You are full of shit. Your claim (and the claim of others) does not make an assertion true. There are people on the streets of Manhattan who sell copyrighted works which almost certainly constitutes an infringement. It would be one thing to allow for the police to investigate and apprehend such people. It would be another to legalize vigilantes to run amok trying to stop everyone who attempts to sell to the public.
Instead of insisting that you should be able to nail jelly to the wall how about a real solution? Take the money and power out of Washington, D.C. As long as liberals insist on centralizing all that money and power you are going to have this challenge (people seeking influence, etc). One of the crucial ideas of the American experiment was to put limits on how invting a target the central government would be because of all the limitations. As those limitations have crumbled the other results have logically followed.
Give them less power and less money and you won't have to gut the other parts of the constitution to protect elected officials from undue influence.
Hmphh! Teenagers indeed! Some adults quickly decided things like the gnutella protocol needed to be implemented and deployed. I'm familiar with many gnutella developers and there are almost no teenagers among them. Freenet, which is an even more important protocol, seems to be the province of developers in their twenties and thirties. Except for Jon Johanson, the accomplished teenager hacker seems to be largely an invention of the press and popular myth.
In any case, technological civil disobedience is not going to be enough. If tens of millions oppose this crap then they need to monetize their views. You can now use PayPal to pay for membership in EFF (I know because I just did). Go to their web page now and JOIN. If the open technological environment has made it possible for you to become wealthy, then it is a practical decision to make a significant contribution to the EFF in order to protect the world that made your success possible.
If you look at the statistics about the relative sizes of these economical activities, the "entertainment" world is dwarfed by the tech world they seek to command. If we just had it in our collective personality makeup (we don't) to speak up and protest these ignorant outrages they would be properly chastised by the uproar. Since we don't, we need to build organisations like the EFF. Time is running out. There is no guarantee that the Supreme Court will reign in these insults to our Constitution. 'Technological civil disobedience' is not going to be enough. Make your voice (wallet) heard now!
Re:'The Economist' is guilty of wishful thinking
on
Andreesen "Grows Up"
·
· Score: 1
I agree with your observation but would add that it was a separate development from the web that Andreeson helped to advance. It seems like the P2P world had the social impact that it was assumed that the web would have had.
For those who care to keep track it should be noted that Napster was a completely new application written with the internet as its platform with no particular relation to the earlier development of the web. That's not quite fair since the web made distribution of the client software much easier to accomplish. But from a technical perspective it did not develop as a consequence of the web. In fact the most important new characteristics that lead to its success were high speed connections. Other P2P applications benefit from those high speed connections being non-transient. These conditions were not attained until recently (and only for a minority so far).
The next area of public contention will be when P2P aspects of wireless unlicensed networks (e.g. mesh networking) get deployed broadly. Again the complaint will be that they are sharing what others are providing (high speed access to the public internet). Followed soon by efforts to prevent video programming from being "Napsterized". What messy times we live in.
Does it make you feel safe that only mathematically literate readers are certain your comments are absurd and uninformed? Know many people who use 128 bit PGP public keys? Wouldn't it be somewhat more likely that the key length is something like 1024 or 2048 bits?
Now let's make this more explicit. You plan to compute all prime factors of the relevant size and store all corresponding products of each pair so they can be found by a simple lookup. Planning to use the Sieve of Erastosthenes to find all these primes? Regardless the quantity of primes less than a number x (in our case some approximately 512 bit number for 1024 bit keys) is asymptotic to x/log x (the Prime Number Theorem, page 9 of "An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers" by Hardy and Wright). You are considering roughly every possible pair of that quantity so square that number. I get a number around 2^980. Each will require 3000 bits of storage (ignoring, at least for now, attempts to compress) or about 375 bytes. That previous large number is something like 10^327 which we need to bump to 10^329 to get a rough estimate of the number of bytes needed.
I'm hoping I can buy a 100 gigabyte drive for $100 before too long. That would provide 10^11 bytes of storage. So I would need about 10^318 such drives for your project. I suppose when buying in bulk like this I might get a better price but I don't have anything like $10^320 laying around. In fact, I doubt that the NSA has money like that at its disposal.
If it hasn't been piling on already I imagine the next step is, but how long do you think that "table look up" would take if you did manage to assemble that much storage? A nanosecond for each comparison and traversing about half the list on average? So 10^327 times 10^-9 seconds or 10^318 seconds. I seem to recall there are 3.15 times 10^7 seconds per year. Your average look up would take 10^311 years to complete. Current estimates of the time since the big bang at less than 10^10 years. (I also doubt there are 10^300 elementary particles in the universe).
Just to summarize: anyone who thinks brute force is a useful option just doesn't know what he is talking about. Quantum computing is another topic left as an exercise for the reader who wants to consider real threats to RSA.
"I always like it when people think they're individually smarter than hundreds of designers and engineers at multibillion dollar corporations."
How does your world view handle the report that a 15 year old Norwegian was able to write a program to decrypt DVD's? Add to that the fact that a cryptographer, Frank Stevenson (not necessarily employed by a multi-billion dollar corporation), provided an analysis of the algorithm that allowed subsequent decryption programs for DVD's able to extract the right decryption key on the fly.
Or there is the HDCP scheme for DVI video that was cracked using simple linear algebra before it was even deployed. Again work by multi-billion dollar companies undone by hobbyists.
You might want to wait for someone with personal experience with it but I've read there are 802.11 bridge products that allow any ethernet enabled product to gain wireless access. They tend to be more expensive than the cards but the price is going down as competition increases. They are finally available from more than one source. Sorry, I don't have any handy links but that is the name of the product category.
What nonsense, HDCP has already been broken. Several different groups have announced it and it has been reported here. Doesn't anyone pay attention and/or have a memory? The important point is that it doesn't matter. HDCP is used to encrypt a DVI connection from the recorder to the screen. This is an uncompressed high resolution bitstream. Even if you decrypt and capture it you are looking at something that was already 20 megabits per second when it was highly compressed using MPEG-2. The uncompressed stream is about two orders of magnitude larger (that's right, on the order of gigabits per second). Even a full gigabit ethernet could not handle this stream of data and the same goes for most hard drives. So even though the encryption used is ineffective, it is also unnecessary.
I'd be willing to bet that the actual D-VHS tape is recording the MPEG-2 stream that is being broadcast which is still a beast at 20 megabits per second (if it is analogous to regular VCR's it will have its own digital tuner and hence access to the compressed signal without exposing it to capture anywhere except the tape). Comparing it to a standard 5 gigabyte DVD you have a format that usually pumps out 5 megabits per second or less sustained (the maximum the standard allows for is 10 mbps). So a pre-recorded tape would need about four times the capacity of a DVD or about 20 or so gigabytes. If you decompress it you are looking at terabytes of data. So if you have a sufficiently fast terabyte of spare storage available you will be able to "pirate" those movies.
On the other hand there are already no fewer than four PCI boards that provide tuning and capture of current over the air HDTV to your hard drive. They all cost a hell of a lot less than $2,000 (more like $400). The only thing missing is a disc based pre-recorded medium. A 2x DVD-ROM drive supports sufficient data rates to handle HDTV. I'm sure they can do multi-layer 20+ gig pressed DVD's.
Right, they'll sue Intel when hell freezes over. The last thing they would try is to sue anyone with the resources to defend themselves and the 'political' stature to laugh off the lies and slurs the MPAA might attempt.
Re:Some background on the FT network
on
Kazaa to be shut down?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The open protocol equivalent of the FastTrack network is Gnutella. From all appearences the FastTrack network uses a slightly modified gnutella protocol. It is tricky to pin down exactly what improves the FastTrack experience but I would say it is the two-tiered network where only the supernodes have the responsibility of routing most packet traffic.
Ironically this modification of the gnutella protocol was introduced about a year ago by Clip2 when they introduced their Reflector. FastTrack made the observation that this sort of enhancement should be an organizing principle for the entire network rather than a marginal enhancement. It helps to minimize network traffic while extending network visibility horizon by orders of magnitude (by the ratio of nodes : supernodes).
Even as these events transpire the various gnutella clients are in the process of implementing the two layer structure in a very public presentation and review of the needed protocol modifications. Simultaneously we are in the process of adding full file hash values in order to improve the quality of files that can be found and downloaded over gnutella. When hash information has been successfully deployed on the gnutella network we will also be able to implement swarm downloads.
It is a slower process to have a public protocol evolve to respond to empirical results for a variety of clients. But in the end it might be a more robust method.
No, they didn't get as far as putting Prof Felton of Princeton University in jail, but not because of good intentions. A threatening letter was sent to him warning him of criminal charges that could be filed against him if he presented a particular paper at a conference (the paper that analyzed various water marking technologies). He chose not to present that paper because of these threats. The case has continued to evolve and now those thugs who were so quick to send threatening notes are claiming there was nothing to it.
OK, now how do you deal with a spoof attack where legitimate addresses are marked as 'bad'? In other words, how do you deal with the issue of authentication in a decentralized network?
Thank you for expressing the point I was so inadequately trying to put into words. That was exactly my reaction except I foolishly decided to quibble about exactly how many years made sense with a standard was truly unsettled ten years ago (and engage in other pointless disputes). The SGI comment just had so little to do with the AccessDTV board (eg no 8VSB decoder, no TiVo style capability, etc) that it struck me as a complete non sequitur.
Please, that is just an uninteresting historical aside. Current implementations of DeCSS analyze the stream and obtain the key in a fraction of a second because the encryption scheme is so feable and utterly broken. There is no current dependence (and never really was) on the Xing key. As long as they want to maintain compatibility of all the equipment sold already there is hardly any reason to bother with CSS.
Incidentally, if people were paying attention to slashdot they might recall that a researcher in Holland announced a theortical crack of the proposed 4C encryption standard for HDTV. If it is deployed it will be a matter of a short time before the master key of the system is computed and posted. This might enable people to use the equipment they bought to continue to receive HDTV.
If you read the other replies you can see that BoarderPhreak was suffering from a reality distortion:
BoarderPhreak:
FWIW, SGI workstations supported the HDTV format for nearly ten years now... In most video and 3D applications, "HDTV" was also an option - for generating content for this "new format."
lupetto:
I used to work exclusively with SGI hardware and software in a broadcasting environment. HDTV output is fairly new in the SGI world - I'm thinking it came out about two years ago. This HDTV input/output board was made only for the very high end servers (only onyx2 servers afaik).
All I did was call him on his exaggeration and he started the name calling (jackass) and condescending attitude. I'll admit I escalated but if he can't take it he should avoid dishing it out.
Thanks for actually providing an informative response in the middle of this pissing contest. Personally I have nothing against SGI and am pleased to hear they have real value in several areas.
If you knew how spell checkers work, you would know that there would be no spelling checker complaint about goggle since it is the correct spelling of the wrong word. The point is, you pompous, self important jackass, that no one cares if your work station could output to a format called HDTV years ago because it has nothing to do with the article except to compensate for the fact that you are dickless. Now, go away or I'll taunt you once more!
19.4Mbps is the compressed bit stream. It decompresses into something much larger (approx x100). So capturing the raw bit stream is the ideal case for preserving the best picture. No question about it, you need mammoth amounts of disk space for this stuff to be at all feasible.
"As for a $500 board to receive and watch HDTV on an SGI, why the hell would you want to?" Maybe it's a valid question because that is what the article is about, jackass.
As for being the "provider for high-end hardware to the NSA" that's just the vestiges of Cray which has very little to do with SGI except they were acquired. Both businesses (Cray supercomputers and pricey workstations) were declared dead men walking by others some time ago. I've got no dog in that fight so I don't really care. But the arrogant "been there, done that" attitude did strike me as pompous, inaccurate and entirely beside the point.
p.s. The grand alliance document with the completed specifications is dated: Version 2.0, December 7, 1994 which "was adopted by U.S. FCC as the U.S. standard for terrestrial high definition television". You might want to save that nickel and learn how to use Goggle yourself.
Two weeks passed long ago. This is the third HDTV receiver/recorder board to be sold to the public and they have been on the market for months. The current HDTV over the air signal is not encrypted though AccessDTV does play games with the signal in an apparant effort to anticipate future complaints.
The real market breakthrough will arrive when an HDTV tuner card is released that uses the main processor for signal processing (decompression, etc). Those boards should be no more than about $150 but who knows how much processing power will be required? 1.2 GHz? 1.5 GHz?
Jeez, ten years ago the format currently called HDTV did not exist. So what are you smoking? Still steamed because no one cares about your over-priced hardware which is swiftly sinking into obscurity? Let me take a wild guess -- it isn't possible now and it never has been possible to buy a $500 board that would enable a SGI workstation to receive HDTV over the air? Being a Mac user myself I'm not particularly a partisan of the PC world but the implication that PC are about 10 years behind workstations won't survive any reasonable scrutiny.
Slashdot Mirror
Fine, your suggestion is acceptable. Now go away, who needs you?
Hilarity (Hilary) Rosen is the head of the RIAA, not the MPAA. You need to take your poke at Jack Valenti.
"cameras that are new and thus expensive"
Please, they can be purchased for about $150 on eBay and they only work with the T68i phone. Not exactly a natural target for lowlifes.
You are full of shit. Your claim (and the claim of others) does not make an assertion true. There are people on the streets of Manhattan who sell copyrighted works which almost certainly constitutes an infringement. It would be one thing to allow for the police to investigate and apprehend such people. It would be another to legalize vigilantes to run amok trying to stop everyone who attempts to sell to the public.
Instead of insisting that you should be able to nail jelly to the wall how about a real solution? Take the money and power out of Washington, D.C. As long as liberals insist on centralizing all that money and power you are going to have this challenge (people seeking influence, etc). One of the crucial ideas of the American experiment was to put limits on how invting a target the central government would be because of all the limitations. As those limitations have crumbled the other results have logically followed.
Give them less power and less money and you won't have to gut the other parts of the constitution to protect elected officials from undue influence.
Hmphh! Teenagers indeed! Some adults quickly decided things like the gnutella protocol needed to be implemented and deployed. I'm familiar with many gnutella developers and there are almost no teenagers among them. Freenet, which is an even more important protocol, seems to be the province of developers in their twenties and thirties. Except for Jon Johanson, the accomplished teenager hacker seems to be largely an invention of the press and popular myth.
In any case, technological civil disobedience is not going to be enough. If tens of millions oppose this crap then they need to monetize their views. You can now use PayPal to pay for membership in EFF (I know because I just did). Go to their web page now and JOIN. If the open technological environment has made it possible for you to become wealthy, then it is a practical decision to make a significant contribution to the EFF in order to protect the world that made your success possible.
If you look at the statistics about the relative sizes of these economical activities, the "entertainment" world is dwarfed by the tech world they seek to command. If we just had it in our collective personality makeup (we don't) to speak up and protest these ignorant outrages they would be properly chastised by the uproar. Since we don't, we need to build organisations like the EFF. Time is running out. There is no guarantee that the Supreme Court will reign in these insults to our Constitution. 'Technological civil disobedience' is not going to be enough. Make your voice (wallet) heard now!
I agree with your observation but would add that it was a separate development from the web that Andreeson helped to advance. It seems like the P2P world had the social impact that it was assumed that the web would have had.
For those who care to keep track it should be noted that Napster was a completely new application written with the internet as its platform with no particular relation to the earlier development of the web. That's not quite fair since the web made distribution of the client software much easier to accomplish. But from a technical perspective it did not develop as a consequence of the web. In fact the most important new characteristics that lead to its success were high speed connections. Other P2P applications benefit from those high speed connections being non-transient. These conditions were not attained until recently (and only for a minority so far).
The next area of public contention will be when P2P aspects of wireless unlicensed networks (e.g. mesh networking) get deployed broadly. Again the complaint will be that they are sharing what others are providing (high speed access to the public internet). Followed soon by efforts to prevent video programming from being "Napsterized". What messy times we live in.
Does it make you feel safe that only mathematically literate readers are certain your comments are absurd and uninformed? Know many people who use 128 bit PGP public keys? Wouldn't it be somewhat more likely that the key length is something like 1024 or 2048 bits?
Now let's make this more explicit. You plan to compute all prime factors of the relevant size and store all corresponding products of each pair so they can be found by a simple lookup. Planning to use the Sieve of Erastosthenes to find all these primes? Regardless the quantity of primes less than a number x (in our case some approximately 512 bit number for 1024 bit keys) is asymptotic to x/log x (the Prime Number Theorem, page 9 of "An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers" by Hardy and Wright). You are considering roughly every possible pair of that quantity so square that number. I get a number around 2^980. Each will require 3000 bits of storage (ignoring, at least for now, attempts to compress) or about 375 bytes. That previous large number is something like 10^327 which we need to bump to 10^329 to get a rough estimate of the number of bytes needed.
I'm hoping I can buy a 100 gigabyte drive for $100 before too long. That would provide 10^11 bytes of storage. So I would need about 10^318 such drives for your project. I suppose when buying in bulk like this I might get a better price but I don't have anything like $10^320 laying around. In fact, I doubt that the NSA has money like that at its disposal.
If it hasn't been piling on already I imagine the next step is, but how long do you think that "table look up" would take if you did manage to assemble that much storage? A nanosecond for each comparison and traversing about half the list on average? So 10^327 times 10^-9 seconds or 10^318 seconds. I seem to recall there are 3.15 times 10^7 seconds per year. Your average look up would take 10^311 years to complete. Current estimates of the time since the big bang at less than 10^10 years. (I also doubt there are 10^300 elementary particles in the universe).
Just to summarize: anyone who thinks brute force is a useful option just doesn't know what he is talking about. Quantum computing is another topic left as an exercise for the reader who wants to consider real threats to RSA.
"I always like it when people think they're individually smarter than hundreds of designers and engineers at multibillion dollar corporations."
How does your world view handle the report that a 15 year old Norwegian was able to write a program to decrypt DVD's? Add to that the fact that a cryptographer, Frank Stevenson (not necessarily employed by a multi-billion dollar corporation), provided an analysis of the algorithm that allowed subsequent decryption programs for DVD's able to extract the right decryption key on the fly.
Or there is the HDCP scheme for DVI video that was cracked using simple linear algebra before it was even deployed. Again work by multi-billion dollar companies undone by hobbyists.
You might want to wait for someone with personal experience with it but I've read there are 802.11 bridge products that allow any ethernet enabled product to gain wireless access. They tend to be more expensive than the cards but the price is going down as competition increases. They are finally available from more than one source. Sorry, I don't have any handy links but that is the name of the product category.
What nonsense, HDCP has already been broken. Several different groups have announced it and it has been reported here. Doesn't anyone pay attention and/or have a memory? The important point is that it doesn't matter. HDCP is used to encrypt a DVI connection from the recorder to the screen. This is an uncompressed high resolution bitstream. Even if you decrypt and capture it you are looking at something that was already 20 megabits per second when it was highly compressed using MPEG-2. The uncompressed stream is about two orders of magnitude larger (that's right, on the order of gigabits per second). Even a full gigabit ethernet could not handle this stream of data and the same goes for most hard drives. So even though the encryption used is ineffective, it is also unnecessary.
I'd be willing to bet that the actual D-VHS tape is recording the MPEG-2 stream that is being broadcast which is still a beast at 20 megabits per second (if it is analogous to regular VCR's it will have its own digital tuner and hence access to the compressed signal without exposing it to capture anywhere except the tape). Comparing it to a standard 5 gigabyte DVD you have a format that usually pumps out 5 megabits per second or less sustained (the maximum the standard allows for is 10 mbps). So a pre-recorded tape would need about four times the capacity of a DVD or about 20 or so gigabytes. If you decompress it you are looking at terabytes of data. So if you have a sufficiently fast terabyte of spare storage available you will be able to "pirate" those movies.
On the other hand there are already no fewer than four PCI boards that provide tuning and capture of current over the air HDTV to your hard drive. They all cost a hell of a lot less than $2,000 (more like $400). The only thing missing is a disc based pre-recorded medium. A 2x DVD-ROM drive supports sufficient data rates to handle HDTV. I'm sure they can do multi-layer 20+ gig pressed DVD's.
Right, they'll sue Intel when hell freezes over. The last thing they would try is to sue anyone with the resources to defend themselves and the 'political' stature to laugh off the lies and slurs the MPAA might attempt.
The open protocol equivalent of the FastTrack network is Gnutella. From all appearences the FastTrack network uses a slightly modified gnutella protocol. It is tricky to pin down exactly what improves the FastTrack experience but I would say it is the two-tiered network where only the supernodes have the responsibility of routing most packet traffic.
Ironically this modification of the gnutella protocol was introduced about a year ago by Clip2 when they introduced their Reflector. FastTrack made the observation that this sort of enhancement should be an organizing principle for the entire network rather than a marginal enhancement. It helps to minimize network traffic while extending network visibility horizon by orders of magnitude (by the ratio of nodes : supernodes).
Even as these events transpire the various gnutella clients are in the process of implementing the two layer structure in a very public presentation and review of the needed protocol modifications. Simultaneously we are in the process of adding full file hash values in order to improve the quality of files that can be found and downloaded over gnutella. When hash information has been successfully deployed on the gnutella network we will also be able to implement swarm downloads.
It is a slower process to have a public protocol evolve to respond to empirical results for a variety of clients. But in the end it might be a more robust method.
We're still uncertain if the Heisenberg exploded. On the other hand the Hindenberg did have an explosive demise.
No, they didn't get as far as putting Prof Felton of Princeton University in jail, but not because of good intentions. A threatening letter was sent to him warning him of criminal charges that could be filed against him if he presented a particular paper at a conference (the paper that analyzed various water marking technologies). He chose not to present that paper because of these threats. The case has continued to evolve and now those thugs who were so quick to send threatening notes are claiming there was nothing to it.
OK, now how do you deal with a spoof attack where legitimate addresses are marked as 'bad'? In other words, how do you deal with the issue of authentication in a decentralized network?
Thank you for expressing the point I was so inadequately trying to put into words. That was exactly my reaction except I foolishly decided to quibble about exactly how many years made sense with a standard was truly unsettled ten years ago (and engage in other pointless disputes). The SGI comment just had so little to do with the AccessDTV board (eg no 8VSB decoder, no TiVo style capability, etc) that it struck me as a complete non sequitur.
Please, that is just an uninteresting historical aside. Current implementations of DeCSS analyze the stream and obtain the key in a fraction of a second because the encryption scheme is so feable and utterly broken. There is no current dependence (and never really was) on the Xing key. As long as they want to maintain compatibility of all the equipment sold already there is hardly any reason to bother with CSS.
Incidentally, if people were paying attention to slashdot they might recall that a researcher in Holland announced a theortical crack of the proposed 4C encryption standard for HDTV. If it is deployed it will be a matter of a short time before the master key of the system is computed and posted. This might enable people to use the equipment they bought to continue to receive HDTV.
If you read the other replies you can see that BoarderPhreak was suffering from a reality distortion:
BoarderPhreak:
FWIW, SGI workstations supported the HDTV format for nearly ten years now... In most video and 3D applications, "HDTV" was also an option - for generating content for this "new format."
lupetto:
I used to work exclusively with SGI hardware and software in a broadcasting environment. HDTV output is fairly new in the SGI world - I'm thinking it came out about two years ago. This HDTV input/output board was made only for the very high end servers (only onyx2 servers afaik).
All I did was call him on his exaggeration and he started the name calling (jackass) and condescending attitude. I'll admit I escalated but if he can't take it he should avoid dishing it out.
Thanks for actually providing an informative response in the middle of this pissing contest. Personally I have nothing against SGI and am pleased to hear they have real value in several areas.
If you knew how spell checkers work, you would know that there would be no spelling checker complaint about goggle since it is the correct spelling of the wrong word. The point is, you pompous, self important jackass, that no one cares if your work station could output to a format called HDTV years ago because it has nothing to do with the article except to compensate for the fact that you are dickless. Now, go away or I'll taunt you once more!
19.4Mbps is the compressed bit stream. It decompresses into something much larger (approx x100). So capturing the raw bit stream is the ideal case for preserving the best picture. No question about it, you need mammoth amounts of disk space for this stuff to be at all feasible.
"As for a $500 board to receive and watch HDTV on an SGI, why the hell would you want to?" Maybe it's a valid question because that is what the article is about, jackass.
As for being the "provider for high-end hardware to the NSA" that's just the vestiges of Cray which has very little to do with SGI except they were acquired. Both businesses (Cray supercomputers and pricey workstations) were declared dead men walking by others some time ago. I've got no dog in that fight so I don't really care. But the arrogant "been there, done that" attitude did strike me as pompous, inaccurate and entirely beside the point.
p.s. The grand alliance document with the completed specifications is dated: Version 2.0, December 7, 1994 which "was adopted by U.S. FCC as the U.S. standard for terrestrial high definition television". You might want to save that nickel and learn how to use Goggle yourself.
Two weeks passed long ago. This is the third HDTV receiver/recorder board to be sold to the public and they have been on the market for months. The current HDTV over the air signal is not encrypted though AccessDTV does play games with the signal in an apparant effort to anticipate future complaints.
The real market breakthrough will arrive when an HDTV tuner card is released that uses the main processor for signal processing (decompression, etc). Those boards should be no more than about $150 but who knows how much processing power will be required? 1.2 GHz? 1.5 GHz?
Jeez, ten years ago the format currently called HDTV did not exist. So what are you smoking? Still steamed because no one cares about your over-priced hardware which is swiftly sinking into obscurity? Let me take a wild guess -- it isn't possible now and it never has been possible to buy a $500 board that would enable a SGI workstation to receive HDTV over the air? Being a Mac user myself I'm not particularly a partisan of the PC world but the implication that PC are about 10 years behind workstations won't survive any reasonable scrutiny.