Steinbring Inc.

I think we are going to see a return of Ma Bell very soon.

AT&T Inc. has offered a new set of concessions that are expected to satisfy the two Democrats on the Federal Communications Commission and lead to approval of the company’s $85 billion buyout of BellSouth Corp.

…

Among the promises made by the company:

–An offer of stand-alone, high-speed Internet service to customers in its service area for $19.95 per month for 30 months. The “naked DSL (digital subscriber line)” offer would allow those who live in AT&T and BellSouth’s service areas to sign up for fast Internet access without being required to buy a package of other services.

–A greater commitment to network neutrality, or nondiscrimination involving Internet traffic. AT&T said it would “maintain a neutral network and neutral routing in its wireline broadband Internet access service” for two years.

–To freeze rates for “special access” customers, usually competitors and large businesses that pay to connect directly to a regional phone company’s central office via a dedicated fiber optic line, for 48 months.

–To “assign and/or transfer to an unaffiliated third party” all of its 2.5 GHZ spectrum currently licensed to BellSouth within one year of the merger closing date.

–To “repatriate” 3,000 jobs that were outsourced by BellSouth outside the U.S. by Dec. 31, 2008, with at least 200 of those jobs to be located in New Orleans.

Link [ Via Slashdot ]

Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, sentenced to death for his role in 148 killings in 1982, will have his sentence carried out by Sunday, NBC News reports.

This is cool!  This is just more proof that any DRM can be circumvented.

From Engadget:

Can it be? Is Hollywood’s new DRM posterchild AACS (Advanced Access Content System, see more here) actually quite breakable? According to a post on our favoritest of forums (Doom9) by DRM hacker du jour muslix64, his new BackupHDDVD tool decrypts and dismantles AACS on a Windows PC. Just feed the small utility a crypto key (it comes bundled with keys for a few popular HD DVD titles, with the promise of more on the way), and it’ll dump the video right off the disc onto your hard drive, supposedly playable in any HD DVD compatible player. If true, this would instantly become the DeCSS of high def optical (where you at, Jon?), as AACS is the copy protection scheme used not only by HD DVD, but by Blu-ray as well. Code and source posted in read link, let us know what you find!

From DailyTech:

“Muslix64″ describes the utility as “a java based command line utility that decrypt video files (.evo) from a HD DVD disk that you own, to your hard drive and you can play them back with a HD DVD player software.”

Although much of the dirty work in backing up an HD DVD movie is done by the tool, users are still required to find their own cryptographic keys for the disc being copied. No guidance is provided to help users find the keys but the author suggests the process is trivial.

Although the exploit hasn’t been completely confirmed yet, if it turns out to be true it could mean a number of things. For one, it is possible that we might start seeing pirated HD DVD content. In addition, since Blu-ray also uses AACS, we might see a similar crack be released for Blu-ray movies in the next couple of weeks.

“Muslix64″ claims the tool works on his XBOX 360 external HD DVD player, but that the software should not be limited to just one specific player.

From the program’s FAQ:

How do you do that?

The program itself has nothing special. It simply implement the AACS
decyption protocol. I have followed the freely available documents about AACS
Have a look at: www.aacsla.com
The trick, is to find what they call the “Title keys”. So I figure out how to
extract them.


How do you extract the “Title keys”?

I won’t explain it in detail. Read the AACS doc first. You will understand.
The title keys are located on the disk in encrypted form, but for a
content to be played, it has to be decrypted! So where is the
decrypted version of the title key? Think about it…


What kind of crypto algorithms are involved?
Standards algorithms:
    ECC-160
    AES-128

Look in the AACS doc for more details.


What is the TKDB.cfg file?

This is the Title key Database file. It holds the decryption keys for the movies.

I don’t know if he’d have any way of legally doing this in the US.

A guy from a small village located near Novosibirsk, Russia has a hobby. His hobby is to make full size models of old tanks.

…

Once he got a little tour across the neighborhood on his new example of a World War II tank. That made a lot of panics in the quite Siberian area - police arrived to see why the tanks entered the village.