Mysteries Of The CDRW and Backups Revealed

Talinom writes "Tom's Hardware has a story that details information regarding some of the new (and old) copy protection schemes out there, as well as results from several different CDRW drives. There are a lot of sites devoted to this topic, but Tom's is usually rather thorough."

Comments

A Few Words Knowing Voices

[Real World Stuff]

Remember last April when Andreessen said "If a computer can see it, display it and play it -- it can copy it,..."

Article found here.

As Dan Briklin says "With ever changing technology, in order to preserve many works we will need to constantly move them ahead, copying them to each new media form before the previous one becomes obsolete. Also, as we create new media, we need to preserve the knowledge of the methods of converting from one media to another, so we can still access the old works that have not yet been moved ahead. This is crucial. Without this information, even preserved works could be unreadable.

The most famous example of that type of translation information was an inscribed slab of rock from 196 BC found in 1799. It contained a decree written in Greek that was also written in two forms of Egyptian. It's called the Rosetta Stone. It let scholars finally read ancient works in hieroglyphics that they had physical possession of but whose language had been a mystery for 1,400 years (despite being common for the 3,500 years before being superseded). Cuneiform, a form of writing used by many ancient civilizations, was similarly opaque to scholars until they found a text in multiple languages carved into a cliff -- the Behistun inscription."

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[BrookHarty]

I personally use www.gamecopyworld.com to download nocd patches. Why would I put a cd in when the game is fully installed? To make the game company happy? Um, no.

BTW, Still have to buy the game to play online, which is really the point. So even if I use nocd patches, I couldnt play-online without a legal serial.

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[ergo98]

People who break copy protection are "good guys"? Sorry, but as the kind of guy who goes down to EB every month or so to help support my fellow programmer for their efforts and ingenuity, I'm not going to be in line to give them a pat on the back, just as I'm not out there looking to give accolades to people cheating on welfare or collecting fraudulent compensation claims : Theft is theft.

Having said that, the comparison between security and copy protection is brutally flawed at the outset. Security is to avoid ANY intrusions, copy protection is to avoid MOST intrusions. This is a vast chasm of difference that many people with very juvenile thought processes fail to get on Slashdot. To put it into expanded form: Copy protection is meant to make it inconvenient for the casual "pirate", to the point that they're more likely to just buy a copy rather than screw with 20 different burning softwares, or downloading cracks from the warez sites (indeed, I would say that virus' and trojan horses have done software vendors more of a favour than they could ever imagine: I know a lot of former pirates who won't touch anything that isn't on a retail shelf anymore). Copy protection NEVER has to be absolute to be effective.

stop calling it "copy protection"

[RelliK]

I can't stand the expression "copy protection". It is the propaganda slogan dreamed up by the RIAA/MPAA. You see, the so-called "copy protection" does not atually "protect" anything -- it prevents you from copying. The proper term, then, is copy control. Of course the word "control" doesn't have nice ring to it. RIAA/MPAA much prefers the word "protection", just like mafia likes to call their racket and extortion a "protection".

I personally call it copy prevention since it describes the technology in question and has the same acronym. Every time I read the term "copy protection", I cringe. Just count the number of times it's been used in the article...