Many of you are completely unaware of AACS. That’s fine, it hasn’t been in the mainstream media much. It’s a new technology on Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs which is designed to make it difficult to access a movie you buy however you want. (Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are basically high capacity DVD’s for watching High Definition movies on your whizzy new HDTV.) You see, they encrypt the content on the discs using AACS so that only people who pay a bunch of money to the licensing authority and agree to a bunch of rules can make stuff which will play these movies. This means that if you use an uncommon Operating system like Linux, you can’t just buy and play the movies. If you want to buy a movie and then copy it onto a Media Center PC that you have plugged into your TV, that is supposed to be impossible. If you want to buy a movie and burn a backup copy for the kids to watch and drool over so you don’t wind up having to buy 50 copies of the Little Mermaid HD or something, they want to stop you.
Recently, one of the primary AACS encryption keys was leaked. With this, tinkerers all over the world can write software and modify hardware that will allow people who have legally bought High Definition movies to dow hatever they want with them, including reasonable, legal fair-use activities. This encryption key is basically just a long number. You can’t legally copyright a number, incidentally. However, the folks who make AACS have vowed to pursue legal action against anybody who publishes it. In my own effort to join the civil disobedience happening all over the Internet right now, I would like to share a small short scene with you which just happens to have a very similar pronounciation to the number in question, when it is expressed in a mathermatical notation called “hexadecimal.” (Hexadecmal means it uses 0-9 and also A-F as digits, so the number can be written a little shorter than if you just used 0-9. ‘A’ means ten, ‘B’ means 11, etc.) Don’t read the character names out loud — just the dialog, and you will be on the verge of invoking the wrath of the AACS people, too.
It’s about a man called Dee who is trying to proposition several prositutes, but insists that that he has won the services of one or two in a previous (unspecified) eating competition. The german madam disagrees and insists that the rate will be seven (hundred Euros) for the three women, “If I have (a) [body guard]” – and the refers idiomatically to her body guard as if he were a bumble bee, given his ability to “sting” the stingy patron.
One of the employees at the brother claims that Dee only “ate for one” at the eating competition. He insists that he must have eaten five or six meals and then pulls out a card which he says shows he ate five. Then he claims six. The employee looks at the scorecard and realises it only says three. He continues to insist that he ate five, correcting himself and saying six. He indicates the front and back of the card white saying “ate, ate” to indicate that he ate the quantities on both sides of the card at the eating contest.
Dee – Oh, “nein?” F— “nein.” Won one o’ two!
Madam – Nein, Dee. Seven for ‘e three, ‘f I’ve bee.
Lady – Dee ate for one.
Dee – Five? Six? See, Five! Six!
Lady – Three!
Dee – Five… Six! Ate. Ate. See?
Madam – Oh.
Feel free to copy that scene or perform it or put it on T-shirts. I do ask that you let me know if you do so.