A hacker claims to have written code to break Windows Vista encryption within hours of the operating system’s consumer launch. Canadian programmer and security researcher, Alex Ionescu claims on his blog that he’s managed to unlock Vista’s Protected Media Path (PMP) encryption feature to enable high-def DVDs to be copied. Microsoft’s system is designed to degrade the quality of video and audio playback with hardware components not approved by Microsoft. Due to concerns over violating US law, Ionescu has not released the source code. He would “really love to release this tool to the public” and is currently looking into options such as emphasising the research aspect. He said that in the first 24 hours after blogging about his achievement, his site received over 60,000 visitors, but claims that he never intended to publicise the crack on the day of Vista’s release. Alex is now quite nervous about what an army of lawyers backed by draconian copyright laws could do to him if he released the details, but he claims to be currently looking into the details of safely releasing his details about this at the moment though.”