News

Okay, now things are getting confusing. Hot on the heels of his announcementhttp://www.stereophile.com/news/010107hacked/">announcement; that he had hacked HD DVD's Advanced Access Content System (AACS) digital rights management (DRM), muslix64 claimed to have done the same to Blu-Ray's implementation, with the help of anti-DRM crusader Janvitos. You can read the whole saga at the Doom9">http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=120869">Doom9 forum but we'll just give you the juicy bits: "In less than 24 hours, without any Blu-ray equipment, but with the help of Janvitos, I managed to decrypt and play a Blu-ray media file using my known-plaintext attack."

Gracenote's CMI: Many audiophiles are joyously embracing high-end music servers in their systems, but one vexing little problem has remained for serious music listeners: The metadata tags that work so well for popular music are completely inadequate for identifying classical works.

While both XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio have been growing their subscriber bases (almost 8 million for each), Wall Street has remained unimpressed. Both firms ended 2006 with stock prices that were approximately half their 2006 levels (Sirius at $3.54 and XM at $14.45).

On our last News Desk post of 2006, we reported that an anonymous hacker called Muslix64 had announced that he had crackedhttp://www.stereophile.com/news/010107hacked/">cracked; the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) digital rights management (DRM) scheme. Muslix64 said he'd release more details (and decryption software) on January 2. That software, called BackupHDDVD, is now available onlinehttp://rapidshare.com/files/8318838/BackupHDDVD.zip.html%22">online; and the Internets have been all atwitter about it, with charges ranging from "bogus!" to "hallelujah!"

For far longer than I've been attending the January Consumer Electronics Show (CES), it has overlapped with the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo. Indeed, in the old days when the high-end portion of CES was housed in the Sahara hotel and casino, the two shows shared the same venue, leading to one of the more bizarre culture collisions known to modern man (one was certainly never in doubt as to who was there for which show).

On December 13, 2006, the US Federal Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the August 8, 2005 grant of summary judgment in favor of AudioQuest, finding that the district court had correctly terminated Monster Cable's January 5, 2004 assertion that AudioQuest's Dielectric-Bias System (DBS) willfully infringed upon Monster's Bias Circuit System (BCS) patent (US Patent No.5,307,416 for Audio Interconnect & Speaker Cable, "Bias Circuit System").

We've written frequently about the lawsuits brought by the recording industry against alleged downloaders, but here's an interesting fact: None of the cases has actually gone to trial yet. Many have been dropped by the labels when it appeared they had targeted the wrong defendants; even more have been settled by defendants intimidated by the $750-per-song damages claimed by the labels. Now an attorney is vigorously seeking a trial—and one of his big arguments is that the labels' math doesn't add up.