How was CSS broken?
It is unknown at this time who exactly first “broke” the CSS scrambling algorithm. The first “DeCSS”-type program seems to have been “Dod (Drink or Die) Speedripper”, released in late September 1999. According to most sources, it used a DVD player key recovered from the object code of the Xing software-based DVD player program. In early October, Jon Johansen announced on the LiViD mailing list that a friend of his was working on a similar program and perhaps would be willing to release the source code to the Linux developer community. This was in fact done in the middle of October. In November 1999, an analysis of the “CSS decryption” source code and the underlying CSS algorithm revealed serious weaknesses which made it possible to defeat CSS without a player key.
