Very broad coverage of yesterday's crazy Digg chaos. Got picked up by all the top tech news outlets, and blog mentions on other top-tier news sites.

Wired's 2007 predictions. Funny that I'm getting a Blu-ray ad on a page predicting its demise. Still not sure why people are assuming that either format will win. Who won, SACD or DVD-A? Hehe, thought so.

Well, not quite ... I took a look at this, and it's not really that groundbreaking. Here's my Digg comment:

AACS has not been "hacked". The author's source code simply implements the decryption algorithm (documented, no black magic here).

The only thing of interest is the fact that he extracted the title keys, which he almost certainly obtained by poking around in PowerDVD's memory space.

The proper title for this post is (probably) "AACS Title Keys Extractable from PowerDVD".

Now, if the title keys can be obtained and distributed en masse (100,000 titles would require only a few megabytes even with title metadata), then AACS is certainly ineffective, but it's incorrect to say that it is "cracked" or "hacked". Nothing here will lead to a libdeaacs.so that could operate in the absence of a key database.

Angry but often insightful post on piracy vs. DRM-infected "legitimacy".

Quoted: Then came the PC makers, the dumb sheep that they are. There seems to be a race to see who can pass the buck quickest ...

Looks like the HD-DVD drive in the Xbox 360 is a pure software renderer (even for VC-1) ... rendered to GDI at that. Yes, you heard right -- the Xbox 360 is using GDI. Wow.

Quoted: What takes 4.7 million lines of code, partner teams from all over Microsoft, and millions of dollars to create? The Xbox 360 system software? Nope. This is just the HD DVD player. The Xbox platform team (us) is experiencing its own emergence day as of

The coupon being widely used to pick up the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive for $160.

The rumor is true ... this is great. I can run this on my Xbox until the drivers come out, then to the PC with its fully digital connection.

Not bad ... if it had PC compatibility (a future possibility), it'd be a much nicer deal. They really need to announce a digital video adapter in the meantime ...

Quoted: The drive will also be bundled with Peter Jackson's King Kong and the Xbox 360 Universal Remote.

Quoted: Welcome to “The HD DVD Insiders,” Microsoft’s new HD DVD blog. This is our forum for our passionate employees to talk about the format, our VC-1 codec, and what we’re doing to provide consumers with the world’s best HD content.