Who Is AACS LA and are they in my PC?

The following is there to greet us all when we browse the PDFs found on the AACS LA site just in case you wanted to know the “WHO” behind AACS LA

Yes I know this is the Vista section of Tom’s and AACS LA has everything to do with it. Please look at the names of the “OWNERS” of AACS LA. IBM and Intel make chips; Matsushita, Sony and Toshiba make HD DVD drives; Walt Disney and Warner Brothers make movies that use AACS encryption and Microsoft provides the embedded OS and the software. Please take a moment to watch the video at the following site and then resume this thread.

YOUTUBE

If you watched the video you will notice that you were looking at a complete X86 computer, running embedded MS operating system with no hard drive. Intel found a use for all of those P4s. To watch HDDVDs you will eventually need to connect your set top box to the internet. Say what? Connect to the internet to be able to watch a movie? YES, over time AACS will create keys that will force players to be upgraded or be non-useable.

Yes people, Microsoft has entered your TV with Intel and all of the oldies but goodies. Here is AACS LA sitting there with no competition being a conglomeration of businesses that have apparently set the current standards. Try to make your own HDDVD and see what happens when you get to the encryption part. Here we have arrived in a complete catch 22 since the same folks who brought us “SUPER MONOPOLY” are now parking the same chips in our living rooms. If you open the Sony version you will see the same Intel chips and have the same Microsoft code.

Comments? Debate? Speak:

You appear to have a grasp on the situation. As we look deeper the relationship with Microsoft and its vendors has taken a new shape. In the past Microsoft used its monopoly power to regulate pricing granting deeper cuts to OEMs that played the game. Since the DoJ hearing conclusion Microsoft can no longer practice discounting through favoritism by the exclusion of alternatives (though there appear to be none left). Instead they now have what they call "PARTNERS". In this thread we see that AACS LA is nothing more than a "Protection Racket" that is more or less sanctioned by the US government. This is what happens when the government fails to break up a true monopoly.

Dig deeper yet and you will see that HDDVD is being used in several ways as a form of eye candy that allows AACS LA to be thrust into all parts of our homes and offices. The idea that a DVD player phones home for encryption updates is completely insane. We are looking at "The Clipper Chip" on steroids. Forget what you know and consider the implication of a small digital cop in each and every electronic device. All of these devices in our lives amount to a sensor array to keep tabs on what we watch, what we read, what we write, who we know, who we vote for, the boards we post on, what we upload, what we download.

A DVD player that phones home does let “them” know what you are watching and exactly “when” you are watching it. Over time “they” can postulate from your viewing habits that you do or don’t have a wife by the amount of time you spend watching male oriented movies vs. female oriented movies. This sort of information could be trivial in appearance and thought of as a “bonus” for the consumer since it would allow “them” to better “target” given viewers. George Orwell wrote a book about Microsoft titled “1984” it seems that they make “Big Brother’s Viewing Screen” and put Microsoft in charge of “The Ministry of Information.” While that is my view it does not lessen the risk of overt violations of privacy.

Several people on this site have encouraged me to “take my dismal views and go away” and then today it happened. The program called BackupHDDVD started by none other than Muslix64 was forced down from SourceForge by AACS LA using the DMCA. One could reason that BackupHDDVD is nothing more than a “piracy tool” and yet another could reason that BackupHDDVD circumvents nothing at all. AACS encryption codes have not been broken yet. BackupHDDVD allows you to make a back up of your HDDVD nothing more or less by finding the volume keys in full view found in a memory dump of your computer.

Make all the arguments you want pro or con if AACS LA does not like BackupHDDVD thenBackupHDDVD gets taken down. No litigation, no day in court, no real judge and an elimination of a tool that allows a user to see the contents of his/her RAM and allows people to make their “one legal backup!” This whole thing is going to be the end of computing as we know it. Even if you don’t care about HD content we are all fitting the bill.

I posted that video since it clearly shows that a HDDVD player is nothing more than a P4 X86 computer and now we can understand why it is so expensive. We can also see who makes the parts and clearly stands to profit in hardware sales, encryption costs (making encrypted media), software, infrastructure, marketing and royalties. AACS LA is what allows MS’es “Bit Locker” to work. Clearly many are out of the loop on this matter. We are paying so that our homes and offices can be invaded by what amounts to a “Super Clipper Chip.”