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Testing Microsoft And The DMCA
sproketboy writes "I found a great piece about an MIT student and his XBox hacking over at news.com.
Apparently he can't get his how-to book published do to fears with DMCA. I hope he at least can get it publish in China or Russia where people have some freedoms left. ;)." The student is doctoral candidate Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, the same hacker Microsoft declined to stop last August from presenting a paper on insecurities in the Xbox hardware.
This whole affair about XBox, Security, DMCA, Linux-on-the-XBox and stories about how MS is losing money n the XBox.... is this all a big ploy by MS to somehow generate interest on the XBox? I mean, is the XBox not selling well as a gaming platform, which is what it's supposed to be anyway?
/. crowd think that anything done against the DMCA is a worthy pursuit? Sharing files maybe, reverse engineering maybe, but Linux on the XBox - certainly not for me.
Why fiddle around with a $200 XBox and load Linux on it after circumventing a 100 security holes, when a Linux PC can be had for the same price on Walmart?
How many of us can afford an XBox but not a separate PC? Even if somehow it's possible to load Linux on an XBox and attach a CD writer, USB mouse, kbd etc., is it still worth the trouble?
The more I read such articles, the more I get the feeling MS is DESPARATE to sell these XBoxen. Does the
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
The freedom to write books of dubious utility or worth that trample Godzilla-style all over the "intellectual property" rights of rich people from western nations, apparently, as long as you don't critisise or otherwise cause a percieved threat to the PRC.
So China's publishing industry should be right up this X-box guy's alley.
The xbox is slightly changed around a bit from version to version. Not really sophisticated stuff but they do shuffle the pcb layout a little to keep chippers guessing for a couple of minutes. Mostly to cut costs I would suspect.
The reality is, that if they closed up the D0 line on the bios chips they would be quite a large step closer to removing the ability for modchips to be used. Most of the chips implicitly rely on pulling D0 to ground.
Even though this MIT guy is cool and talks about some decent things you can hardly blame microsoft for trying to shut the guy up. At the end of the day every person that has ever wanted a modchip from me has wanted it for piracy - not so he can have a fabulous webserver etc.
The book does contain a section about possible attacks against Palladium and TCPA, as well as a discussion of non-cryptographic alternatives to Trusted Computing that provide good security without the bitter taste of DRM.
;-) ...these days, it seems public opinion is guided mostly by speculation and FUD...
The hope is in part to establish some kind of precedent about fair use, whether or not it sticks around long enough to matter when Trusted Computing hits full stride. At least, it will provide a solid starting point for arguments
>What kind of "freedom" does a citizen have in a communist country?
I have lived in communist country (unwillingly) for 20 years. You could be arrested for no reason, but laws presented a lot of freedom (which was not guranteed and people were arrested).
To get back to Your question - it looks like communist countries have the same kind of "freedom" as U. S. citizens:
* neither can tell the world what they want
* neither of them could go wherever they want - try to go for a trip to Syria and we'll see how long You will stay at customs when You will return.
* noth of them are forced to conform to a ton of stupid laws like alcohol in paperbags and right to work (this meant You have to be employee, kind of commie law).
That's from theoretical point of view. Practically citizens in any country have the amount of freedom granted by their leaders/government. These leaders and governments are as stupid, as the majority of citizens in given country.
Aw come on now :-) when you're spending 80 hours a week writing code and papers, you're entitled to a couple of weeks to dink around with hardware. Besides, my advisor encouraged all of us to look at existing hardware for examples of how to do (or not to do) things. e.g., video game consoles represent the best performance/price point on the market, and the architecture of some of the machines, such as the Gamecube, is actually quite impressive (the Gamecube's main memory is composed of 10ns random-access latency devices--in other words, the Gamecube's main memory was as fast as the L2 caches on some mainstream processors back when the Gamecube was released. Processors that cost more than an entire Gamecube did, incidentally).
t hesis.pdf if you care to read about it...abstract below.
My thesis was on supercomputer architecture.
http://www.xenatera.com/bunnie/phd
The furious pace of Moore's Law is driving computer architecture into
a realm where the the speed of light is the dominant factor in system
latencies. The number of clock cycles to span a chip are increasing,
while the number of bits that can be accessed within a clock cycle is
decreasing. Hence, it is becoming more difficult to hide latency. One
alternative solution is to reduce latency by migrating threads
and data, but the overhead of existing implementations has previously
made migration an unserviceable solution so far.
I present an architecture, implementation, and mechanisms that reduces
the overhead of migration to the point where migration is a viable
supplement to other latency hiding mechanisms, such as
multithreading. The architecture is abstract, and presents programmers
with a simple, uniform fine-grained multithreaded parallel programming
model with implicit memory management. In other words, the spatial
nature and implementation details (such as the number of processors)
of a parallel machine are entirely hidden from the
programmer. Compiler writers are encouraged to devise programming
languages for the machine that guide a programmer to express their
ideas in terms of objects, since objects exhibit an inherent physical
locality of data and code. The machine implementation can then
leverage this locality to automatically distribute data and threads
across the physical machine by using a set of high performance
migration mechanisms.
An implementation of this architecture could migrate a null thread in
66~cycles -- over a factor of 1000 improvement over previous
work. Performance also scales well; the time required to move a
typical thread is only 4 to 5 times that of a null thread. Data
migration performance is similar, and scales linearly with data block
size. Since the performance of the migration mechanism is on par with
that of an L2 cache, the implementation simulated in my work has no
data caches and relies instead on multithreading and the migration
mechanism to hide and reduce access latencies.
..this reminds me - for no clear reason - on the controversy surrounding PGP when it was first written. While it was illegal to export the code in binary form (ie as a file) as it was considered a mution, it was quite allright to print out a stack of paper and send it abroad, letting some poor sod punch it all back in.
No, I know this isn't like that, but I'm reminded of it, that's all. Possible because the information already is 'out in the wild', but can't be 'officialy' published.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
It's just another example of how, while the US' system of government was perfectly feasible and perhaps sufficient in the 19th century, the onslaught of modern technology and new thinking have rendered it obsolete and inefficient.
Consider this: despite the opinions offered regarding Scalia, Thomas, et al., I have a hard time imagining them finding Patriot constitutional. Unfortunately, they consider it their responsibility to neither offer the theory by which it would be rendered void, nor allow an incorrect argument to suffice in a case presented to them.
It's a maddening situation that takes _years_ to sort out. All the while, bad law is allowed to impede people's lives. US 2.0 would cure that, one would hope.
You could blame the politicians but we elected them.
You wouldn't even be thinking about this in China. You'd just accept it and move on. That is the difference.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Hey there Troed,
I'm actually still working on trying to get it published by someone, but I'm not pinning my hopes on it...hopefully in a few weeks someone will pick it up and I won't be printing the book myself anymore. It's a bit too time consuming. On the other hand, I feel like if I don't get the book out myself, it'll never get out...it could end up in legal review la la land for months, maybe years...whereas if I just print it and start selling it, and I don't end up in jail, maybe that will give some comfort to publishers...
Anyways, why is it that you'd rather see me trying to get the book published by a third party? Wondering if there is some greater significance to having a third party publish than my limited perspective is providing...
In the article, there is reference to that poor soul recently nabbed for selling mod chips. Now his domain name is the property of the US Gov't. Check it out.
The article also lists four other sites (drug paraphenalia sites 1 2 3 4) which are blocked by the DEA. Interesting part, click them, now the DEA, FBI whoever knows you checked them out. Disturbing.
So, I made sure I connected to all these links. It would be nice if other people did this too because a high volume of random connects, will essentially make data collection worthless. Anyone know more of these?
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I don't hate Jews, but I hate the state of Israel - does that make me anti-semitic? (I would say "some of my best friends are Jewish" but they aren't, though I did once go out with a really beautiful girl called Jessica who is Jewish, I used to work with a really nice guy called Alex who is Jewish and I really like the Jewish bakery in Stanmore where I used to get my walnut wheat cakes in the morning). It's time for the ourage of Israel to STOP, aqnd the only way it's gonna stop is if America makes it stop, coz they're paying for the whole fucking show anyway.
That was classic intercourse!
I am a xbox hacker and would like to say that the xbox is amazeing, for $200 i can 1. play divx movies on my TV 2. play/sort my ogg/mp3 collection 3. emulate mame/snes/nes and play my huge rom collections 4. rent/copy/warez monger all the games i can (got 5 on hard drive right now) 5. make backup copies of games so if they got damaged/lost i'm not SOL 6. have yet another FTP server on my home network for exchange of files between outdated OS's (only 1 is windows) 7.play DVD's without paying the 30$ mpaa tax and the list goes on..... i might consider running mandrake or debian (only 2 flavors i know that are compiled for xbox yet) but will probebly put a 80 gig drive in it first.. my advice is buy a refurbished one and pray that you get a good philips/samsung drive that will play CD-r's (the thomsons suck, and will only play dvd-r,cd-rw-s) and above all the satisfaction that i'm screwing M$!
come comment on the madness at http://slashdot.org/~phreak03/journal/
At least in the US we have the RIGHT to speak out against the DMCA
That's where US is smart; they can portray to be democratic yet still act as a commie state. In other words, yes go and protest about the DMCA. Protest day and night, but will you make a difference? Nope. As long as the DMCA is serving the interests of XXXX and *they* want it that way and they have the spin-doctors to do damage-control, there is little you can do about it.
Oh btw, you don't really have the RIGHT to speak out against anything; it has to be politically correct too. Just recently some politician in the Canadian parliment said, "I hate those damn Americans", got that person labelled immediately as a terrorist.
Kashif