Blu-ray is finally hacked ..

With the Toshiba-backed HD-DVD format recently falling to the skills of one anonymous hacker known only as ‘Muslix64’, it was perhaps only to be expected that Sony’s Blu-ray technology would be quick to follow suit—and it has.

Late Sunday night it was the turn of Sony’s AACS (Advanced Access Content System) content protection system to fall.

According to a report on The Inquirer, Muslix64 beat the Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection on Sony’s Blu-ray discs and swiftly unlocked the files, which will probably grate with Sony considering it believes its AACS to be a much more significant deterrent to hackers than the protection system utilised in HD-DVDs. However, if the reports are real (and they probably are) then previously AACS-protected files are now playing on Muslix’s freeware video player of choice.

More pointedly, it would appear that Muslix64 relied on a successful plaintext data stream approach to hack both HD-DVD and Blu-ray—unlike other failed attempts by (lesser?) hackers that opted to hammer on Blu-ray and HD-DVD’s player software.