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EFF Begins Digital Television Liberation Project
Dozix007 writes "One year from today, on July 1, 2005, an FCC
regulation known as the
Broadcast Flag will lock up your digital television signals. But EFF's
"DTV Liberation Project"
aims to help the public keep over-the-air
programming free. The Broadcast Flag, which places copy controls on DTV
signals, attempts to stop people from making digitally-perfect copies
of television shows and redistributing them. It also stops people from
making perfectly legitimate personal copies of broadcasts. More
disturbing, the Broadcast Flag will outlaw the import and manufacture
of a whole host of personal video recorders (PVRs), TiVo-like devices
that send DTV signals into a computer for backup, editing and playback.
After the Broadcast Flag regulations go into effect, all PVR
technologies must be Flag-compliant and 'robust' against user
modification -- and that means, once again, that the entertainment
industry is trying to tell you what you can do with your own machines."
I disagree. If they hadn't suborned congress, then I would agree with you, but starting with the "Mickey Mouse protection act" the media companies have induced the congress to pass laws in violation of the general welfare and not otherwise authorized by the constitution. And I don't care what blather the supreme court uses to justify their bending the knee to to media companies.
At this point I feel that nearly anything which is done to damage, or even inconvenience them is laudible. What I'd really like is to get all their managers and lawyers thrown in jail...and not a country club either. Well, this won't happen. The law is too corrupt. And since the "law" won't act, I won't condemn anyone else who does. I may think them foolhardy, but I won't condemn them.
The corruption of the congress, the presidency, and of the courts should be considered a crime on the level of treason. As such, anyone who comits such a crime should pay an extravagant penalty. And when a company does so, not only should the company be attained, but also the decision making officers and those who implemented the decision. And those managers or directors who approved it. In many ways it's a far worse crime of treason than a soldier deserting in the face of the enemy. And it deserves a harsher penalty.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
no It's a law that simply makes the regular honest citizen a criminal.
Grey market devices will be available forever. the last DVD player I bought, is 100% region free and does not obey the "you cant skip this" flag on video files.
you can get them shipped directly to you and they are supposedly "illegal"
same goes for the DVR's in a couple years.... China will have the uncrippled versions for us.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"How else can I help the EFF," you ask? 30% of the profits from book purchases at No Starch Press (when follow the link from the EFF's website) are donated back to the EFF.
While I doubt anyone will read this due to the lateness of this post, I still must do so.
Lemme just say first... I am something of an expert on digital television... it is my job.
Digital TV is for the most part based on the ATSC standard, which in turn is based on the ISO/IEC 13818-1 standard (AKA "Generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information: Systems".
Our enemy though, is the "Redistribution Control" As defined in ATSC Standard A/65B, now for a quick overview...
Within 13818, a stream of data (the transport stream is made up of packets who's length is always 188 bytes, within the first 4 bytes of the transport packet there is a field known as the PID which helps a decoder to know what is in a stream.
100 dollars worth of hardware could easily build a part which would demodulate an 8vsb signal on one end and pass the contained transport stream into a FPGA for instance who's sole job would be to do basic processing of the transport stream's EIT's to see what PID carry's the Redistribution Control (RC). Once the PID is detected, locating packets which carry it would be a simple task. Finally, once a packet is found to be carrying an RC, the FPGA would restamp the PID of the packet to 1FFF (the PID of a null packet who's payload is ignored by the decoder) then finally pass the stream to a modulator which would create the signal your decoder would receive and bada bing bada boom! No more Redistribution Control!
Sad thing is... I work with hardware everyday which would be capable of doing this... but even with my employee discount it's still far out of my price range. Of course such a device (as described above) would be illegal as it's only real use would be to bypass a copy control mechanism.
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