Yeah, these ideas are all great right up until the point that the key has to be loaded into memory to decrypt the content on the cd (into memory).
People will just use Softice to either get the key (since it will be an app key, not a unique one), or to just get the decrypted data. (and replace the decrypt routines with a load from raw file routine).
This is a classic example of people not understanding the trusted client problem, namely that you can't trust the PC as a client, ever!
Re:PS2 weakness is inability to make bootable disc
on
Sony vs Modchips
·
· Score: 1
Give me a break. Sony does exactly what would make them money, and I see no evidence that this would.
If you want something that runs X, vorbis, etc. then I'd strongly suggest a PC. It shouldn't be much more than a PS2 + hd/net accessory for equivilant performance.
MSI Nforce board $163
Duron 1Ghz 55$
128mb DDR $20
20.0gb IDE $60
16x DVD $41
ATX case $43
Ethernet $18
Total $400
+ some shipping
$400 = PS2 + eventual hd/net/linux kit
Look, and it already runs linux and is probably faster than an Xbox! And you don't have to jump through as many hoops to get it running.:)
The PS2 is meant for one thing - games.
Re:Not about Region coding or 'personal backups'
on
Sony vs Modchips
·
· Score: 1
I was wrong about the DVD-R stuff, thanks for being the 10%.
I also agree that it may be technically difficult to only region check, I'm not expecting that. I'm hoping that people will be a little more realistic and honest about what these chips will be used for in most scenarios, and why Sony might be paying attention.
As I said before, I don't think breaking region protection is at all wrong. In the end all that matters is 1 player = 1 royalty for developer.
Re:Not about Region coding or 'personal backups'
on
Sony vs Modchips
·
· Score: 1
You've managed to completely miss my point.
Yes, you're not prohibited from making personal backup copies, and not giving them to anyone. This is different from a right. Restricting fair use seems to be a legitimate practice (especially post-DMCA), and like the death penalty and the drug war, I wish I could change it, but that's the way it is for the moment. Write your representatives!
I know what people do with chips because I'm not stupid. I've never met a person who chipped their PSX exclusively for purchasing import games or backing up games they already purchased.
This all matters because game developers should get paid for their work, and increasing the easy of copying games substantially decreases the revenue of game companies. I like games. I want more. Hence, I pay for games.
Re:Not about Region coding or 'personal backups'
on
Sony vs Modchips
·
· Score: 1
I didn't intend for that to be a troll, I'm sorry if I misled you. I did have a point, I just wasn't clear enough about it.
I support the full legalization of all soft drugs, and most hard ones. I just think that many of the people who support the 'medical' initiatives don't really care that much about sick people, and are hoping that they'll get some sympathy votes from people who otherwise wouldn't support recreational use, and that there will be more potential for abuse with the medical laws on the books.
Don't misrepresent what you want, just because it might be unpopular.
I want marijuana to be legal, with no restrictions or gotchas.
Some of these people here want to pirate PS2 games.
Lets just be honest about it, as opposed to hiding behind code words. Just as some people would honestly benifit from medical use of marijuana, there are also many who have legit (import) uses for mod chips, but these people are a small fraction of the total who want these things for completely different (and perhaps less legitimate, in the case of games) purposes.
Re:Not about Region coding or 'personal backups'
on
Sony vs Modchips
·
· Score: 1
Pirate groups currently strip and repackage PS2 games to fit onto a standard CD-R. (With some PS2 games, this isn't neccesary, as the game wasn't larger thant 650mb to begin with)
I'm fairly certain (90%), that the PS2 can't read DVD-Rs, so for most new releases automated user backups simply aren't feasable.
Even if it was completely feasable with the correct consumer equipment to perform these backups, that doesn't change the fact that properly cared for, the game discs should last well past the life of the system. Regardless of any legal ability to perform backups, 99% of the time a 'backup' is performed is to pirate software.
Not about Region coding or 'personal backups'
on
Sony vs Modchips
·
· Score: 3, Flamebait
Just like the medical marijuana movement, there is a great deal of intellectual dishonesty in the gaming community surrounding mod chips. The illegitimate uses of these paticular chips far outweight the semi-legit ones.
Backups are a red herring - it is technically infeasable right now to back up PS2 games, and may remain so well into the future. I don't think PS2s will even read DVD-Rs... The only possible use for the 'backup' features is software piracy. To say otherwise is to brand yourself an idiot. Be honest here people, you just want to play 'backups' downloaded off IRC. Stop whining about this and just admit you want to steal games, and accept that Sony is going to try and do something about it!
In a perfect world, there would be exactly two functions performed by a PS2 mod chip - DVD region code breaking and PS2 region breaking. Region coding is the biggest bunch of bullshit that the world has ever seen, and circumventing it doesn't even result in lost revenues.
I saw a prototype of this system many years ago at the University of Washington HIT lab. Red mono only, and took a table, but it looked pretty good. I'm realling looking forward to consumer color models... maybe in another 10 years. Getting this up and running is just one of many steps towards becoming a gargoyle.:)
While this is a marvelous attitude (and an appealing one for me, coder-in-training), you must realize this is why Mozilla (and other open-source products) haven't shipped. My limited experience in development has led me to conclude the following (at least at the last place I worked) about the process.
Program managers come up with ideas, everyone goes to meetings about them (even testers). Development leads for each feature team (btw, all were developers for 5+ years) then come up with schedules, working with the devs.
The devs (me) try really hard to get it done. There is an absolute ship date.
It slips a little bit. Everything takes longer than imagined.
We cut a whole bunch of stuff so we can ship close to it.
We finally ship a product.
If we were coding for coding's sake, the work would never get done. It would, however, be a programmer's dream.:)
At first I thought, oh, this might be good.. hehe. boy, was I ever wrong.
There are 2 kinds of enemies. Ones on the ground, and ones not on the ground. Some of them have different models, but that really isn't important. Then you get to a boss.. And run out of ammo.
The guns are all as lame or lamer than Unreal 1. They went totally overboard with the partical effects, so you get distracted cuz it is raining hard are you are firing the 10 trillion bright green bouncing sparks gun.
Deathmatch reminds me of doom.. Low detail levels, and LAG! The sword sucks in HTH.
These guys are gonna get slaughtered. This is the "Blood 2" of the year 2000.
That isn't saying very much..:) Of course it is more stable than 9x. Cuz 9x is the least stable OS ever invented.:) (Although, some of the macs may occasionally give it a run for it's money)
I'm more interested in comparisons to NT. NT's stability seems directly tied to what drivers and hardware you are using. Some are good. Some are very, very bad. Guess that's what you get when too much stuff runs in kernel mode.
The only 2k crashes I've got have been driver related (sound, CDRW DMA mode, etc).
IBM almost certainly signed contracts that required them to continue supporting OS/2. This is simply an outgrowth of that. IBM could care less about the hobbyist market, in fact, it is hard to say if they ever cared about them at all.
If I'm gonna use an unsupported OS, I'll use BeOS. At least Be cares about the community...
Humankind will live on the moon, and robots will clean our houses! Computers will furfill our every desire in virtual worlds! Cats will be able to talk! Slashdot will have mirrors for the sites it links to! It'll be AMAZING!
Seems like the last few "interesting link" posts that have been made, the site goes down in oh, 10 or 15 minutes. Slashdot should take all that big money they've been getting, and buy some big-ass to mirror all the pages they link to.
I work some tech support, and my biggest complaint isn't people not understanding. That's ok, that's why I'm a tech and they.. um.. work on drywall. It is when the first thing they say is "I don't know anything about computers, so I can't help you." People who don't know anything are not the problem, that's why I have a job. People who REFUSE to learn anything are. ("My kid was playing on the server, and now my software doesn't work.") ()
UF doesn't make fun of ignorance, it makes fun of stupid people.
I'm a moron. Using it as a VPN tool is a great idea. I'm planning to do it now.:) Keep the nostalgia from my last message, but disregard the criticism. By all means, maintain it and keep it up to date. Cable modem comes in soon, and I'd love access to the interior of my university.
Gosh, those were the days. Slirp, Navigator 2.0, Windows 3.1, my 486DX-66, and a 14.4k modem. Oh baby. Slirp was an awesome tool in the pre-ppp days, but is there even an isp out there now that doesn't offer PPP? slirp was a tool created just for getting around shell accounts. I can't think of any use for it now. It is a cool hack, so a copy should certainly be preserved, but I see no reason to keep it up to date.
of course, stephenson's snow crash predates virtual light. The concept of mediated reality is starting to become trendy. See a military application at:
It's my understanding that ethernet cards and motherboard bios' have unique identifiers also. (Not positive on the mboard, sure about ethernet). What's to keep some unscrupulous corp from tracking us now?
Obviously the real solution is to not be connected to the net.:)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ever use a University network? Ever connect to a machine in a university? Ever connect to a machine anywhere? Gosh, you could be vulnerable to packet sniffing. Better not use any machines. Ever.:)
This isn't about OS diversity, or the biological nature of machines, it's about Windows 9x being a buggy hack of dos. Funnily enough, that means it doesn't have a security model. On any other decent OS (I think I'll even include NT in this), what 9x users consider a virus would first be considered a root expoit or DOS attack. You'd notice there still seem to be alot of those, but they are due to minor patchable flaws in the design of software, not major flaws in the design of the OS. Virii will really be solved when everyone moves to an OS (be it WinNT Consumer 2010, linux, etc..) that actually has some internal permissions-type safeguards against, say, random writes to the HD.
This may sound like a miserly CLI whine, but I've just finished reading Neal Stephenson's essay/rant about OS dev, and I'm suspicous about any "GUI for everyone" that isn't designed from the ground up as part of the OS. I think to really have a successful newbie GUI, it needs to be a OS that is intentionally non-complex. Try as you like, I somehow doubt that people will ever be able to successfully get Linux to fit into a truly simple, yet usable design. There are just too many features. Now, that said, using the Linux kernel and X as the core of a simple GUI oriented OS might not be a bad idea (see Windows CE and PalmOS for examples of this.., but I think it should be considered a seperate goal than making a good powerful GUI.
Will this ever die? Regardless of what stop-gap fix the recording industry comes up with (dongles, SCMS, copy-protect chips) that allow any modification of the system (transfer cables, cases you can crack open, or software) is doomed to failure. Witness software cracks, SCMS circumvention cables for SPDIF, and Playstation mod chips. Even a true secure digital music format can be circumvented at a system driver level. I can think of no job more frustrating and pointless then that of a copy-protection implementor.
Although, perhaps I'm mis-interpreting the goals of the record industry. That their hope is not to actually stop piracy, but to make it just inconvenient enough that most stupid consumers won't go to the trouble of circumventing it. Of course, that's getting less true as time goes on.
Conclusion: They're screwed, regardless of what they do. Let's just sit back and watch their efforts go down in flames.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, a true misanthrope. I'm impressed - your messages convey an honest hatred of all humanity. Not the typical flamebait. I salute you!
Yeah, these ideas are all great right up until the point that the key has to be loaded into memory to decrypt the content on the cd (into memory).
People will just use Softice to either get the key (since it will be an app key, not a unique one), or to just get the decrypted data. (and replace the decrypt routines with a load from raw file routine).
This is a classic example of people not understanding the trusted client problem, namely that you can't trust the PC as a client, ever!
Give me a break. Sony does exactly what would make them money, and I see no evidence that this would.
:)
If you want something that runs X, vorbis, etc. then I'd strongly suggest a PC. It shouldn't be much more than a PS2 + hd/net accessory for equivilant performance.
MSI Nforce board $163
Duron 1Ghz 55$
128mb DDR $20
20.0gb IDE $60
16x DVD $41
ATX case $43
Ethernet $18
Total $400
+ some shipping
$400 = PS2 + eventual hd/net/linux kit
Look, and it already runs linux and is probably faster than an Xbox! And you don't have to jump through as many hoops to get it running.
The PS2 is meant for one thing - games.
I was wrong about the DVD-R stuff, thanks for being the 10%.
I also agree that it may be technically difficult to only region check, I'm not expecting that. I'm hoping that people will be a little more realistic and honest about what these chips will be used for in most scenarios, and why Sony might be paying attention.
As I said before, I don't think breaking region protection is at all wrong. In the end all that matters is 1 player = 1 royalty for developer.
You've managed to completely miss my point.
Yes, you're not prohibited from making personal backup copies, and not giving them to anyone. This is different from a right. Restricting fair use seems to be a legitimate practice (especially post-DMCA), and like the death penalty and the drug war, I wish I could change it, but that's the way it is for the moment. Write your representatives!
I know what people do with chips because I'm not stupid. I've never met a person who chipped their PSX exclusively for purchasing import games or backing up games they already purchased.
This all matters because game developers should get paid for their work, and increasing the easy of copying games substantially decreases the revenue of game companies. I like games. I want more. Hence, I pay for games.
I didn't intend for that to be a troll, I'm sorry if I misled you. I did have a point, I just wasn't clear enough about it.
I support the full legalization of all soft drugs, and most hard ones. I just think that many of the people who support the 'medical' initiatives don't really care that much about sick people, and are hoping that they'll get some sympathy votes from people who otherwise wouldn't support recreational use, and that there will be more potential for abuse with the medical laws on the books.
Don't misrepresent what you want, just because it might be unpopular.
I want marijuana to be legal, with no restrictions or gotchas.
Some of these people here want to pirate PS2 games.
Lets just be honest about it, as opposed to hiding behind code words. Just as some people would honestly benifit from medical use of marijuana, there are also many who have legit (import) uses for mod chips, but these people are a small fraction of the total who want these things for completely different (and perhaps less legitimate, in the case of games) purposes.
Pirate groups currently strip and repackage PS2 games to fit onto a standard CD-R. (With some PS2 games, this isn't neccesary, as the game wasn't larger thant 650mb to begin with)
I'm fairly certain (90%), that the PS2 can't read DVD-Rs, so for most new releases automated user backups simply aren't feasable.
Even if it was completely feasable with the correct consumer equipment to perform these backups, that doesn't change the fact that properly cared for, the game discs should last well past the life of the system. Regardless of any legal ability to perform backups, 99% of the time a 'backup' is performed is to pirate software.
Just like the medical marijuana movement, there is a great deal of intellectual dishonesty in the gaming community surrounding mod chips. The illegitimate uses of these paticular chips far outweight the semi-legit ones.
Backups are a red herring - it is technically infeasable right now to back up PS2 games, and may remain so well into the future. I don't think PS2s will even read DVD-Rs... The only possible use for the 'backup' features is software piracy. To say otherwise is to brand yourself an idiot. Be honest here people, you just want to play 'backups' downloaded off IRC. Stop whining about this and just admit you want to steal games, and accept that Sony is going to try and do something about it!
In a perfect world, there would be exactly two functions performed by a PS2 mod chip - DVD region code breaking and PS2 region breaking. Region coding is the biggest bunch of bullshit that the world has ever seen, and circumventing it doesn't even result in lost revenues.
I saw a prototype of this system many years ago at the University of Washington HIT lab. Red mono only, and took a table, but it looked pretty good. I'm realling looking forward to consumer color models... maybe in another 10 years. Getting this up and running is just one of many steps towards becoming a gargoyle. :)
While this is a marvelous attitude (and an appealing one for me, coder-in-training), you must realize this is why Mozilla (and other open-source products) haven't shipped. My limited experience in development has led me to conclude the following (at least at the last place I worked) about the process.
:)
Program managers come up with ideas, everyone goes to meetings about them (even testers). Development leads for each feature team (btw, all were developers for 5+ years) then come up with schedules, working with the devs.
The devs (me) try really hard to get it done. There is an absolute ship date.
It slips a little bit. Everything takes longer than imagined.
We cut a whole bunch of stuff so we can ship close to it.
We finally ship a product.
If we were coding for coding's sake, the work would never get done. It would, however, be a programmer's dream.
At first I thought, oh, this might be good..
hehe. boy, was I ever wrong.
There are 2 kinds of enemies. Ones on the ground, and ones not on the ground. Some of them have different models, but that really isn't important.
Then you get to a boss.. And run out of ammo.
The guns are all as lame or lamer than Unreal 1. They went totally overboard with the partical effects, so you get distracted cuz it is raining hard are you are firing the 10 trillion bright green bouncing sparks gun.
Deathmatch reminds me of doom.. Low detail levels, and LAG! The sword sucks in HTH.
These guys are gonna get slaughtered. This is the "Blood 2" of the year 2000.
-Teman
That isn't saying very much.. :) Of course it is more stable than 9x. Cuz 9x is the least stable OS ever invented. :)
(Although, some of the macs may occasionally give it a run for it's money)
I'm more interested in comparisons to NT.
NT's stability seems directly tied to what drivers and hardware you are using. Some are good. Some are very, very bad. Guess that's what you get when too much stuff runs in kernel mode.
The only 2k crashes I've got have been driver related (sound, CDRW DMA mode, etc).
-Teman
Ahh, I loved that.. Oops, didn't shutdown.. Hey, guess what doesn't work now. That's right - your HPFS partition! Time to reinstall.
OS/2 was rad when all you ran were win3.1 and dos apps. Now it isn't.
OS/2 users -> run linux! (or even better, FreeBSD!)
-Teman
IBM almost certainly signed contracts that required them to continue supporting OS/2. This is simply an outgrowth of that. IBM could care less about the hobbyist market, in fact, it is hard to say if they ever cared about them at all.
If I'm gonna use an unsupported OS, I'll use BeOS. At least Be cares about the community...
-Teman
Humankind will live on the moon, and robots will clean our houses! Computers will furfill our every desire in virtual worlds! Cats will be able to talk! Slashdot will have mirrors for the sites it links to! It'll be AMAZING!
Seems like the last few "interesting link" posts that have been made, the site goes down in oh, 10 or 15 minutes. Slashdot should take all that big money they've been getting, and buy some big-ass to mirror all the pages they link to.
I work some tech support, and my biggest complaint isn't people not understanding. That's ok, that's why I'm a tech and they .. um.. work on drywall. It is when the first thing they say is "I don't know anything about computers, so I can't help you." People who don't know anything are not the problem, that's why I have a job. People who REFUSE to learn anything are. ("My kid was playing on the server, and now my software doesn't work.") ()
UF doesn't make fun of ignorance, it makes fun of stupid people.
-Teman
I'm a moron. Using it as a VPN tool is a great idea. I'm planning to do it now. :) Keep the nostalgia from my last message, but disregard the criticism. By all means, maintain it and keep it up to date. Cable modem comes in soon, and I'd love access to the interior of my university.
------------
Gosh, those were the days. Slirp, Navigator 2.0, Windows 3.1, my 486DX-66, and a 14.4k modem. Oh baby. Slirp was an awesome tool in the pre-ppp days, but is there even an isp out there now that doesn't offer PPP? slirp was a tool created just for getting around shell accounts. I can't think of any use for it now. It is a cool hack, so a copy should certainly be preserved, but I see no reason to keep it up to date.
of course, stephenson's snow crash predates virtual light.
The concept of mediated reality is starting to become trendy. See a military application at:
http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG19990712S0054
It's my understanding that ethernet cards and motherboard bios' have unique identifiers also. (Not positive on the mboard, sure about ethernet). What's to keep some unscrupulous corp from tracking us now?
:)
Obviously the real solution is to not be connected to the net.
-Teman
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ever use a University network? Ever connect to a machine in a university? Ever connect to a machine anywhere? Gosh, you could be vulnerable to packet sniffing. Better not use any machines. Ever. :)
Solution: SSL
This isn't about OS diversity, or the biological nature of machines, it's about Windows 9x being a buggy hack of dos. Funnily enough, that means it doesn't have a security model. On any other decent OS (I think I'll even include NT in this), what 9x users consider a virus would first be considered a root expoit or DOS attack. You'd notice there still seem to be alot of those, but they are due to minor patchable flaws in the design of software, not major flaws in the design of the OS.
Virii will really be solved when everyone moves to an OS (be it WinNT Consumer 2010, linux, etc..) that actually has some internal permissions-type safeguards against, say, random writes to the HD.
This may sound like a miserly CLI whine, but I've just finished reading Neal Stephenson's essay/rant about OS dev, and I'm suspicous about any "GUI for everyone" that isn't designed from the ground up as part of the OS. I think to really have a successful newbie GUI, it needs to be a OS that is intentionally non-complex. Try as you like, I somehow doubt that people will ever be able to successfully get Linux to fit into a truly simple, yet usable design. There are just too many features. Now, that said, using the Linux kernel and X as the core of a simple GUI oriented OS might not be a bad idea (see Windows CE and PalmOS for examples of this.., but I think it should be considered a seperate goal than making a good powerful GUI.
Will this ever die? Regardless of what stop-gap fix the recording industry comes up with (dongles, SCMS, copy-protect chips) that allow any modification of the system (transfer cables, cases you can crack open, or software) is doomed to failure. Witness software cracks, SCMS circumvention cables for SPDIF, and Playstation mod chips. Even a true secure digital music format can be circumvented at a system driver level. I can think of no job more frustrating and pointless then that of a copy-protection implementor.
Although, perhaps I'm mis-interpreting the goals of the record industry. That their hope is not to actually stop piracy, but to make it just inconvenient enough that most stupid consumers won't go to the trouble of circumventing it. Of course, that's getting less true as time goes on.
Conclusion: They're screwed, regardless of what they do. Let's just sit back and watch their efforts go down in flames.
DAT: never again!