume Unique Key
static unsigned char volume_unqiue_key[16]; // First decrypt the C-value with the processing key
oRijndael.MakeKey((char *)processing_key, CRijndael::sm_chain0, 16, 16);
oRijndael.DecryptBlock((char *)encrypted_c_value, (char *)decrypted_c_value); // Then XOR it with with the uv (of the corresponding C-value)
for (j = 0; j 16; j++)
{
if (j 12)
{
media_key[j] = decrypted_c_value[j];
}
else
{
media_key[j] = decrypted_c_value[j]^uv[j-12];
}
} // Then check if the resulting media key is correct using the verify media key record
oRijndael.MakeKey((char *)media_key, CRijndael::sm_chain0, 16, 16);
oRijndael.DecryptBlock((char *)encrypted_verification_data, (char *)decrypted_verification_data);

if (!memcmp(decrypted_verification_data_should_be, decrypted_verification_data, 8))
{
for (j = 0; j 16; j++)
{
printf("%02X ", decrypted_verification_data[j]);
}
}
printf("\n"); // Then do a AES-G (basicly a decrypt and an XOR) on the media key + volumeID
oRijndael.MakeKey((char *)media_key, CRijndael::sm_chain0, 16, 16);
oRijndael.DecryptBlock((char *)volume_id, (char *)decrypted_volumeid);

Re:Wikipedia article on the number is down too.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] page for discussing the hastily-performed speedy-delete of the article. For some reason, a proper article for deletion could not be performed and some editor had to go and speedy-delete it. As a consequence, the normal airing of both sides by editors of varied backgrounds is not going on. Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] really sucks when certain admins decide to circumvent process and then use the outcome that happened because of their circumvention as retroactive justification. The speedy-delete editor, by the way, is calling the number an exploit.

Re:Kevin Rose Response

[thefekete]

There is a second post [digg.com] from Kevin entitled: "Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0"

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you've made it clear. You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won't delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.