Breaking the Code

Those who have been following my few comments about the continued Academy Screener dustup here or on NRO may be interested to know that a (full disclosure!) ABSOLUTELY FREE DVD player arrived at my door today. Given to all Academy voters and produced by Dolby subsidiary Cinea, it is meant to play something called S-VIEW DVDs – specially encrypted discs to prevent pirating. How secure are they? Says the flyer accompanying the player: “According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which developed the encryption that protects the S-VIEW disc, it would take a computer faster than any existing today approximately 149 trillion years to crack the key.”

Meanwhile, we have yet to receive a single disc to play on the sucker. Of the thirty or so DVDs I have already received, none are encrypted.