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Star Trek Online unpacks Cardassian mystery boxes
While last December's red gift boxes proved controversial in the Star Trek Online community, Cryptic has stated that they were incredibly profitable and that it will continue to produce similar "treasure chest" items that require real-world money to acquire. True to its word, the studio will release a new batch of Cardassian Lock Boxes this Thursday as standard, free drops -- but opening them is going to cost you. The lock boxes contain one random reward inside that ranges from insanely rare (in this case, a Cardassian Galor-class starship) to trivially common (such as consumables) and everything in-between. While the boxes will be attained and traded like any other in-game loot, they can only be opened with a special Master Key purchased in the C-Store. Master Keys will go on sale for 100 CP apiece or 10 for 900 CP. Other potential prizes in the Cardassian Lock Boxes include Tribbles, Hortas, shuttles, Deep Space Nine costumes, and duty officer packs.
Confirmed: Intel says HDCP 'master key' crack is real
It's been just a few days since we broke news of the HDCP master key crack -- a rogue unlocking of the code that keeps HD content under strict control. Now Intel has independently confirmed to both Fox News and CNET that the code is indeed the genuine article. According to company spokesman Tom Waldrop, "It does appear to be a master key," adding that "What we have confirmed through testing is that you can derive keys for devices from this published material that do work with the keys produced by our security technology... this circumvention does appear to work." Coming from the company that developed and propagated the protocol, that's about as clear as you can get. If Intel is worried about the potential damage to copyrighted material and a new flood of super high-quality pirated material, however, the company certainly isn't showing it. "For someone to use this information to unlock anything, they would have to implement it in silicon -- make a computer chip," Waldrop told Fox News, and that chip would have to live on a dedicated piece of hardware -- something Intel doesn't think is likely to happen in any substantial way. Of course, like any major corporation, Intel seems prepared to duke things out in the legal arena should any super-rich hackers decide to do the unthinkable. So, to the Batcave then?
HDCP 'master key' supposedly released, unlocks HDTV copy protection permanently
(function() { var s = document.createElement('SCRIPT'), s1 = document.getElementsByTagName('SCRIPT')[0]; s.type = 'text/javascript'; s.async = true; s.src = 'http://widgets.digg.com/buttons.js'; s1.parentNode.insertBefore(s, s1); })(); Digg Just as the MPAA is preparing to offer movies to customers at home while they're still in theaters by limiting playback to DRM-protected digital outputs only, the HDCP protocol they rely on may have been cracked wide open. All devices that support HDCP, like Blu-ray players, set-top boxes and displays with HDMI inputs, have their own set of keys to encrypt and decrypt protected data and if keys for a particular device are compromised, they can be revoked by content released in the future which will then refuse to play. Now, posts have been floating around on Twitter about a supposed "master key" which renders that protection unusable since it allows anyone to create their own source and sink keys. Who discovered this and by what technique isn't immediately clear, but as early as 2001 security researcher Niels Ferguson proposed that it could be easily revealed by knowing the keys of less than 50 different devices. Hardware HDCP rippers like the HDfury2 and DVIMAGIC have been around for a while and various AACS cracks easily allow rips of Blu-ray discs but if this information is what it claims to be, then the DRM genie could be permanently out of the bag allowing perfect high definition copies of anything as long as the current connector standards are around. While it's unlikely your average user would flash their capture device with a brand new key and get to copying uncompressed HD audio and video, keeping those early releases off of the torrents in bit perfect quality could go from difficult to impossible.
