viznut's amazing discoveries

[2007-05-06]

The HD-DVD key as a piece of art

When I first saw the famous AACS encryption key (you know, the one that starts with 09 F9 and gets censored everywhere), I didn't know about the context, so I started to look at is as either a bunch of encoded characters or a short machine-code routine.

The hexdump obviously doesn't represent 8-bit plaintext because of the wide variety of byte-initial bits, but perhaps it could work as textmode art. So, here's a PETSCII interpretation of the key. It looks rather abstract so perhaps it also needs a suitably all-around title. "Threat of Society", for example.

All right, now we just need an art gallery to put it in, as well as someone proficient in art analysis to generate some clever bullshit about it. Or at least we could print some T-shirt or badges. Or perhaps it'll just be enough to put the thingy available to a site that gathers all kinds of artistic interpretations of the theme.

By the way, it'd also be fun if the byte sequence actually were a piece of executable code that would work as a 16-byte intro on some obscure platform (by the way, the smallest category in Pouet.net is 32-byte). However, in X86 and Z80 the code is total gibberish, and the 6502 disassembly isn't that sane either (although you might look at it as a filler loop).

0000    09F9    ORA #$F9
0002    1102    ORA ($02),Y
0004    9D74E3  STA $E374,X
0007    5BD841  SRE $41D8,Y  ; illegal LSR+EOR
000A    56C5    LSR $C5,X
000C    6356    RRA ($56,X)  ; illegal ROR+ADC
000E    88      DEY
000F    C0xx    CPY #xx
0011    xxxx    (put in a branch perhaps)

Anyway, I think we are going to be seeing even more "dangerous bit sequences" in the future, so perhaps we should prepare for this by introducing different ways for turning short arbitrary bitstrings into visual art, music and other nice things with a maximized probability of esthetically pleasing output. I've actually had this idea for a long while in the context of going into extreme minimalism in demoscene productions.

09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
0"?D1`IUTXUO805;%8U:(P```
CfkRAp1041vYQVbFY1aIwA==