http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_nvidia_hdcp_support/
HDCP is Intel-designed copy prevention that uses strong crypto to encrypt the digital video signal on the cable between your video card (or TV or DVD player) and your monitor. There is no need for it -- you are seeing the signal that it is encrypting -- except for DRM. Despite a bunch of PC graphics chips and boards having announced HDCP support, according to the above article, it turns out that none of them will actually work. It looks like something slipped somewhere, and an extra crypto-key chip needed to be added to every existing board -- at manufacturing time. My wild ass guess is that the original design would have had software communicate the keys to the board, but Hollywood has recently decided not to trust that design. This is going to make life very interesting for the HD-DVD crowd. Intel's grand scheme was to corrupt the PC to an extent that Hollywood would trust movies, music, etc, to PCs. Intel decided to learn from an oligopoly what they know about extending a monopoly into the indefinite future, by combining legislative bribery with technological tricks. Now it appears that even though they have largely succeeded in pushing all kinds of crap into PC designs, Hollywood doesn't trust the results enough anyway. The result may well be that HD-DVDs that contain movies can only be played on dedicated equipment (standalone HD-DVD players), at least for the first few years. Or, you'll need a new video board, which nobody sells yet, when you buy your first HD-DVD drive. Or the DRM standards involved will have to be somehow weakened. Anybody know anything more about this imbroglio? John PS: Of course, the whole thing is foolish. DVD "encryption" has been cracked for years, and circumvention tools widely distributed worldwide, despite being too illegal to appear in out-of-the-box products. DVD encryption has provided exactly zero protection for DVD revenues -- yet DVD revenues are high and rising. In short, unless Hollywood was lying about its motivations, DRM has so far been useless to Hollywood. Yet it has done great violence to consumers, to computer architecture, to open competition, and to science. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]