How Were DVDs Cracked?
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy
In simple words, DVDs had a protection mechanism based on encryption. This encryption technique has a master key, a 16 character/byte "password" and from this master key, "smaller" keys can be generated and these smaller keys can be invalidated (disabled) at a later time.
In order to legally decrypt the content from the DVD, you needed one of those smaller keys and you had to pay a fee to the people who made the encryption and promise to agree to some security rules (on order to protect this key) and in exchange they gave you one of these keys. You could then use this key to decrypt content.
If they somehow found out you didn't protect that key properly, all the retail discs produced after that date would have your key in a blacklist file on the disc, so your product would no longer be able to decrypt the content.
One of the first people to break the encryption has simply installed a DVD player software on his computer (I think it was WinDVD) and saved the contents of the RAM to hard disk while playing a DVD, or something like that, and found out that perhaps due to a bug in the software or maybe laziness from a programmer's part, that 16 character key was still present in computer memory while the disc was playing (normally it shouldn't be).
So the guy wrote a software pretending to be that software player and using that software's key to decrypt the contents fo the DVD. The organization handling the keys blacklisted that key so the software could only decrypt DVDs produced before that time, but it was a good start.
Eventually, programmers figured out that master 16 character key from which all smaller keys are produced, so any decrypting software could generate new unused keys and pretend it's a new software player or hardware dvd player and they could do nothing about, the software can impersonate any other software or hardware box.
The company owning the encryption system changed that master key several times but all those keys have leaked.
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