The death of AACS, the DRM scheme used by HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, is arriving at an accelerated pace (see "DRM End Times"). arnezami has been joined by "Geremia" over at the Doom9 forums and together they have made significant progress toward permanently breaking AACS. The current hack still requires technical skills (desoldering chips in drives, flashing ROM), but they are making discoveries that should lead to easy tools that anyone could use.
arsTechnica has a pretty good summary, concluding:
Although AACS has proven much more difficult to fully crack than the copy protection on regular DVDs, it is unlikely to remain only partially cracked for very long. The real problem with trying to create an "uncrackable" copy protection is that the media must come with the keys used to decrypt it somewhere on the device and the media itself. Hiding these keys in different places—security by obscurity—merely delays the inevitable. Of course, for the content providers, any delay is still better than no delay at all, so expect the battles between copy protection and hackers to continue.
AACS is probably the most sophisticated DRM scheme that is being used in publicly distributed media. The death of AACS could be the knock on the head that media companies need in order for them to realize DRM is a dead end.
