TechWag

BoingBoing this morning has a funny as all get out flickr provided picture of a hamster running a Nintendo DS, and talking about the AACS key.

The problem is now that the cat is out of the bag proverbially, and people are turning the data into color swatches, photoshopping it, developing poetry around it, breaking it into octal, binary, and other numbering formats, the information is now out there in ways that will make it near impossible to remove from the Internet.

The stupid part is if the AACS had just let it go, knowing where it was located, and then using the inbuilt key update system built into AACS, by revoking the key and making a new one, odds are most likely that the war between hackers and the AACS would have played out quietly in the small dark geek corners of the world. Not many people would have noticed, not many people would have cared. Unfortunately they turned the whole thing into a rallying point that has resulted in a fanatical approach to the issue, it is do or die, the little person against the big evil corporation.

AACS is built to be updated on the fly by standard PKI key revocation schemes, it was designed to be updated and update able. The new set of keys or the new key revocation list is supposed to be included on the media. Sony’s last issue with the key updates shows that it still has a couple of problems, but overall the way that the system is designed to work, and the way that it does work is based on some fairly common standards that many people who use PKI are familiar and comfortable with.

So there are now two battles being fought here, one where the Internet mob has one opinion, and is working diligently to get information out, and the other where the AACS board is desperately trying to keep their keys safe and quiet. No one will win this one.