This is just in and has not been confirmed, but it appears
according to this Salon article that ALL of the horrible
SDMI encoding schemas have been broken. All of them!
That SDMI was hackable doesn't surprise me that much. Nor does the fact that
the RIAA thinks it can put the mp3 jinni back in the bottle. Boy are they
dumb.
However, I am surprised that it was so easily and completely hacked. If you
don't know, the RIAA held a contest to see if anyone could break SDMI. Much of the elite hacker community vowed
to boycott the
contest as they felt the RIAA was using the hackers to do the RIAA's dirty
work. (Note: the reward for cracking SDMI was a paltry $10,000)
Naturally, you can expect the RIAA to continue to act like an ostrich and stick
there collective heads so far in the ground they all pop up in China. They
probably now sue the hackers that hacked SDMI under the DMCA to prevent them
from distributing the hack.
When will the RIAA learn? Probably about 10 minutes after the music labels
realize what a horrible strategy the RIAA has been following concerning digital
music and "pulls the plug" on them.
