• tjhart85
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                617 months ago

                It’s the key needed to unencrypt a video DVD, it’s how people were able to make duplicates of DVDs. This was technically illegal to use thanks to the DMCA, but not illegal to know, so people had fun with it and plastered it on T-shirts, mugs, etc…

                • GONADS125
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                  157 months ago

                  I remember thinking I was hot shit for ripping a ton of Netflix and Redbox movies back in the day…

                  • tjhart85
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                    157 months ago

                    Blockbusters mail rental service was amazing since if you returned the movies to the store instead of mailing them they counted as a free in store rental coupon AND would flag the movie as returned and prep the next set to be sent to you. They were slower than Netflix but if you were willing to go into Blockbuster, it was crazy worth it.

                    I had Netflix and Blockbuster and a huge rotation of DVDs coming and going.

                    I didn’t have time to actually watch anything I was ripping, lol, but it was fantastic to expand the collection.

              • @zzx@lemmy.world
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                267 months ago

                Tldr: DVDs can not easily be played unless using authorized hardware (or software in the case of WinDVD)

                Once the key was leaked, this was no longer the case, and now DVDs can be played by anyone with the key (enabling piracy)

              • @Chobbes@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                It’s the password to unlock the content on the DVD (well, HD DVD / Blu-Ray) so you can just copy the video from it for redistribution.

                  • @Chobbes@lemmy.world
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                    107 months ago

                    More technically, the data on the disk is encrypted with that “password”, so there’s not really a password prompt. It’s more like your DVD player will have this encryption key stored on it somewhere (possibly on a separate chip where it’s hard for somebody to extract it and distribute it on the internet lol), and then it will automatically run the decryption algorithm with this key on the disk contents transparently.

              • @solrize@lemmy.world
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                107 months ago

                Blue ray movies are encrypted to prevent unauthorized copying. Someone figured out and published the decryption key making copying possible. The movie companies went nuts and tried to suppress dissemination of the key, but it was out of the bag. That 09f9 number is the key that was formerly a big secret. Now that you know it, you can copy blue ray discs.

                • radix
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                  57 months ago

                  Why didn’t they just change it? Set a new encryption key for every disc?

                  • @CoggyMcFee@lemmy.world
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                    127 months ago

                    Any Blu-ray player has to know the key in order to play a disc. So they’d have to have some way to update every single player. There would be no feasible way to do that.

                  • slazer2au
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                    87 months ago

                    Can you imagine having to update your Blu-ray player each time a new movie came out?

    • @legios@aussie.zone
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      267 months ago

      Hahaha, many many years ago that was in a meta tag on my website and the welcome banner for my mail server!

    • -RJ-
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      207 months ago

      anyone remember when this flooded Digg.com the day it came out? Happy days.