The copyright industry is not going quietly. The legitimacy of its monopolist and consumerist practices are still upheld by policymakers and panicking creators who haven’t seen any real alternative in action. I humbly submit my silly cartoon about people with inanimate objects for heads as a first step in that direction.
Your Face is a Saxophone is a surrealist satire of the advertising industry, which makes fun of actual companies and brands. It tells the story of the staff of Buzzword Marketing, and their dealings with the absurd demands of their corporate clients. Also, everybody has inanimate objects instead of heads for some reason. It’s either an artistic statement on how consumerism objectifies us all, or an excuse for us to not have to animate their mouths moving; you decide. As a bonus, Your Face is a Saxophone is Public Domain under CC0.
My friends and I formed Plankhead to produce the series. At the beginning of 2011, we released the first full-length, 25 minute episode — a pilot that we pitched not to a TV network, but to the Internet. We were able to raise enough money from individual donors to make a second one, which came out astronomically better than the first. Naturally, we’d like to continue the series — we have five more episodes planned, and we’re starting on the third in the next few weeks. But this isn’t just yet another crowdfunded indie project.
Your Face is a Saxophone started out as an assault on advertising. Since it began, I’ve realized that the problems with advertising are just one part — along with the copyright monopoly, unchecked greed, the pursuit of censorship, and other problems — of the holistic problem that is the ancien régime of the corporate entertainment industry. Much like these motivations, Your Face is a Saxophone is a part of a larger whole; a prototype for how to produce, promote, and proliferate culture in complete opposition to the problematic habits of the copyright industry.
I certainly hope you find the show entertaining. But even if you don’t, let me explain why you should still help it succeed:
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Major Breakthrough in Cracking HDCP, the DRM System That Restricts the HDTV You Bought
HDCP, or High-bandwith Digital Content Protection, is a system that degrades the quality of or blocks audio and video from, among other things, Blu-Ray discs being sent to an unlicensed piece of equipment, with the intent of preventing unauthorized copying. In practice, it doesn’t actually prevent copying at all, and only serves to cripple older HDTVs that predate the technology, equipment built by hobbyists and smaller companies without the means to pay the technology’s licensing fees, Mac and Linux users with Blu-ray drives, or even a PS3 being used in a completely normal fashion. Fortunately, its defeat may be imminent.
An anonymous individual posted the master key for HDCP, the (now former) trade secret on which the system’s encryption algorithm is based. This master key is what’s used to generate the vendor keys unique to each model of TV, Blu-ray player, etc., and now that it’s out in the open, anyone with cryptographic tools can create their own working keys.
Essentially, the system is blown wide open. Permanently. A new master key can be created, but it would be incompatible with all of the HDCP devices currently in existence.
No word yet on exactly how the master key was discovered, but it was probably reverse-engineered; it’s been known for a while that one could calculate the master key using less than fifty different vendor keys.
The person who posted the key requested that it be mirrored, so I’ve decided to do so. Hit the jump if you’d like to see the HDCP master key.
Continue reading ‘Major Breakthrough in Cracking HDCP, the DRM System That Restricts the HDTV You Bought’