"IE not legal to buy and install on an existing machine"
It's not legal? You actually bother to repeat that crap? I understand that you are trying to point out that the quoted price implies some unsupported action on the part of the person making the purchases. But please don't spout the company line about purchasing and using a product as being somehow illegal.
The price of this item is about the same as Roku. How do the units compare? I saw a friend's Roku which he had connected to an HD display and playing HD transport streams that were stored on a server's hard drive. Does this device even have the ability to display an HD transport stream (the format used for HDTV broadcasts in the USA)?
"In conclusion: overrated, overpriced Mac hardware. For the same price you can get a Hauppuage product that can also timeshift television."
Have you ever owned and used a Hauppauge product? I've had a couple and to compare that crap with almost anything on the Mac (or the PC for that matter) shows ignorance or chutzpah of the first order. Then there is the odd comparison with a Linux product that can involve installing a few binaries and setting up some cron tasks. Right, that is a real valid comparison.
What I suspect you are missing is that people are willing to pay to get something that just works rather than turn the whole thing into a project or a continuing hobby. I like the CreativeLabs TiVo-like product I have for the PC but it still has some rough edges and only works for TV. When I selected it there wasn't anything at a comparable price that included a radio tuner. That was less than 5 years ago so I suspect your numbers might be a little off.
I was concerned that I tried to be too brief. The question is if the product you describe allows time shifting of a radio program in the same manner as a TiVo allows for TV. Specifically, can you pause a radio program to do something else and then continue to listen without waiting for the entire program to be recorded without missing anything? It is the simultaneous recording and playback while a program is being broadcast that is the big deal here. The elgato product I have for my Mac allows that for TV as does the Creative Labs board I have for my PC. The FusionHDTV board for my PC does NOT have that capability.
All three of those are video products. The (minor) innovation in this case is that someone has finally added a capability for radio that had been overlooked. I suspect your Tuner/Radio device doesn't have that capability but you don't mention the model and I doubt they would go out of their way to point out what they don't do.
In case I've been too brief again the important point here is how much work the product does to decouple you from a rigid broadcast schedule. If you just want to listen to a program after it is over you don't need anything beyond what recording to tape allowed. But recording to a hard drive opens new possibilities that have been exploited for TV but oddly not for radio until now.
"There have been USB based TV Tuner/Radio capture devices for years now. So a highly stylized Mac product comes out that is overpriced and overhyped. How is this Slashdot news?"
There were VCRs for years before TiVo appeared. How can TiVo be considered newsworthy? The reason is because the interface to the user no longer acts like the data is being stored on a tape. For example the ability to record and play back from a live stream flexibly is enabled by recording to a hard drive but not always made available.
(b) In a case where the making of the copies or phonorecords would have constituted an infringement of copyright if this title had been applicable, their importation is prohibited. "
What I can read is the word "importation". Since downloading does not involve importation (something I believe you have strenuously argued) how could this clause be of any relevance? Wouldn't it be more likely that this clause is about pirate CD's and not about downloads at all?
Like many others I am not about to modify my behavior based on the musings of armchair lawyers when there are courts available to adjudicate these issues. If the RIAA does not bring a case against Allofmp3.com and win it, it would be distinctly odd for me to reach their (the deservedly despised RIAA) desired conclusion without them having even attempted to bring a case.
With apologies to the community for being abusive in the wording of a subject, I think it is justified in answering the original abusive reply. You may disagree with a person without blurting out the accusation that the person is a thief. I would save that sort of claim for the case of shoplifting. One of the aspects of language that can be quite useful is its ability to be used to make distinctions.
Buying a CD and then disposing of it in a manner which you, the RIAA and their lackeys find fault is hardly the ocassion that warrants name calling. The person involved actually purchases a CD and at no time sets himself up as a competitive commercial distributer of the material. He doesn't even mention the possibility of non-commercial distribution, just disposing of the physical disc which he purchased.
If a business model is so fragile that it requires authority over the contents of a legitimate customer's hard drive and the legal right to approve or disapprove sale of used items, then that business model is hopelessly broken. Passing increasingly draconian regulations to prop up something so clearly broken does little beyond increasing disdain for authority which is needed for legitimate causes. Thomas Jefferson was opposed to copyright law because of his concern for its potential for abuse. For most of us it took over two hundred years for those concerns to start becoming obvious but it is hard to ignore his concerns now.
Just go to Suprnova.org and look for the torrent file. That is how I managed to get WorldWind downloaded. Why does anyone bother with centrally configured downloads of large files? Set up a tracker and make the torrent file available and you get scalable download capability that increases as the demand gets larger.
I am a subscriber to Keyhole which is a much more powerful and accessible product. But to be fair it is not free. If you are intrigued by World Wind and would like to have a look at the real thing you can get a 7 day or 14 day trial. The longer trial and lower subscription price are for the NVidia version of Keyhole which is subsidized by NVidia (I suppose). Please note though that an NVidia graphics board is not a necessity. The current first year subscription for the NVidia version is $30.
I don't work for Keyhole but as someone else commented I wouldn't mind. For example, would they like to produce a Mac version of the product?
I suppose you were looking for a software only solution and what I'm describing really is software only but the software is written to only work if you have the board installed. The board is any one of the HDTV receiver boards from DVico. The one I purchased well over a year ago is their original board and I purchased it for less than $150 as a new product from Digital Connection.
The software that comes with this product is not without any problems but it has at least two very nice features. If your graphics card has DVI out it is capable of sending the digital video signal to an external HDTV over DVI as well as display the HD image in a window on your PC. The other nice feature is that it will work with any firewire port your PC has (obviously I have only tested the "any" part of that description in my own case). I believe the enabling condition you need is to be running XP. You just click the button on the bottom left of the FusionHDTV control window which is labeled DVHS to view a transport stream that is connected to your firewire port.
The specific setup I have tested is running Virtual DVHS on a Mac and viewing the content on the PC running FusionHDTV with the DVHS button selected. On the other hand you can use VLC to play HDTV for sources across ethernet when you can run VLC on both platforms. It would involve more description than most would care to read but the gist is that you have Advanced Output options available when you open a file and the receiver can use Open network to receive the content. I've used this with VLC running on the PC and Mac.
What a brilliant idea, blame the victim. "Your cluelessness makes you deserve your miserable fate". Thank goodness this sort of attitude is not acceptable in most other areas of life. Hmm, he didn't study the details of internal combustion engines so it is his fault that such a slight flaw in the design led to his death in an accident.
Will it ever be an acceptable idea that products that routinely catastrophically fail are poorly designed? Because my preference is to use Mac OS X, I suppose I could take the attitude that XP users just get what they deserve, but I have a machine running XP so that doesn't seem like such a reasonable position.
I think this reply is disingenuous since you changed from teachers' pay to cost per pupil which are two significantly different things. Compare teachers' salaries in the US to what is paid in European countries. When people point to cost per pupil they include the bloated administrative costs, programs that have no educational content, massive programs to bus children to distant schools and so on.
Keep the focus on the front-line workers. Not the administrators and bureaucrats. One of the best episodes of "Yes, MInister" included a hospital that hadn't opened yet but was a hotbed of employment and activity. It was humorous because it was both outrageous and oddly believable.
Did you misspell both "blatant" and "misspellings" on purpose? One might think that with all this computing power at our disposal we would have spell checkers that would be more effective. Handling the distinction between "affect" and "effect" would be harder but not allowing nonexistent spellings should be trivial.
Has everyone already forgotten the fatwah that was issued for Salman Rushdie for "committing a crime" in one country while residing in another? His crime was writing a book considered impious ("The Satanic Verses") and his sentence was death.
So if US law can be applied world wide why not Islamic law? In the past I thought most US policy makers showed proper caution about allowing too much authority that could supercede national sovereignty. The principle is much more important than the specifics. So it is not bad enough that people who have government granted monopolies are given authority over what technology is allowed, now they are allowed to set precedents that could undermine national sovereignty? What a looming nightmare.
If someone were breaking into a store and taking the CD's I would agree. If someone were making their own unauthorized CD's and selling them I would also agree. But no item is being stolen. Instead something more abstract is happening related to the second case. Sometimes making a copy is infringement and sometimes it is fair use. The problem a lot of us have is that in order to protect the specifics of a business model many are willing to gut the provision of fair use and eviscerate the public domain.
I would suggest a modification to your calculation. The length of the border between Canada and Alaska is 2,477 km and seems like it would not be logically involved in this matter. First because it runs directly north-south so there is no 100 mile region above this border and second because neither country has much population to speak of in this region. That brings the 'inhabited area' to something more like 400,000 square miles. That puts the effective populatin density to about 73 people per square mile.
If the populations of both countries were homogeneously spread they would probably be equally unlikely to be attractive markets for broadband. The more important question is how large the proportion is that willingly squish themselves into sufficiently high density concentrations. In other words what proportion of the Canadian population is 'urban' versus what proportion of the US population is 'urban'.
On a related issue has anyone looked at the statistics for something like Folding@Home or seti and tried to make sense of the geographical distribution of contributors? Specifically where are the so-called broadband exemplars like South Korea and Singapore? It is as if they don't exist. Is it just a language issue? Are they only using the bandwidth as an over-engineered method to deliver what cable TV has done for decades?
Why do some people take such pride in things they don't do? Congratulations, you succeed in not viewing any television. Do you also manage to not watch movies at home or at the theater? Have you also managed to avoid live theatrical performances and musicals? If your point is that most of TV is meritricious tripe I don't think you will find a very committed opposition. For that matter most published literature is a significant disappointment. Is your home a proudly book-free zone?
Getting away from the pervasive commercials of TV is an understandable goal. Doing so by burning your TV set seems like an odd method. By all means continue your defiant stance against the media overlords but don't expect any lauditory poems to be written in your honor.
"the HD tuner card and software must rely on PSIP data for program guide"
Nope. I have one of the first generation Dvico cards so I can verify that it works fine with TitanTV.com. The remaining question is if TitanTV has the correct channel lineup for your cable system. I can't verify that detail since I don't subscribe to cable but when you examine the web site they certainly seem to have the cable channel mapping question addressed. By clicking on the appropriate button on the web site you either schedule a recording or if the program is currently playing the channel is changed to that program.
"...I am referring to is cable content from non-OTA sources..."
You were referring to HD content in a manner that I thought implied that HD would all be encrypted rendering a QAM receiver like the Dvico board unusable for cable. If it were not for the FCC regulation I would agree with that position. But don't forget the original reason for the existence of cable TV. It allowed people to get OTA signals that would otherwise be unviewable with an antenna.
There will always be a large number of people who need cable in order to get good reception of OTA stations. For them an HDTV tuner card that handles QAM will be just what they need for no fewer than 7 networks that provide original HDTV programming. It won't handle HBO or Showtime (or ESPN, Discovery, etc). But whereas the broadcast stations have been given their marching orders for HDTV, the numerous cable networks have no such enforced motivation and some may never upgrade.
"able operators in north america encrypt their high value content (HD is definitely high value)"
You might benefit from some fact checking before making definitive pronouncements. According to FCC regulation, cable TV operators are NOT allowed to encrypt signals they obtain from OTA sources. Not all cable operators will necessarily be in compliance but such companies are violating their regulations and can face penalties if reported to the FCC. There are details I am glossing over but the claim that everything will be encrypted is a red herring.
If you want to speculate about the actual product go to its website: http://www.dvico.com/. If your PC has a video card with DVI out as an option you can send the HD signal (not some pathetic neutered NTSC version that would have to go out an S-Video or composite video port). You can also send the unaltered transport stream out a FireWire port to an HD compatible FireWire port on another device. Examples would include D-VHS decks, some DVR's that are appearing and some Mitsubishi TV's will take FireWire input.
Depends on how you define majority. If you equate one hour of CSI to one hour of travel documentary on Discovery you will get results that don't reflect the viewing habits of most people. For entertainment programming in HD you have all the OTA networks: ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, WB, UPN, and PBS and then there is HBO and Showtime with a few popular programs. Since so few cable networks have converted to HD while essentially all new OTA network programs are HD (even on the WB, UPN is the exception with very little HD content so far). Notice that if you live in one of many markets (Minneapolis being one) you can connect an antenna to that card and get a great deal of HD for $0 per month.
So if you count hours of new entertainment programming, I think you will still get the majority of content in unscrambled form. If you factor in ratings I think the lead would increase. Sports are another matter.
Yes, I can see that way of reading your comments. There are so many others acting as if this exploit strips the DRM and talk about invoking the DMCA that I felt something had to be said to keep the discussion closer to the actual facts. I've got nothing against counter-factual hypotheticals, I just need to pay closer attention.
"While the idiot does this, his neighbor, the resourceful hacker, sniffs out the Ethernet frames, pulls down a stream of Apple Lossless Format audio, and saves it to his disk. Now he, and anyone else with technical expertise in range, will have any audio sent to the unit, including music purchased that the iTunes Music Store."
Would that technical expertise include the ability to compute an RSA private key from the corresponding public key? Because this hack only includes Apple's public key. The stream is still encrypted (using AES and the AES key is encrypted with Apple's public RSA key).
Without Apple's private key you can sniff all you want and all you will get is random pile of bits. The Apple Express can play the music because it has the private key. You don't.
"Hey, can your neighbor snoop your S/PDIF port and record off it? No? Thought so. Can some guy with a cantenna a mile away sniff your S/PDIF port?"
I think you are missing a significant point in this story. Jon's hack does NOT crack Apple's encryption. If he had managed to crack AES/RSA this would be a much bigger story. The losslessly compressed stream being sent to Apple Express whether from iTunes or a JustePort equivalent is still an encrypted stream. Without Apple's private key you cannot read the stream. Jon found Apple's corresponding public key and followed the details how iTunes sets up the stream and emulates them in his product.
Nobody's encryption has been cracked. The reason it is called a public key is because it can and usually has to be made public in order to be useful. But being public in no way compromises the security of the encryption as long as the corresponding private key is not revealed.
Thanks for an actually useful post. I don't understand why so many are trying to invoke the DMCA except for an unfortunate lemming effect. Notice that he didn't crack or attempt to crack any encryption. Both AES and RSA are still secure. All three protocols involved: AES, RSA, and RTSP, are public. As is (almost?) always the case with RSA the public key involved is public and expected to be (hence the term public key).
The formula is as simple as a recipe. Take any AES symmetric key, apply Apple's public key to it and stream the AES encrypted media to the Apple Express. Of course that still leaves the minor matter of execution but there was no cracking involved. The resulting stream can still only be unscrambled by Apple's product which has access to the corresponding private key.
I suppose Apple is scrambling the stream to insure that only approved devices, like Apple Express, can actually play the music. To everything else which does not have the private key, the stream is just noise. This development doesn't change that fact. Apple's product is just as secure today as it was before the announcement. If Apple Express rejects sessions that pass through too many routers it will still do so for any non-Apple sources.
It is obviously a nice hack because the user has a wider choice of sources but everyone can climb down from the ramparts. Notice also (from the article, the web site is still inaccessible past midnight) that this still spreads Apple's influence somewhat further because the Apple Express is designed to play only streams that are compressed with Apple's lossless compressor. Apple's lossless codec is available for Mac OS X (obviously) and Windows if you install iTunes and/or QuickTime.
Slashdot Mirror
"IE not legal to buy and install on an existing machine"
It's not legal? You actually bother to repeat that crap? I understand that you are trying to point out that the quoted price implies some unsupported action on the part of the person making the purchases. But please don't spout the company line about purchasing and using a product as being somehow illegal.
The price of this item is about the same as Roku. How do the units compare? I saw a friend's Roku which he had connected to an HD display and playing HD transport streams that were stored on a server's hard drive. Does this device even have the ability to display an HD transport stream (the format used for HDTV broadcasts in the USA)?
"In conclusion: overrated, overpriced Mac hardware. For the same price you can get a Hauppuage product that can also timeshift television."
Have you ever owned and used a Hauppauge product? I've had a couple and to compare that crap with almost anything on the Mac (or the PC for that matter) shows ignorance or chutzpah of the first order. Then there is the odd comparison with a Linux product that can involve installing a few binaries and setting up some cron tasks. Right, that is a real valid comparison.
What I suspect you are missing is that people are willing to pay to get something that just works rather than turn the whole thing into a project or a continuing hobby. I like the CreativeLabs TiVo-like product I have for the PC but it still has some rough edges and only works for TV. When I selected it there wasn't anything at a comparable price that included a radio tuner. That was less than 5 years ago so I suspect your numbers might be a little off.
I was concerned that I tried to be too brief. The question is if the product you describe allows time shifting of a radio program in the same manner as a TiVo allows for TV. Specifically, can you pause a radio program to do something else and then continue to listen without waiting for the entire program to be recorded without missing anything? It is the simultaneous recording and playback while a program is being broadcast that is the big deal here. The elgato product I have for my Mac allows that for TV as does the Creative Labs board I have for my PC. The FusionHDTV board for my PC does NOT have that capability.
All three of those are video products. The (minor) innovation in this case is that someone has finally added a capability for radio that had been overlooked. I suspect your Tuner/Radio device doesn't have that capability but you don't mention the model and I doubt they would go out of their way to point out what they don't do.
In case I've been too brief again the important point here is how much work the product does to decouple you from a rigid broadcast schedule. If you just want to listen to a program after it is over you don't need anything beyond what recording to tape allowed. But recording to a hard drive opens new possibilities that have been exploited for TV but oddly not for radio until now.
"There have been USB based TV Tuner/Radio capture devices for years now. So a highly stylized Mac product comes out that is overpriced and overhyped. How is this Slashdot news?"
There were VCRs for years before TiVo appeared. How can TiVo be considered newsworthy? The reason is because the interface to the user no longer acts like the data is being stored on a tape. For example the ability to record and play back from a live stream flexibly is enabled by recording to a hard drive but not always made available.
"What, can't you read?
(b) In a case where the making of the copies or phonorecords would have constituted an infringement of copyright if this title had been applicable, their importation is prohibited. "
What I can read is the word "importation". Since downloading does not involve importation (something I believe you have strenuously argued) how could this clause be of any relevance? Wouldn't it be more likely that this clause is about pirate CD's and not about downloads at all?
Like many others I am not about to modify my behavior based on the musings of armchair lawyers when there are courts available to adjudicate these issues. If the RIAA does not bring a case against Allofmp3.com and win it, it would be distinctly odd for me to reach their (the deservedly despised RIAA) desired conclusion without them having even attempted to bring a case.
With apologies to the community for being abusive in the wording of a subject, I think it is justified in answering the original abusive reply. You may disagree with a person without blurting out the accusation that the person is a thief. I would save that sort of claim for the case of shoplifting. One of the aspects of language that can be quite useful is its ability to be used to make distinctions.
Buying a CD and then disposing of it in a manner which you, the RIAA and their lackeys find fault is hardly the ocassion that warrants name calling. The person involved actually purchases a CD and at no time sets himself up as a competitive commercial distributer of the material. He doesn't even mention the possibility of non-commercial distribution, just disposing of the physical disc which he purchased.
If a business model is so fragile that it requires authority over the contents of a legitimate customer's hard drive and the legal right to approve or disapprove sale of used items, then that business model is hopelessly broken. Passing increasingly draconian regulations to prop up something so clearly broken does little beyond increasing disdain for authority which is needed for legitimate causes. Thomas Jefferson was opposed to copyright law because of his concern for its potential for abuse. For most of us it took over two hundred years for those concerns to start becoming obvious but it is hard to ignore his concerns now.
Just go to Suprnova.org and look for the torrent file. That is how I managed to get WorldWind downloaded. Why does anyone bother with centrally configured downloads of large files? Set up a tracker and make the torrent file available and you get scalable download capability that increases as the demand gets larger.
I am a subscriber to Keyhole which is a much more powerful and accessible product. But to be fair it is not free. If you are intrigued by World Wind and would like to have a look at the real thing you can get a 7 day or 14 day trial. The longer trial and lower subscription price are for the NVidia version of Keyhole which is subsidized by NVidia (I suppose). Please note though that an NVidia graphics board is not a necessity. The current first year subscription for the NVidia version is $30.
I don't work for Keyhole but as someone else commented I wouldn't mind. For example, would they like to produce a Mac version of the product?
I suppose you were looking for a software only solution and what I'm describing really is software only but the software is written to only work if you have the board installed. The board is any one of the HDTV receiver boards from DVico. The one I purchased well over a year ago is their original board and I purchased it for less than $150 as a new product from Digital Connection.
The software that comes with this product is not without any problems but it has at least two very nice features. If your graphics card has DVI out it is capable of sending the digital video signal to an external HDTV over DVI as well as display the HD image in a window on your PC. The other nice feature is that it will work with any firewire port your PC has (obviously I have only tested the "any" part of that description in my own case). I believe the enabling condition you need is to be running XP. You just click the button on the bottom left of the FusionHDTV control window which is labeled DVHS to view a transport stream that is connected to your firewire port.
The specific setup I have tested is running Virtual DVHS on a Mac and viewing the content on the PC running FusionHDTV with the DVHS button selected. On the other hand you can use VLC to play HDTV for sources across ethernet when you can run VLC on both platforms. It would involve more description than most would care to read but the gist is that you have Advanced Output options available when you open a file and the receiver can use Open network to receive the content. I've used this with VLC running on the PC and Mac.
What a brilliant idea, blame the victim. "Your cluelessness makes you deserve your miserable fate". Thank goodness this sort of attitude is not acceptable in most other areas of life. Hmm, he didn't study the details of internal combustion engines so it is his fault that such a slight flaw in the design led to his death in an accident.
Will it ever be an acceptable idea that products that routinely catastrophically fail are poorly designed? Because my preference is to use Mac OS X, I suppose I could take the attitude that XP users just get what they deserve, but I have a machine running XP so that doesn't seem like such a reasonable position.
I think this reply is disingenuous since you changed from teachers' pay to cost per pupil which are two significantly different things. Compare teachers' salaries in the US to what is paid in European countries. When people point to cost per pupil they include the bloated administrative costs, programs that have no educational content, massive programs to bus children to distant schools and so on.
Keep the focus on the front-line workers. Not the administrators and bureaucrats. One of the best episodes of "Yes, MInister" included a hospital that hadn't opened yet but was a hotbed of employment and activity. It was humorous because it was both outrageous and oddly believable.
Did you misspell both "blatant" and "misspellings" on purpose? One might think that with all this computing power at our disposal we would have spell checkers that would be more effective. Handling the distinction between "affect" and "effect" would be harder but not allowing nonexistent spellings should be trivial.
Has everyone already forgotten the fatwah that was issued for Salman Rushdie for "committing a crime" in one country while residing in another? His crime was writing a book considered impious ("The Satanic Verses") and his sentence was death.
So if US law can be applied world wide why not Islamic law? In the past I thought most US policy makers showed proper caution about allowing too much authority that could supercede national sovereignty. The principle is much more important than the specifics. So it is not bad enough that people who have government granted monopolies are given authority over what technology is allowed, now they are allowed to set precedents that could undermine national sovereignty? What a looming nightmare.
If someone were breaking into a store and taking the CD's I would agree. If someone were making their own unauthorized CD's and selling them I would also agree. But no item is being stolen. Instead something more abstract is happening related to the second case. Sometimes making a copy is infringement and sometimes it is fair use. The problem a lot of us have is that in order to protect the specifics of a business model many are willing to gut the provision of fair use and eviscerate the public domain.
I would suggest a modification to your calculation. The length of the border between Canada and Alaska is 2,477 km and seems like it would not be logically involved in this matter. First because it runs directly north-south so there is no 100 mile region above this border and second because neither country has much population to speak of in this region. That brings the 'inhabited area' to something more like 400,000 square miles. That puts the effective populatin density to about 73 people per square mile.
If the populations of both countries were homogeneously spread they would probably be equally unlikely to be attractive markets for broadband. The more important question is how large the proportion is that willingly squish themselves into sufficiently high density concentrations. In other words what proportion of the Canadian population is 'urban' versus what proportion of the US population is 'urban'.
On a related issue has anyone looked at the statistics for something like Folding@Home or seti and tried to make sense of the geographical distribution of contributors? Specifically where are the so-called broadband exemplars like South Korea and Singapore? It is as if they don't exist. Is it just a language issue? Are they only using the bandwidth as an over-engineered method to deliver what cable TV has done for decades?
Why do some people take such pride in things they don't do? Congratulations, you succeed in not viewing any television. Do you also manage to not watch movies at home or at the theater? Have you also managed to avoid live theatrical performances and musicals? If your point is that most of TV is meritricious tripe I don't think you will find a very committed opposition. For that matter most published literature is a significant disappointment. Is your home a proudly book-free zone?
Getting away from the pervasive commercials of TV is an understandable goal. Doing so by burning your TV set seems like an odd method. By all means continue your defiant stance against the media overlords but don't expect any lauditory poems to be written in your honor.
"the HD tuner card and software must rely on PSIP data for program guide"
Nope. I have one of the first generation Dvico cards so I can verify that it works fine with TitanTV.com. The remaining question is if TitanTV has the correct channel lineup for your cable system. I can't verify that detail since I don't subscribe to cable but when you examine the web site they certainly seem to have the cable channel mapping question addressed. By clicking on the appropriate button on the web site you either schedule a recording or if the program is currently playing the channel is changed to that program.
"...I am referring to is cable content from non-OTA sources..."
You were referring to HD content in a manner that I thought implied that HD would all be encrypted rendering a QAM receiver like the Dvico board unusable for cable. If it were not for the FCC regulation I would agree with that position. But don't forget the original reason for the existence of cable TV. It allowed people to get OTA signals that would otherwise be unviewable with an antenna.
There will always be a large number of people who need cable in order to get good reception of OTA stations. For them an HDTV tuner card that handles QAM will be just what they need for no fewer than 7 networks that provide original HDTV programming. It won't handle HBO or Showtime (or ESPN, Discovery, etc). But whereas the broadcast stations have been given their marching orders for HDTV, the numerous cable networks have no such enforced motivation and some may never upgrade.
"able operators in north america encrypt their high value content (HD is definitely high value)"
You might benefit from some fact checking before making definitive pronouncements. According to FCC regulation, cable TV operators are NOT allowed to encrypt signals they obtain from OTA sources. Not all cable operators will necessarily be in compliance but such companies are violating their regulations and can face penalties if reported to the FCC. There are details I am glossing over but the claim that everything will be encrypted is a red herring.
If you want to speculate about the actual product go to its website: http://www.dvico.com/. If your PC has a video card with DVI out as an option you can send the HD signal (not some pathetic neutered NTSC version that would have to go out an S-Video or composite video port). You can also send the unaltered transport stream out a FireWire port to an HD compatible FireWire port on another device. Examples would include D-VHS decks, some DVR's that are appearing and some Mitsubishi TV's will take FireWire input.
Depends on how you define majority. If you equate one hour of CSI to one hour of travel documentary on Discovery you will get results that don't reflect the viewing habits of most people. For entertainment programming in HD you have all the OTA networks: ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, WB, UPN, and PBS and then there is HBO and Showtime with a few popular programs. Since so few cable networks have converted to HD while essentially all new OTA network programs are HD (even on the WB, UPN is the exception with very little HD content so far). Notice that if you live in one of many markets (Minneapolis being one) you can connect an antenna to that card and get a great deal of HD for $0 per month.
So if you count hours of new entertainment programming, I think you will still get the majority of content in unscrambled form. If you factor in ratings I think the lead would increase. Sports are another matter.
Yes, I can see that way of reading your comments. There are so many others acting as if this exploit strips the DRM and talk about invoking the DMCA that I felt something had to be said to keep the discussion closer to the actual facts. I've got nothing against counter-factual hypotheticals, I just need to pay closer attention.
"While the idiot does this, his neighbor, the resourceful hacker, sniffs out the Ethernet frames, pulls down a stream of Apple Lossless Format audio, and saves it to his disk. Now he, and anyone else with technical expertise in range, will have any audio sent to the unit, including music purchased that the iTunes Music Store."
Would that technical expertise include the ability to compute an RSA private key from the corresponding public key? Because this hack only includes Apple's public key. The stream is still encrypted (using AES and the AES key is encrypted with Apple's public RSA key).
Without Apple's private key you can sniff all you want and all you will get is random pile of bits. The Apple Express can play the music because it has the private key. You don't.
"Hey, can your neighbor snoop your S/PDIF port and record off it? No? Thought so. Can some guy with a cantenna a mile away sniff your S/PDIF port?"
I think you are missing a significant point in this story. Jon's hack does NOT crack Apple's encryption. If he had managed to crack AES/RSA this would be a much bigger story. The losslessly compressed stream being sent to Apple Express whether from iTunes or a JustePort equivalent is still an encrypted stream. Without Apple's private key you cannot read the stream. Jon found Apple's corresponding public key and followed the details how iTunes sets up the stream and emulates them in his product.
Nobody's encryption has been cracked. The reason it is called a public key is because it can and usually has to be made public in order to be useful. But being public in no way compromises the security of the encryption as long as the corresponding private key is not revealed.
Thanks for an actually useful post. I don't understand why so many are trying to invoke the DMCA except for an unfortunate lemming effect. Notice that he didn't crack or attempt to crack any encryption. Both AES and RSA are still secure. All three protocols involved: AES, RSA, and RTSP, are public. As is (almost?) always the case with RSA the public key involved is public and expected to be (hence the term public key).
The formula is as simple as a recipe. Take any AES symmetric key, apply Apple's public key to it and stream the AES encrypted media to the Apple Express. Of course that still leaves the minor matter of execution but there was no cracking involved. The resulting stream can still only be unscrambled by Apple's product which has access to the corresponding private key.
I suppose Apple is scrambling the stream to insure that only approved devices, like Apple Express, can actually play the music. To everything else which does not have the private key, the stream is just noise. This development doesn't change that fact. Apple's product is just as secure today as it was before the announcement. If Apple Express rejects sessions that pass through too many routers it will still do so for any non-Apple sources.
It is obviously a nice hack because the user has a wider choice of sources but everyone can climb down from the ramparts. Notice also (from the article, the web site is still inaccessible past midnight) that this still spreads Apple's influence somewhat further because the Apple Express is designed to play only streams that are compressed with Apple's lossless compressor. Apple's lossless codec is available for Mac OS X (obviously) and Windows if you install iTunes and/or QuickTime.