In one of those interesting twists of fate, I was discussing HD related DRM with some friends on Boxing Day and then on the 27th a utility called BackupHDDVD gets announced. It's already got a Wikipedia entry.

As you might expect, this has really kicked up a dust storm: Warner Bros has already got YouTube to pull the demo video (on the grounds that it shows content that they own), Cyberlink (the people behind PowerDVD) are flatly denying their product could have been a source of any keys, and a number of interest groups (such as the HD DVD consortium) have all launched investigations.

I don't know who muslix64 is, but I note that "he" (reads like a he) has been very careful to distribute both the announcement and the code in all the right places to ensure that they would spread as far and as wide as possible - without doing anything that was actually illegal online (so far). There are no keys in the distribution, all that has been distributed is a framework to use should you have one and a claim that getting the keys is possible. This is, of course, the hard part.

Weather this is a scam, a publicity event, or the real thing, a lot of thought has gone into this. If nothing else, the next couple of weeks will be "interesting" for the entertainment community.