Iliah,
That's pretty ironic, no? Thomas Knoll makes a fuss about Nikon's "encryption" of WB info. Every hacker worth their 2 cents could've hacked that "encryption" -- and Adobe didn't even need to hack it themselves as David Coffin did it already and published the hack freely (via dcraw). Nobody's getting sued over the hack. But when you buy something from Adobe that you as a professional end-user actually want to protect your work, that protection is too weak to be of real use.
BTW, folks, don't for a minute believe that real encryption can be easily hacked if done right and intentionally so. When done right, it requires some serious brute force method to crack real encryption. Have you ever heard of the 56-bit RSA RC5 encryption secret key challenge that resulted in a worldwide project to try to hack using brute force method from ~8 years ago? I actually had a couple of my own PCs participate in the project for a while. Don't know how long it eventually took a worldwide community of desktop computers and workstations to finally crack, but it was definitely more than a whole year -- it took about one year to cycle through ~1/2(?) the keys looking for the one key needed to crack it. We're talking about
hundreds of thousands of computers running around the clock. And that was only w/ 56-bit key -- nowadays, you can have 128-bit key, which means 2^72x or
~4.7 thousand x billion x billion times that previous~72 million x billion combinations.
http://www.sigpc.net/v1/n22.htm
Basically, if done right, the encryption should be essentially impenetrable. In cases where encryption is cracked, it's generally because it was done very sloppily *or* did not use a sufficiently good method -- for instance, the above mentioned 128-bit RSA is actually available for commercial use and used widely on the web nowadays. And FYI, it took a while even for the relatively weak DES encryption found in the DVD format to be cracked, and in that case, it was cracked mainly because one licensee of the DVD format did a sloppy job of it -- they left their key unprotected in their code -- so that the key was discovered by the kid who wrote DCSS.
BTW, in case everyone hasn't caught on, IMHO, I suspect Iliah is grumbling at least in part over Adobe's hypocrisy and sloppiness while they made a big fuss over what Nikon did w/ their WB info. OR maybe I'm just reading too much into his post.
_Man_
