Some people think a low UID/. account is worth money. Yes, they're idiots, but they're willing to pay money for it. The same goes for ridiculous fashions or other "prestige" items. Number one rule of capitalism: offer goods and services and take the money offered in return, even if you think those people are really silly.
Also, sex goes down well on ebay. Have a look at how much panties or other fetish clothes go for on ebay. Guys thinking with their dicks bid more than women looking for normal clothing. Since the used panties debacle (panties advertised as having been worn, mailed foil packed for "freshness", usually sold at over $100 per pair), ebay yank all used panties auctions. All clothes have to be advertised as clean and laundered, or their cleanliness state not mentioned at all. This isn't because of any special law, it's just to stop opportunistic sellers hawking $10 underwear for over $100, just because they have a woman's scent.
I'm not sure about games, but almost all the cheat discs and hardware available are completely unsanctioned.
I particularly like Datel's DVD Region X. It's legal to buy for the PS2, despite being entirely unapproved or licensed by Sony. From what I know about its operation, it copys the Playstation BIOS ROM into RAM, then hacks it
to remove the region-code limitation on the PS2 DVD player -- UK citizens can now view Region 1 DVDs which are almost always much better and cheaper to import than it is to buy the UK release several months later in the shops.
to remove the green screen SCART limitation. Sony think it's a good idea that RGB output from the PS2's DVD player should be cripped by boosting the green component so DVDs are unwatchable. Games themselves are not crippled like this. Sony bundle the PS2 with a lower quality SCART "adaptor" that uses uncrippled composite video.
to remove the need for an official Sony memory card. Official Sony memory cards have the CSS decryption algorithm buried in them and the DVD player forcibly uses that. This is to quell the market for unofficial memory cards, because while Sony can't stop competitors making what is essentially some flash ROM and a simple microcontroller, they can stop them from replicating the CSS decryption algorithm through copyright law. And, of course, if memory card manufacturers don't include the CSS algorithm, Sony can simply say to the public "these are inferior quality memory cards - they don't work with our DVD player. Mwuhahahahahaha!"
The Region X comes with a hardware dongle. This is not just used to stop people pirating DVD Region X, it also contains Flash ROM so people can enter "update codes" - i.e. if Sony change the BIOS to fuck Datel's hacks up, Datel can issue update codes to change the offsets and values of their runtime patches.
No, Sega do it because they're fuckwits. Now look at them, they're out of the console business. Sony and Nintendo have always made a profit on their consoles, in fact Nintendo were fined for price-fixing the NES console. Only the Gamecube in the EU is currently sold very slightly below cost. It still makes a profit in the US and Japan. Nintendo admitted this and announced they are only doing it in reaction to the huge ($100-$200 per console) deliberate losses made by the X-box, and they will recoup their losses over time as the Gamecube source components drop in price.
If selling or giving something away below market value is illegal then Linux better duck becuase a big hammer is coming it's way!
Not "something", but "physical goods" and not "market value" but "below cost" as in you are physically losing money with every sale, and you're doing it knowingly and deliberately to squeeze out competitors before then putting your prices up.
Linux can't be accused of this because it's not an individual company competing in the market, and its licensing doesn't allow for putting the price up -- it's perpetually free.
The issue in this case though, is that the Linux XBox team can't crack the digital signature that Microsoft uses (AFAIK), so they have to ask Microsoft, or waste time in trying to crack it.
Yes. AFAIK too, MS use the same standards of signing as PGP does, so if the Linux teams crack their signing key in any reasonable amount of time, I'd be really fucking worried for the integrity of digital signatures as a whole. If we could crack MS's private key quickly, we could crack anyone's private key quickly.
By the time the Dreamcast was hacked, it was already dying
That's true, but then the DC did have a really short lifespan compared to other consoles. I remember using an unofficial Megadrive/Genesis dev-kit, written by cracking groups, on the Amiga in 1990, and the Megadrive was still profitable until I think about 1993-1994 when trailing-off interest and the new messiah (the Sony Playstation) killed it.
were it not for the Mill CD backdoor in the BootROM, the Dreamcast most likely would not have been hacked
Well, I think we have to thank Sony for this. Prior to the Playstation, console owners were contented not to get magazine demos like the computer owners. However, once Sony moved to CD-based media, console owners now expect game demos on magazines. While Sega made it difficult to easily pirate GD-ROMs because of the custom pressing hardware, it also made demo CDs financially unviable. So they added the CD backdoor to allow for coverdisc and trade-show demos. This is why Sony and Microsoft use media that can be duplicated with conventional CD/DVD mastering facilities, although obviously not with consumer CD-R/DVD-R drives.
some titles that had checks for whether or not they were on real discs or not
Most discs do, for virtually all games platforms. They just get cracked. If the DC games used more than the capacity of a regular CD-R, the crackers added disc-changing code. The same happened with Amiga games that used more sectors than normal copyable disks, and their game data was already fully compressed -- they were split onto two normal disks by crackers.
Actually, my favourite anti-piracy code is a tie between the anti-Action Replay code (the Amiga has a Time-Of-Day counter which continually ticks away and can't be set by software to anything other than zero -- just run normal timer interrupts and check the TOD has elapsed by the amount you expect it to, then your software can't be successfully "unfrozen" from an Action Replay "backup" (memory and register dump)) and the Rob Northen Copylock (self-decrypting-reencrypting trace mode code that depended on both register contents and the status register for correct decryption, and it read a protected track which had sectors that were fractionally longer than the sectors the Amiga/Atari could write by itself -- timing tolerance margins in the disk-reading hardware allowed for them, but they physically took longer to read, and that could be measured with the high-resolution timers).
Sure, but only if they're not bankrupted in court by a company with bigger pockets than them tying things up (i.e. Microsoft) while trying to prove it.
They make no money on X-box games Yet more X-boxes lie unsold in warehouses. They don't even make $200 on them, never mind the $400 they cost to make. Less developers are convinced that the X-box is a success, which means less games developed for the X-box, which means less money once again.
MS are selling X-boxes below cost to _gain market share_. It is an illegal practice (at least, it is in international trade). Getting _market share_ is what they want, and is the key to how much money they make. To deny them money, deny them market share. The best way to do this is buy one of their competitor's machines, which increases the games market _at the expense of MS_.
Buying an X-box gives MS $200 of your money, regardless of what you do with it, and they use it as propoganda with developers. Don't let them win.
Hobbyists, pirates and games companies reverse engineer the hardware details.
People write their own dev-kits (as happened with the Megadrive, SNES, PSX, PS2, Dreamcast, Gameboy and GBA, to name just a few) and either build their own flashable carts or mod-chips.
Many of the best games programmers in the industry (such as the Factor 5 team) grew up programming games consoles with these unsanctioned dev-kits.
Sega tries to sues Acclaim for circumventing their boot code and copying their "copyrighted data" needed for Megadrive carts to boot, regardless of content. They lose, spectacularly. Precedent is set. Companies have no requirement to get "approval" from the hardware manufacturer, they can release unlicensed software should they want, provided they wrote all code themselves and got all hardware programming information by reverse-engineering rather than stealing NDA'ed documents.
I use two programs to retrieve files, wget and Mozilla. Both show the download rate whether I'm fetching from HTTP or FTP.
What bugs me is when servers won't tell me the final downloaded file size -- no ETA available. I've seen both FTP and HTTP servers do it. The same goes for servers that don't support resuming or last-modified dates. They suck.
The investors should not be told this encryption is "unbreakable".
The investors should be told that the encryption is based on two 32-bit keys derived from passwords, a 256-byte header which boils down to a 7-bit key, and a one-time-pad file of arbitrary size (the "million bit key"). The encryption involves executing a state machine with a large number of different permutation methods, rather than sticking to a single ciphering method which allow building a statistical model of how well the plaintext is perturbed.
The investors should be told that -- despite not revealing the algorithm -- the encryption software has been reverse-engineered and a portable decryptor written in C.
The investors, finally, should be told that the encryption is almost useless. In order for any legitimate party to decrypt a file, you need to send them the one-time-pad as well. If you're storing files encrypted for your own private use, you need to store the one-time-pad somewhere secure. Why not just store your files unencrypted in this secure place? If you encrypt more than one file with the same one-time-pad, that renders it useless - only the ~71 bits need to be broken.
I suspect that the "mail in a floppy" tactic is so there isn't 10 million copies of the RISC OS PCI subsystem source code floating about on the 'net by next week.
I also suspect that they will order the routines or name the variables in that code so they can match copies they find posted on the internet with the exact home address of the person who leaked them.
To intercept keyboard and mouse input I install a system-wide hook. A hook is a point in the system message-handling mechanism where an application can install a subroutine to monitor the message traffic in the system and process certain types of messages before they reach the target window procedure. To install a hook use SetWindowsHookEx() function.
To disable special keys (Ctrl-Alt-Del, Alt-Tab, Ctrl-Esc, Windows key) I used SystemParametersInfo() function with SPI_SETSCREENSAVERRUNNING flag. Even though applications are not supposed to use this flag, because it is used internally in Windows 9x, it does the job.
Also note that Linux has a 'pseudo-SAK' key, Alt-SysRq-K. It's not a true SAK, as XFree86 (and any other program with root priveleges) can take control of the keyboard if it wants to. However, Alt-SysRq-K will kill normal user processes on the console (also, processes with root priveleges that don't take over the keyboard handling) and return you to whatever the/bin/login program is today.
Of course, I'd just you a keyghost hardware keystroke logger, so it wouldn't really matter what your software setup was like.
I think ThinkGeek used to sell these babies for a little while, they probably realised they' have rather unethical uses. You might need to break your own locks if you've lost your key, but you certainly don't need to log your own keystrokes because you've forgotten your password.
Do you actually do any free software development? Perhaps you're just a good little consumer and don't care about the power struggles "behind the scenes" as long as you get your bread and circuses.
As it happens, if I wanted to play a DVD, I have the choice of my dedicated DVD player (which connects to a 5.1 decoder), my Playstation 2, or my Linux PC (which has my entire CD collection on it), all of which are connected to a decent amp. All three are better quality than an X Box.
What I think is strange is why Bill think's it's OK to sell his X boxes for $100 less than they cost to make, but he won't pay $100 towards my own choice of hardware. I'm not interested in a X Box, but if MS would pay to take $100 off the price of a PS2, that'd be cool. I bought one anyway though, because the games are a lot better.
MS could easily withstand "selling" all their X Boxes at $0. They're not looking to turn a profit, like normal companies. All they care about is the "sales" numbers, so they can win over developers they can't otherwise buy.
Why not wait for them to drop the price to $0 before you "buy" your X Box?
How it this article any more than a barely-disguised advert for X boxes?
Let me make this perfectly clear - every X Box sold (no matter what you use it for) is used as propoganda to convince developers to write for it, which puts more developers under the thumb of MS, and makes money for MS so they can oppress and harass free software developers.
If anything, you should be buying systems from MICROSOFT'S COMPETITORS. BUY A NINTENDO GAMECUBE, A SONY PLAYSTATION, A PALMOS-BASED HANDHELD and A SYMBIANOS-BASED PHONE.
I think the DMCA prevents you reverse-engineering "effective controls" only if you then publish the details of those controls, or material which was protected by them. If you reverse-engineer "effective controls" in order to prepare evidence of copyright infringement in a private litigation, I doubt that would be considered as "publishing" in any respect. If it was, I'm sure the court would give some sort of authority (perhaps to police or government official operating on your behalf) to circumvent the DMCA for that specific instance.
Adding "you can reverse-engineer this code" to the GPL wouldn't do anything, as I could start reverse-engineering, say, Photoshop, on the grounds that I "might find some GPL code" which gave me permission to reverse-engineer anything and everything in order to find if it had been stolen or not.
Oh, and if something is outputting.tar.gz files, there's no need to use GNU tar or gzip. The tar file format is freely knowable (it was originally invented in AT&T UNIX) and the zlib needed to compress it is BSD licensed.
making a perfectly modular approach while supporting so many different formats and codecs is easier said than done.
But it has been done -- in Xine.
Reverse-engineering is the perfect solution, but in practice it can only be done for simple things.
You clearly don't know how difficult (read: easy) it is to do reverse engineering. It only takes a skilled reverse-engineer (of which there are thousands in this world, most of them are ex-crackers), time and interest.
I've reverse engineered decompression algorithms far more difficult than SVQ3's decoder. Although I haven't seen it, there are rumours that SVQ3 has been reverse-engineered and posted anonymously to Usenet. They say it's just H.263 with some scrambling tables, so Sorensen can claim copyright infringement (of those tables) if anyone writes a decoder. All WMV and WMA codecs have been reverse-engineered. There is nothing mystical or special about a multimedia codec, it's just an algorithm like anything else.
One last example, the even more difficult Microsoft Media Player DRM has been flawlessly reverse-engineered (not by me), despite being actively encrypted and made difficult to run through.
The MPlayer authors are rarely the guys behind reimplementing codecs -- that's what the authors of ffmpeg (libavcodec) do. MPlayer just takes the glory by putting it all together.
The problem is, it's difficult to make good MPlayer binaries
It's difficult to make good MPlayer binaries because MPlayer is badly written. Don't you get that? If the MPlayer authors actually cared about well-written software, it would use carefully crafted, modular APIs between all the component parts. I could add Quicktime codecs to MPlayer just by copying a hypothetical mp_qtime.so into lib/mplayer/codecs. Instead, it's a sprawling mess with files all over the place and a special codecs.conf acting as a central registry. Why can't each plugin tell Mplayer what capabilities it has, like Xine or XMMS does?
MPlayer is famous simply mostly because it got Win32 codecs to work outside Windows. Kudos to them for doing so, but distributing other people's binary codecs is usually illegal. Apple don't permit you to hack into the Sorensen codecs and get them to work outside Quicktime Player.
How would the like MPlayer authors like mplayer to be embedded as a binary in some media player, without source? Oh yeah, they whined like kiddies when that happened.
I happen to write decompressors for various archive formats. Do I just take DOS binaries for those formats and hack into them to run them in Linux, then say "x86 only guys!"? No, I fully reverse-engineer the originals and write new depackers from scratch. The MPlayer team should do the same, and stop relying on other people's binaries for their glory.
Can't you just use some "virtual servers" feature to forward ports 23, 69/udp and 80 to a box on the LAN side of the router/modem?
Even though my AMX router actually has a "external access" tickbox, unticking it doesn't actually stop the router responding to http and ftp from the WAN side. So I configured it forward those ports through to the LAN side and let my PC say "connection refused" instead.
And you think mainstream music in the 1950 and 60s was different to now? It wasn't.
BBC radio was the same old bland rubbish back then. Kids had to listen to live music or tune in to foreign radio stations to hear the "new music", the BBC would only play what the government wanted to do. This lead to the invention of pirate radio, radio stations on ships anchored in international waters off the British coast.
Independent radio isn't a god-given right, it's a business just like the music business. It can only survive if it can sell its listeners to its advertisers. You can't run a radio station out of your own pocket like you can with a website, unless you're very rich. Imagine a student radio station: the radio authority fees for FM would be £1500 non-refundable application fee + £214 per year. The Performing Rights fees would be £400 per year, and then there's the transmitter and studio electricity bill, assuming your DJs are doing it for free and playing only their own records to save the station buying any! You can't get away without sponsorship, and sponsors are only looking for one thing - your audience.
The same thing goes for any pubs and clubs you've been to - there's a world of fees and licensing ready to swallow you up unless you turn a steady profit.
Please stop pretending that "independent" radio, clubs and musicians are anything less than money-grubbing whores, because that's what they are.
Yes, if I'd realised in the 1960s that there was going to be more than one phone company, and the population of London was going to hit 10 million, not to mention new fangled gadgets like pagers and mobile phones were going to be invented and become incredibly popular, then I would have introduced the unified numbering scheme earlier.
You forget that many dialing codes formed out of growing from 999 numbers in the area to 9999, to 99999, and each time the existing numbers got a prefix digit. Perhaps we should start dialing 20 digit numbers NOW to avoid future numbering changes? I could start a new business purely on replacing worn-out "0" keys on people's phones.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people think a low UID /. account is worth money. Yes, they're idiots, but they're willing to pay money for it. The same goes for ridiculous fashions or other "prestige" items. Number one rule of capitalism: offer goods and services and take the money offered in return, even if you think those people are really silly.
Also, sex goes down well on ebay. Have a look at how much panties or other fetish clothes go for on ebay. Guys thinking with their dicks bid more than women looking for normal clothing. Since the used panties debacle (panties advertised as having been worn, mailed foil packed for "freshness", usually sold at over $100 per pair), ebay yank all used panties auctions. All clothes have to be advertised as clean and laundered, or their cleanliness state not mentioned at all. This isn't because of any special law, it's just to stop opportunistic sellers hawking $10 underwear for over $100, just because they have a woman's scent.
I particularly like Datel's DVD Region X. It's legal to buy for the PS2, despite being entirely unapproved or licensed by Sony. From what I know about its operation, it copys the Playstation BIOS ROM into RAM, then hacks it
The Region X comes with a hardware dongle. This is not just used to stop people pirating DVD Region X, it also contains Flash ROM so people can enter "update codes" - i.e. if Sony change the BIOS to fuck Datel's hacks up, Datel can issue update codes to change the offsets and values of their runtime patches.
Every console does this.
No, Sega do it because they're fuckwits. Now look at them, they're out of the console business. Sony and Nintendo have always made a profit on their consoles, in fact Nintendo were fined for price-fixing the NES console. Only the Gamecube in the EU is currently sold very slightly below cost. It still makes a profit in the US and Japan. Nintendo admitted this and announced they are only doing it in reaction to the huge ($100-$200 per console) deliberate losses made by the X-box, and they will recoup their losses over time as the Gamecube source components drop in price.
If selling or giving something away below market value is illegal then Linux better duck becuase a big hammer is coming it's way!
Not "something", but "physical goods" and not "market value" but "below cost" as in you are physically losing money with every sale, and you're doing it knowingly and deliberately to squeeze out competitors before then putting your prices up.
Linux can't be accused of this because it's not an individual company competing in the market, and its licensing doesn't allow for putting the price up -- it's perpetually free.
The issue in this case though, is that the Linux XBox team can't crack the digital signature that Microsoft uses (AFAIK), so they have to ask Microsoft, or waste time in trying to crack it.
Yes. AFAIK too, MS use the same standards of signing as PGP does, so if the Linux teams crack their signing key in any reasonable amount of time, I'd be really fucking worried for the integrity of digital signatures as a whole. If we could crack MS's private key quickly, we could crack anyone's private key quickly.
By the time the Dreamcast was hacked, it was already dying
That's true, but then the DC did have a really short lifespan compared to other consoles. I remember using an unofficial Megadrive/Genesis dev-kit, written by cracking groups, on the Amiga in 1990, and the Megadrive was still profitable until I think about 1993-1994 when trailing-off interest and the new messiah (the Sony Playstation) killed it.
were it not for the Mill CD backdoor in the BootROM, the Dreamcast most likely would not have been hacked
Well, I think we have to thank Sony for this. Prior to the Playstation, console owners were contented not to get magazine demos like the computer owners. However, once Sony moved to CD-based media, console owners now expect game demos on magazines. While Sega made it difficult to easily pirate GD-ROMs because of the custom pressing hardware, it also made demo CDs financially unviable. So they added the CD backdoor to allow for coverdisc and trade-show demos. This is why Sony and Microsoft use media that can be duplicated with conventional CD/DVD mastering facilities, although obviously not with consumer CD-R/DVD-R drives.
some titles that had checks for whether or not they were on real discs or not
Most discs do, for virtually all games platforms. They just get cracked. If the DC games used more than the capacity of a regular CD-R, the crackers added disc-changing code. The same happened with Amiga games that used more sectors than normal copyable disks, and their game data was already fully compressed -- they were split onto two normal disks by crackers.
Actually, my favourite anti-piracy code is a tie between the anti-Action Replay code (the Amiga has a Time-Of-Day counter which continually ticks away and can't be set by software to anything other than zero -- just run normal timer interrupts and check the TOD has elapsed by the amount you expect it to, then your software can't be successfully "unfrozen" from an Action Replay "backup" (memory and register dump)) and the Rob Northen Copylock (self-decrypting-reencrypting trace mode code that depended on both register contents and the status register for correct decryption, and it read a protected track which had sectors that were fractionally longer than the sectors the Amiga/Atari could write by itself -- timing tolerance margins in the disk-reading hardware allowed for them, but they physically took longer to read, and that could be measured with the high-resolution timers).
Sure, but only if they're not bankrupted in court by a company with bigger pockets than them tying things up (i.e. Microsoft) while trying to prove it.
Yes. Thanks for the precedent, Sony.
Buy a PS2 or Gamecube instead.
They make no money on X-box games
Yet more X-boxes lie unsold in warehouses. They don't even make $200 on them, never mind the $400 they cost to make.
Less developers are convinced that the X-box is a success, which means less games developed for the X-box, which means less money once again.
MS are selling X-boxes below cost to _gain market share_. It is an illegal practice (at least, it is in international trade). Getting _market share_ is what they want, and is the key to how much money they make. To deny them money, deny them market share. The best way to do this is buy one of their competitor's machines, which increases the games market _at the expense of MS_.
Buying an X-box gives MS $200 of your money, regardless of what you do with it, and they use it as propoganda with developers. Don't let them win.
Bye bye to Castle Technologies, Linux kernel pirates*. Why you couldn't just use castle.co.uk in the first place, we may never know.
*: ALLEGEDLY
I use two programs to retrieve files, wget and Mozilla. Both show the download rate whether I'm fetching from HTTP or FTP.
What bugs me is when servers won't tell me the final downloaded file size -- no ETA available. I've seen both FTP and HTTP servers do it. The same goes for servers that don't support resuming or last-modified dates. They suck.
anywhere in Westminster Council's territory.
Investors shouldn't be misinformed.
The investors should not be told this encryption is "unbreakable".
The investors should be told that the encryption is based on two 32-bit keys derived from passwords, a 256-byte header which boils down to a 7-bit key, and a one-time-pad file of arbitrary size (the "million bit key"). The encryption involves executing a state machine with a large number of different permutation methods, rather than sticking to a single ciphering method which allow building a statistical model of how well the plaintext is perturbed.
The investors should be told that -- despite not revealing the algorithm -- the encryption software has been reverse-engineered and a portable decryptor written in C.
The investors, finally, should be told that the encryption is almost useless. In order for any legitimate party to decrypt a file, you need to send them the one-time-pad as well. If you're storing files encrypted for your own private use, you need to store the one-time-pad somewhere secure. Why not just store your files unencrypted in this secure place? If you encrypt more than one file with the same one-time-pad, that renders it useless - only the ~71 bits need to be broken.
I suspect that the "mail in a floppy" tactic is so there isn't 10 million copies of the RISC OS PCI subsystem source code floating about on the 'net by next week.
I also suspect that they will order the routines or name the variables in that code so they can match copies they find posted on the internet with the exact home address of the person who leaked them.
Also note that Linux has a 'pseudo-SAK' key, Alt-SysRq-K. It's not a true SAK, as XFree86 (and any other program with root priveleges) can take control of the keyboard if it wants to. However, Alt-SysRq-K will kill normal user processes on the console (also, processes with root priveleges that don't take over the keyboard handling) and return you to whatever the
Of course, I'd just you a keyghost hardware keystroke logger, so it wouldn't really matter what your software setup was like.
I think ThinkGeek used to sell these babies for a little while, they probably realised they' have rather unethical uses. You might need to break your own locks if you've lost your key, but you certainly don't need to log your own keystrokes because you've forgotten your password.
RAR will never be free, but you can decompress RAR files with the non-free open source unrar.
Do you actually do any free software development? Perhaps you're just a good little consumer and don't care about the power struggles "behind the scenes" as long as you get your bread and circuses.
As it happens, if I wanted to play a DVD, I have the choice of my dedicated DVD player (which connects to a 5.1 decoder), my Playstation 2, or my Linux PC (which has my entire CD collection on it), all of which are connected to a decent amp. All three are better quality than an X Box.
What I think is strange is why Bill think's it's OK to sell his X boxes for $100 less than they cost to make, but he won't pay $100 towards my own choice of hardware. I'm not interested in a X Box, but if MS would pay to take $100 off the price of a PS2, that'd be cool. I bought one anyway though, because the games are a lot better.
Slave.
You're so easily bought.
MS could easily withstand "selling" all their X Boxes at $0. They're not looking to turn a profit, like normal companies. All they care about is the "sales" numbers, so they can win over developers they can't otherwise buy.
Why not wait for them to drop the price to $0 before you "buy" your X Box?
How it this article any more than a barely-disguised advert for X boxes?
Let me make this perfectly clear - every X Box sold (no matter what you use it for) is used as propoganda to convince developers to write for it, which puts more developers under the thumb of MS, and makes money for MS so they can oppress and harass free software developers.
If anything, you should be buying systems from MICROSOFT'S COMPETITORS. BUY A NINTENDO GAMECUBE, A SONY PLAYSTATION, A PALMOS-BASED HANDHELD and A SYMBIANOS-BASED PHONE.
IANAL.
.tar.gz files, there's no need to use GNU tar or gzip. The tar file format is freely knowable (it was originally invented in AT&T UNIX) and the zlib needed to compress it is BSD licensed.
I think the DMCA prevents you reverse-engineering "effective controls" only if you then publish the details of those controls, or material which was protected by them. If you reverse-engineer "effective controls" in order to prepare evidence of copyright infringement in a private litigation, I doubt that would be considered as "publishing" in any respect. If it was, I'm sure the court would give some sort of authority (perhaps to police or government official operating on your behalf) to circumvent the DMCA for that specific instance.
Adding "you can reverse-engineer this code" to the GPL wouldn't do anything, as I could start reverse-engineering, say, Photoshop, on the grounds that I "might find some GPL code" which gave me permission to reverse-engineer anything and everything in order to find if it had been stolen or not.
Oh, and if something is outputting
you can only declare variables at the start of a block in C, eg for(...){int i;...} or {int i; for(...){...}}
making a perfectly modular approach while supporting so many different formats and codecs is easier said than done.
But it has been done -- in Xine.
Reverse-engineering is the perfect solution, but in practice it can only be done for simple things.
You clearly don't know how difficult (read: easy) it is to do reverse engineering. It only takes a skilled reverse-engineer (of which there are thousands in this world, most of them are ex-crackers), time and interest.
I've reverse engineered decompression algorithms far more difficult than SVQ3's decoder. Although I haven't seen it, there are rumours that SVQ3 has been reverse-engineered and posted anonymously to Usenet. They say it's just H.263 with some scrambling tables, so Sorensen can claim copyright infringement (of those tables) if anyone writes a decoder. All WMV and WMA codecs have been reverse-engineered. There is nothing mystical or special about a multimedia codec, it's just an algorithm like anything else.
One last example, the even more difficult Microsoft Media Player DRM has been flawlessly reverse-engineered (not by me), despite being actively encrypted and made difficult to run through.
The MPlayer authors are rarely the guys behind reimplementing codecs -- that's what the authors of ffmpeg (libavcodec) do. MPlayer just takes the glory by putting it all together.
The problem is, it's difficult to make good MPlayer binaries
It's difficult to make good MPlayer binaries because MPlayer is badly written. Don't you get that? If the MPlayer authors actually cared about well-written software, it would use carefully crafted, modular APIs between all the component parts. I could add Quicktime codecs to MPlayer just by copying a hypothetical mp_qtime.so into lib/mplayer/codecs. Instead, it's a sprawling mess with files all over the place and a special codecs.conf acting as a central registry. Why can't each plugin tell Mplayer what capabilities it has, like Xine or XMMS does?
MPlayer is famous simply mostly because it got Win32 codecs to work outside Windows. Kudos to them for doing so, but distributing other people's binary codecs is usually illegal. Apple don't permit you to hack into the Sorensen codecs and get them to work outside Quicktime Player.
How would the like MPlayer authors like mplayer to be embedded as a binary in some media player, without source? Oh yeah, they whined like kiddies when that happened.
I happen to write decompressors for various archive formats. Do I just take DOS binaries for those formats and hack into them to run them in Linux, then say "x86 only guys!"? No, I fully reverse-engineer the originals and write new depackers from scratch. The MPlayer team should do the same, and stop relying on other people's binaries for their glory.
Press 'j' to 'jump to file'. This lets you search the text of the playlist, so just make sure the playlist has album, artist and song title in it.
Can't you just use some "virtual servers" feature to forward ports 23, 69/udp and 80 to a box on the LAN side of the router/modem?
Even though my AMX router actually has a "external access" tickbox, unticking it doesn't actually stop the router responding to http and ftp from the WAN side. So I configured it forward those ports through to the LAN side and let my PC say "connection refused" instead.
And you think mainstream music in the 1950 and 60s was different to now? It wasn't.
BBC radio was the same old bland rubbish back then. Kids had to listen to live music or tune in to foreign radio stations to hear the "new music", the BBC would only play what the government wanted to do. This lead to the invention of pirate radio, radio stations on ships anchored in international waters off the British coast.
Independent radio isn't a god-given right, it's a business just like the music business. It can only survive if it can sell its listeners to its advertisers. You can't run a radio station out of your own pocket like you can with a website, unless you're very rich. Imagine a student radio station: the radio authority fees for FM would be £1500 non-refundable application fee + £214 per year. The Performing Rights fees would be £400 per year, and then there's the transmitter and studio electricity bill, assuming your DJs are doing it for free and playing only their own records to save the station buying any! You can't get away without sponsorship, and sponsors are only looking for one thing - your audience.
The same thing goes for any pubs and clubs you've been to - there's a world of fees and licensing ready to swallow you up unless you turn a steady profit.
Please stop pretending that "independent" radio, clubs and musicians are anything less than money-grubbing whores, because that's what they are.
Yes, if I'd realised in the 1960s that there was going to be more than one phone company, and the population of London was going to hit 10 million, not to mention new fangled gadgets like pagers and mobile phones were going to be invented and become incredibly popular, then I would have introduced the unified numbering scheme earlier.
You forget that many dialing codes formed out of growing from 999 numbers in the area to 9999, to 99999, and each time the existing numbers got a prefix digit. Perhaps we should start dialing 20 digit numbers NOW to avoid future numbering changes? I could start a new business purely on replacing worn-out "0" keys on people's phones.