He was even nice enough to tell Microsoft and other HOW to make the problem harder to solve. In about a month or two we will start seeing the patches from everyone.
Like most encryption its just a mater of time, money, and access.
Using a lookup table is a unique way to speed things up. Its been used for years to speed up other things. Havent used one in a few years. But havent had the need either. Its a handy tool to use once and awhile. Keep forgeting about it. Wonder if I can apply it to anything I am currently doing. Have to think about that. Hmm if I had about 50 gig yes (have about 8 meg):)
Also trading memory for speed is one of the things that pops up over and over in computer science.
You can still do NAT with ipv6. There is no real reason you can not. If you tell a computer to do something it WILL do it. You tell it that its address is something it will use that. The proper way to do that sort of thing is with your mac address and access control lists. This way you do not have random computers popping up in your network and they have free roam of your network. This has become more important with things like 802.11. However do not doubt that NAT will go away. Its to usefull for that.
The only thing that bugs me with NAT is the hoops you have to jump through to get some software to work. Some of it just doesnt work. Yet these people are doing nothing 'wrong' with what they write. They just now have to take into account something they shouldnt have to be bothered with, what the network is doing. Its a network layer implementation issue leaking into the app layer.
My question is what ever happened to IPv1, IPv2, IPv3, and IPv5?
Why were those types inadequate? Are they still around? Or are they just called something else I didnt know?
That scares me when it happens. I KNOW there is an even worse bug in there then.
Lens law of programming #1. If you have been looking at it for more than an hour its cut and paste error. corollary: If its more than 1 day its a typo.
Never thought about p2p that way. But from what Ive seen thats what they have been yelling about. Interesting...
The funny thing is some companies are SO scared of being sued they will line up to sign up. Just because of FUD surrounding it. But if they stoped and thought about it it would be STUPID to sign anything SCO gives em. As they could be 'tainted' and SCO could try to go after their tech as part of unix. All SCO would have to do is add something similar to their unix and suddenly the other party is on the hook to prove that they didnt copy it. This is a fairly much a case of ignor them they will go away.
My bet is on IBM just buying em out once the stock price goes down just to get rid of the headache.
To add to what the others say it was a very 'safe' decison at the time.
You can pressure the little tiny company to fix whatever goes wrong. Low cost to get things fixed.
Your not out the cost of developing some software for a piece of hardware that directly goes against the big iron your trying to sell.
Your fairly confident you have the patents and copyrights locked up. So you go ahead and do it. Someone makes a clone. SUE em, and they did. But they lost, they gambled.
It also worked out VERY well for IBM. I would go so far as to say it saved them. Apple and a few other companies were eating IBM's lunch in the PC market.
It was when people figured out you could build the same computer for 2k, for what IBM was charging 8k for, that IBM got busted. That was the bad decision. Higher prices than what others can build the things for is what eventually cost IBM the PC market. They had the sucker LOCKED up till about 1989...
No like most industries that have a new thing levied against them. They will pass the cost on to us. We would end up paying for that. I already do. Its called taxes where I live. Some people actually pay to have garbage hauled away, and are billed every month.
My favorite life extension for a printer cart was the old ribbon carts, and a can of WD-40. They would work for a long time till you either put too much oil on the ribbon or the ribbon ate itself.
Recently my dad replaced one of those 'freebe' printers. I got tired of him calling me up every week yelling that it was not working. Finally I talked him into a new printer. The FIRST thing I showed him about buying a new printer is pick the one with the cheap carts. He has loved the thing ever since. It cost him an extra 100 bucks for it the thing. But he is a printing mad man now! It doesnt get stuck. He can actually see the ink in the cart and tell when its empty. Hell he probably could refill the things forever considering what they are. And best of all they do not cost 40 bucks for 1 black cart that dries out in 2 weeks.
Compairing it to another medium like snail mail while seems ok is not. Here is why. Its about ROI. Lets say it costs me 500 bucks to spam 100000 people. I am selling product X with a profit per item of 50 bucks a pop. That means I only need 10 people out of 100000 to respond and poof im in the green. Its that simple. Now lets say I dont get 10 responses I get 100. See how it scales very nicely. Now think about this. For 200 bucks I can get a 'busness class' cable modem around where I live, which is about 8 mega bit. Thats almost a meg of data a second. Thats 1 line for a month. Think how much crap you can spew in a month.
If they were NOT making any money it would be within a year. They do not have to be making huge amounts of money for them to just have it as a 'hobby'. However from what Ive seen of some of the dudes interviewed they are RAKEING it in. So they are probably getting AWSOME response rates.
The funny thing is I have yet to recive any spam on my busness email, and I have had it for 3 years. My company does not filter it. They just tag it as 'possible spam'. Then the leave it up to me to filter. The reason is simple. I ONLY give that email to busness associates. Other people I know put it ALL over the web. They get hundreds per week. I have a 'junk' email account and that gets tons of stuff. But its my filter, all the rest are private.
166-200 wasnt till the end of 95. That means real availablity was not till like begining 96. Might have a few computer shoppers still laying around to look it up. Even on those whats being suggested would have been a chore. I wouldnt want to do anything like that on anything less than a 733 (mid 99). Even then just guessing those numbers would still be awfull. No DeCSS was a lucky break... Because even IF you were lucky enough to guess the number you would have to verify it through visual inspection. Which instantly makes the thing a sticky problem to solve. The problem wasnt something you could let the computer whirrr away at and just come up with a magic number. It involved a human interaction. If someone had had a 'encrypted' and a 'non encrypted' version of any movie it probably could have been solved as well. But no studios were giving that up... Which is why I say the encyption they used was 'decent'. Because it was dificult enough to crack. Which is the point of encryption. To make it so hard you can not do it in a reasonable time frame.
yes you can brute force the keys in hours on TODAYS computers. That was one of the goals of the type of encryption they used. It was meant that each player had a special code. Each equally capable of decrypting it. Now pull out your P120 which was fairly high end when DVD's were specd out. How long will it take you now?
In this case once you know they keys the alg is garbage. Duuuuh. At the time there was NO one that knew how to get one of these numbers. That was the point. The number was sufficantly difficult to get. That is the point of all current encryption. It takes a while to figure out the magic key. Think about it. You pick a number. You then have to look at the output and see if it turned out ok. Next number. This is NOT a trivial problem.
Do not belive me TRY it. Try to get one of the magic numbers starting at 1.
Also look at what they were trying to do. They were not interested in 'security' if they were they would have used a realllllllly beefy one like you said. My whole point was that it was decent enough. It did its job which is to control regions and enforce trade restrictions. It also put the bar high enough that the casual copier could not get at the thing. Once one of the numbers was known they were done. Becuase they wanted each player to have its own number so they could know whom to sue if a number leaked. How do you think they were getting these numbers? They couldnt make them up. They had to have some sort of cyclical type thing going. Otherwise you could not make a new player with a new number and it be tracable or revokable. Revokable ah yes the 'punishment' they hung over the players if they leaked a key. Your player may not play our movies if we feel you have done something wrong.
Also remember that most DVD players are about 1995's tech. So this alg not only had to be workable enough. It had to have a decent execute speed, in hardware, to decode real time 5-15 meg a second. You are not going to get that with a beefy alg. So they made some sacrifices so they could actually ship.
Also the whole thing was ludicrous in the first place. As anyone who sits down to reallllly pirate stuff will tell you. An exact bit by bit copy sells exactly the same as a 'cracked' version. We the viewer care less about encryption, security, regions, CSS, or any of that. All we want to know is when is movie X coming out so we can buy it.
CSS was actually a 'decent' encryption. The alg was well understood. But the keys were unknown. They were unknown for 3+ years. Till one of the 'legit' players left one of their keys in the open. Someone then figured out the 'other' keys from it. Go ahead, give it a shot. Do not use the keys that are out there. Use just the alg and figure out what the keys are. You will not find CSS that easy to crack. CSS is about region control. So they can sell a DVD in one region for 20 dollar US, and in another region sell the SAME dvd for 30 dollars US.
But like you say MTV sucks. It does. Its was a sad sad sad day when vh1 is better than mtv. Course then again MTV was not all that good in the first place. If whiney teenagers doing stupid crap raises ratings for them... I for one do not watch.
So I meander to Walmart and pick up a $25CDN DVD disc
This is the real reason for CSS. In this case region 1 disks. You can buy a 'CDN' or 'USA' disk and the both work on region 1 players. However say you are in France. You need a different region player if you buy your disk there. It is about trade control. CSS is not content scrabling system. The encryption was 'strong enough'. They figured it would last about 5-10 years before someone brute forced it. But they also figured the would have something way better by that time. Someone left the keys in the open and DeCSS was born. So now they are trying to fix a technical problem with law. They had the problem before anyway. How long before someone figured out how to copy the whole disk bit by bit and to hell with breaking CSS. Just let it do what it needs to.
The really fun part is that the studios are playing the money market game. Trying to leverage even more money out of people. We know it but they are trying to sell it as 'security' its not security. Its a trade control. Because if you make a bit by bit copy 'encryption and all' you still get a copy.
I for one have no problem making a copy of something I own. The problem comes in when someone gives away a copy of something they own. That is where the studios are getting bent out of shape. They are also starting to get odd ideas that they own each playing of the thing. They do not realize that we like our control. We do not want to pay for every play. They will figure it out when it costs them more to run the per play system than to sell copies outright.
The other fun part is that they are whining that they are 'down' in sales. They maybe should wake up and notice the recession thats going on. Someone that does not have a job will not be buying a luxury item like a music cd or a dvd.
This is true enough. I used to buy at least a cd a month. I think I am down to like 1 a year. I would always hear a song somewhere and would go snag the whole cd. I usually got one or two more that were rattling around in my head that way.
I do not even bother with mp3's or the like. I seemed to have peaked with the music I want to buy. I have my cd changer. I hit random and have like 2200 songs I can listen to. I have heard very little on the radio that I say hey THATS good I think ill buy that.
Now even when I find one I want I also find sticker shock. 20 bucks for a cd. I can buy a decent DVD for that. The music I may not even care that much about. But a movie Ill watch...
Re:For crying out loud
on
My Visit to SCO
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· Score: 2, Insightful
This is very true. They have not said anything because at first it was 'trade secret' then 'copyright' then 'a licence issue'. As by how they change their stance every week, we can deduce they are TRYING to either squeeze some money out of someone, or trying to get bought out, or both.
If they actually showed what the code is they would in effect remov the 'cloud of doubt'. We would know exactly what is going on. Because we have access to all the previous versions. We can figure out who did what. We can rewrite what we need. The last thing they want is that code to be gone. They want the money or the buy out.
To tell the truth im surprised IBM has been as quite as it has been. Course they may have done something wrong. Or they are getting ready to stomp SCO. Like the JFS they have, basicly SCO is claiming they own it. Even though IBM developed it. This is about the same as if I make a game using windows and its compiler and microsoft shows up and says they own the thing. The whole software industry would give a collective Whhuuuuu? all at once.
SCO is playing a tricky game. If IBM get sued for IP problems. They have ALOT of IP. They also have FULL access to SCO's code. Im sure they can dig up about 2 dozen things SCO is violating. It will not be pretty. How about this for a flip. SCO ends up with Linux, IBM put some code into Linux. IBM does not own it, SCO does. But now is not SCO by virtue of Linux violating IBM's IP? This is NOT that far fetched. My guess is that IBM will get off light. Some of the things IBM has contributed are not little trivial things. They are BIG IP things, and they have the patents to back it up.
Wow thats a LOT of money. With my biggest question of who gets the money?
Several problems with this 'tax'. It can go up. Who do you think will pay for that 'tax'. It sure is NOT going to be Microsoft. They will simpily just tack it onto the cost of software, and blame the goverment. They will not be paying it. It will just increase the software price. Do not think for a second Microsoft will be loosing any money. The only people losing money will be the end user.
Secondly now there would be precident for a tax on just software. What about 'free' closed software. Should not those also be taxed? But they are free, so now they come up with 'fees'. States are loosing out on the huge amounts of money that could be generated by a extra 'software tax' is the sort of thing you will hear.
Third. Lets say this tax ends up going to free software orginizations. Now this is a tax on software I paid for. What if I do not agree what these COMPANIES are doing. Its a form of corperate welfare that should never be allowed. Who would be considered for this check being cut from the goverment. Even IF it ends up going to free software. There will be goverment overhead. Goverment overhead is not free, it costs money.
Fourth do not doubt for a second that local and state wouldnt want a cut of the loot. I can see it now "a '.5%' increase in the so called microsoft tax has been enacted to help schools" Three years later that money is diverted into a different discresionary fund. Suddenly its part of a pool of money that can be spent on anything. But there is no longer enough so another.5 is tacked on.
Also there may be a free speech thing going on here as well. It could in a way be interperted as a form of free speech. Which could make it unconstitutional.
Also remember the same people that buy 20k copies of winxp are the same ones that have HUGE pockets and can get laws like that removed for them, called tax breaks. While the rest of us are stuck with it. Then even if they can not get it removed they will just simpily pass the cost along to you in a different form. YOU will be the one paying that tax. Not microsoft. Not some other company. You may even end up paying it even though you choose not to their stuff. You have very little control over what the banks, or the gas companies, or even the local store use for software. Which is what I always thought free software was about. Free as in free speech not as in free beer.
I for one do not want more tax's. I am already at 70 percent(state + fed + sales + property). Which is more than I really like to give away.
This actually works ive seen it done! And maybe perhaps have partaken of it myself. Oh sure there is a bit of guilt. But only till I get home.
My absolute favorite is 'oh your single you can work even MORE hours.' Ill take wrong answers for 500 alex.
Had one dude actually stand in front of all of us and say 'at this company we have NO comp time'. We would usually work a bit over and make it up somewhere else. Usually we would forget and just work over. He was expecting ONLY overtime and no 40's as it were. Well with that attitude the amount of people leaving at exactly 5 was amazing. There were very few people after 5 at that point. I found I couldnt actually get anything done so I started leaving around the same time. Never underestimate the power of stupidity, and dont get any on you.
This is PURE FUD. BOTH parties do the same crap. Do not doubt for a second that democrats did not vote for the fact that programers do not get to be called 'exempt' while others can be 'non-exempt'. Its a 'stick it to the rich' attitude that screws EVERYONE.
Also the last 'bubble' was a form of missmanagment. There are seriously HUGE companies that are disapering overnight because of missmanagment. These were STAR performers during the 'bubble'. Guess how they did it? They were jamming it to the workers. Who was in charge when this was going on? That is why you are seeing a change in the group of policy makers. If a Democrat has something sane and the Republican seems insane I will vote the way that hurts ME least.
Me? Currently I am voting republican because of the state I live in can not seem to figure out its tax base. And has mismanaged billions of dollars. They need a reminder once and awhile who actually pays the bills.
Which leads me to belive even if we had just 1 unique enough comment/piece of code we could figure out who the hell did what. There are plenty of archives out there that have every kernel version back to the linux dawn of time. Could find it within log(n) steps too. Most of them have changelogs and usually say who did what and when. But so far the 'evidence' has been rather scanty as you say. Also the nda they want to see the code is stupid you would never get to do any linux type thing again. For fear of being the one who puts something in. We can also look at other open source projects of the time and see what sorts of things they were doing. Maybe it wasnt even linux at all maybe it was inherited from some other project?
yep. That is only losers in this situation are IBM and SCO.
SCO has come off looking REALLLLLLllllly bad. IBM has put SCO in a position of a catch 22. They can not say what the code was or where it is without giving up the 'secret'. Then from the point of view of the rest of the world its mostly. Hmm gee thats a shame. Thats what you get when you use trade secret instead of something that can protect you better.
It really matters not to us. Here is why, we HAVE the code already. We dont even have to know what it is. Its in there. It doesnt matter if its burried in some obscure mod or in the main path of code. We HAVE it. Its a trade secret. We have it but we dont know what we have. But the funny part is we dont even have to care.
SCO could have handled the problem alot better. Instead they tried to rip us all off. So we are actually cheering for IBM (gawd).
Civilian gps is supppppppppper flakey. Its effective +/- range without the interferance is about 20-50 ft. That averages out. But it does not mean you will get an average. It means it averages out for the goverment.
I have stood still and watched some badly made ones jump thousands of miles. The goverment says it will be fairly accurate 95% of the time, and it is for about that. The other 5% you may be off by feet, or by miles.
This one dude I worked with was tweaking some software for GPS. Another dude went out and put a small metal cup over the antenna. No signal. THAT easy to defeat.
and we thought the y2k prob was fun to solve. Raise of hands of how many people coded 6 chars or 3 bytes for zip codes?
Never mind all the software that reads these codes. Never mind the retraining of just about EVERYONE about the 'new' codes. Then just trying to remeber your basicly random text zip code. Never mind all the old data laying around that we still use. ALL of it would need to be converted.
Oh its doable but the return on investment is on...? As about a hundred other people have stated GPS would be a better choice with maybe a height. Nice simple and it means something to everyone.
Well trade secrets are not really covered under law other than by contracts. The NDA was just a way to back him into a corner he could not get out of. Meaning he could not REMOVE the lines of code either. Since it would be a 'diff' we would suddenly know what the 'secret' is. Then it would no longer be a secret. It would be almost trival to find it out. There was a 0 sum gain for him to even sign the NDA. He HAS the code already. It should mean very little to him. Other than something funny to watch...
The formula for coca-coke is a trade secret. Not a patent (which it could be) or copyright (which it can not be). IF someone were to figure it out they could sell it. But they could not say it was 'coke' because of trademark law. The reason it is not patented is so long as coke protects it they are protected from others 'stealing' their work. This is sort of the same situation SCO is in. Now that the code is out there but 'hidden' still they can try to squeeze someone to buy them out. Which is how they have been positioning it from the start. Come mid june IBM will probably be the one. As they have the most to loose with AIX.
However Novell COULD push SCO into revealing the code. As they are the owners of the code in the first place. Once that happens SCO would be screwed. As they have no big stick to wave over IBM. Other than a contract breach. Now that all this is public now though. IBM and SCO are going to duke it out. Its a matter of face now. Not which way is cheaper...
That may be true I can not prove or disprove what you say.
There is another side though. MS may have just cut a deal to shut them up. This sort of thing happens all the time. In all IP type deals. Such as 'your infringing on X', then youll see 'well so we are but your infringing on Y', and back and forth for awhile. Then someone will just give in and someone gets some cash.
Instead of paying millions they just pay up the extortion fee and 'get out'. They may not have the time nor the patients to do anything about it. IF they were smart they would have made SCO prove it before giving up one red cent. But it seemed more like a 'go away' sort of thing to me. Or it could be they are doing something else...
I think SCO is trying to position itself to be bought out buy one of the big players. Novell has called em on it. I would also be willing to bet there are some weasly escape clause Novell will be using on SCO soon. There is another bit here also most people have over looked. MS and Novell are bitter enemies. MS has destroyed Novells core busness. SCO and MS have allied with each other. This is a nice back handed slap in Microsofts face... 'NT4 gets the red out', and it did in a BIG way.
Less than one month and gif's will be free again. Can we unburn them?
With straight C++ classes you probably could get something back resembling them. VC is a very regular compiler. Which is the one he used. Havent looked at what VC dose to templates. But I would be willing to bet it transforms them into type specific classes then into C. Would just need to use the preprocessor and see what it did to it.
Inline functions though would be imposible to get back. But then again they are inlined. So the code would be there. Just not necessaryly in the original form.
The VC compiler is just a transform engine. It transforms from C++ to C to PCODE to ASM. Course thats 5 year old info. When I used to care about what the compiler was doing to my code. Templates are probably similar.
Im sure the code that came back out of this thing would be UGLY. But if you look at the end of most exe's shipped these days most developers do not even bother stripping the exe anymore. You probably could even get back MOST of the classe names and function names maybe even the variables.
Slashdot Mirror
He was even nice enough to tell Microsoft and other HOW to make the problem harder to solve. In about a month or two we will start seeing the patches from everyone.
:)
Like most encryption its just a mater of time, money, and access.
Using a lookup table is a unique way to speed things up. Its been used for years to speed up other things. Havent used one in a few years. But havent had the need either. Its a handy tool to use once and awhile. Keep forgeting about it. Wonder if I can apply it to anything I am currently doing. Have to think about that. Hmm if I had about 50 gig yes (have about 8 meg)
Also trading memory for speed is one of the things that pops up over and over in computer science.
You can still do NAT with ipv6. There is no real reason you can not. If you tell a computer to do something it WILL do it. You tell it that its address is something it will use that. The proper way to do that sort of thing is with your mac address and access control lists. This way you do not have random computers popping up in your network and they have free roam of your network. This has become more important with things like 802.11. However do not doubt that NAT will go away. Its to usefull for that.
The only thing that bugs me with NAT is the hoops you have to jump through to get some software to work. Some of it just doesnt work. Yet these people are doing nothing 'wrong' with what they write. They just now have to take into account something they shouldnt have to be bothered with, what the network is doing. Its a network layer implementation issue leaking into the app layer.
My question is what ever happened to IPv1, IPv2, IPv3, and IPv5?
Why were those types inadequate? Are they still around? Or are they just called something else I didnt know?
and have it compile the first time
That scares me when it happens. I KNOW there is an even worse bug in there then.
Lens law of programming #1. If you have been looking at it for more than an hour its cut and paste error. corollary: If its more than 1 day its a typo.
Never thought about p2p that way. But from what Ive seen thats what they have been yelling about. Interesting...
The funny thing is some companies are SO scared of being sued they will line up to sign up. Just because of FUD surrounding it. But if they stoped and thought about it it would be STUPID to sign anything SCO gives em. As they could be 'tainted' and SCO could try to go after their tech as part of unix. All SCO would have to do is add something similar to their unix and suddenly the other party is on the hook to prove that they didnt copy it. This is a fairly much a case of ignor them they will go away.
My bet is on IBM just buying em out once the stock price goes down just to get rid of the headache.
To add to what the others say it was a very 'safe' decison at the time.
You can pressure the little tiny company to fix whatever goes wrong. Low cost to get things fixed.
Your not out the cost of developing some software for a piece of hardware that directly goes against the big iron your trying to sell.
Your fairly confident you have the patents and copyrights locked up. So you go ahead and do it. Someone makes a clone. SUE em, and they did. But they lost, they gambled.
It also worked out VERY well for IBM. I would go so far as to say it saved them. Apple and a few other companies were eating IBM's lunch in the PC market.
It was when people figured out you could build the same computer for 2k, for what IBM was charging 8k for, that IBM got busted. That was the bad decision. Higher prices than what others can build the things for is what eventually cost IBM the PC market. They had the sucker LOCKED up till about 1989...
No like most industries that have a new thing levied against them. They will pass the cost on to us. We would end up paying for that. I already do. Its called taxes where I live. Some people actually pay to have garbage hauled away, and are billed every month.
My favorite life extension for a printer cart was the old ribbon carts, and a can of WD-40. They would work for a long time till you either put too much oil on the ribbon or the ribbon ate itself.
Recently my dad replaced one of those 'freebe' printers. I got tired of him calling me up every week yelling that it was not working. Finally I talked him into a new printer. The FIRST thing I showed him about buying a new printer is pick the one with the cheap carts. He has loved the thing ever since. It cost him an extra 100 bucks for it the thing. But he is a printing mad man now! It doesnt get stuck. He can actually see the ink in the cart and tell when its empty. Hell he probably could refill the things forever considering what they are. And best of all they do not cost 40 bucks for 1 black cart that dries out in 2 weeks.
Thats like what? 3 sheets of paper? With the half full cart that came with it in the first place?
Compairing it to another medium like snail mail while seems ok is not. Here is why. Its about ROI. Lets say it costs me 500 bucks to spam 100000 people. I am selling product X with a profit per item of 50 bucks a pop. That means I only need 10 people out of 100000 to respond and poof im in the green. Its that simple. Now lets say I dont get 10 responses I get 100. See how it scales very nicely. Now think about this. For 200 bucks I can get a 'busness class' cable modem around where I live, which is about 8 mega bit. Thats almost a meg of data a second. Thats 1 line for a month. Think how much crap you can spew in a month.
If they were NOT making any money it would be within a year. They do not have to be making huge amounts of money for them to just have it as a 'hobby'. However from what Ive seen of some of the dudes interviewed they are RAKEING it in. So they are probably getting AWSOME response rates.
The funny thing is I have yet to recive any spam on my busness email, and I have had it for 3 years. My company does not filter it. They just tag it as 'possible spam'. Then the leave it up to me to filter. The reason is simple. I ONLY give that email to busness associates. Other people I know put it ALL over the web. They get hundreds per week. I have a 'junk' email account and that gets tons of stuff. But its my filter, all the rest are private.
166-200 wasnt till the end of 95. That means real availablity was not till like begining 96. Might have a few computer shoppers still laying around to look it up. Even on those whats being suggested would have been a chore. I wouldnt want to do anything like that on anything less than a 733 (mid 99). Even then just guessing those numbers would still be awfull. No DeCSS was a lucky break... Because even IF you were lucky enough to guess the number you would have to verify it through visual inspection. Which instantly makes the thing a sticky problem to solve. The problem wasnt something you could let the computer whirrr away at and just come up with a magic number. It involved a human interaction. If someone had had a 'encrypted' and a 'non encrypted' version of any movie it probably could have been solved as well. But no studios were giving that up... Which is why I say the encyption they used was 'decent'. Because it was dificult enough to crack. Which is the point of encryption. To make it so hard you can not do it in a reasonable time frame.
intel cpu history
yes you can brute force the keys in hours on TODAYS computers. That was one of the goals of the type of encryption they used. It was meant that each player had a special code. Each equally capable of decrypting it. Now pull out your P120 which was fairly high end when DVD's were specd out. How long will it take you now?
In this case once you know they keys the alg is garbage. Duuuuh. At the time there was NO one that knew how to get one of these numbers. That was the point. The number was sufficantly difficult to get. That is the point of all current encryption. It takes a while to figure out the magic key. Think about it. You pick a number. You then have to look at the output and see if it turned out ok. Next number. This is NOT a trivial problem.
Do not belive me TRY it. Try to get one of the magic numbers starting at 1.
Also look at what they were trying to do. They were not interested in 'security' if they were they would have used a realllllllly beefy one like you said. My whole point was that it was decent enough. It did its job which is to control regions and enforce trade restrictions. It also put the bar high enough that the casual copier could not get at the thing. Once one of the numbers was known they were done. Becuase they wanted each player to have its own number so they could know whom to sue if a number leaked. How do you think they were getting these numbers? They couldnt make them up. They had to have some sort of cyclical type thing going. Otherwise you could not make a new player with a new number and it be tracable or revokable. Revokable ah yes the 'punishment' they hung over the players if they leaked a key. Your player may not play our movies if we feel you have done something wrong.
Also remember that most DVD players are about 1995's tech. So this alg not only had to be workable enough. It had to have a decent execute speed, in hardware, to decode real time 5-15 meg a second. You are not going to get that with a beefy alg. So they made some sacrifices so they could actually ship.
Also the whole thing was ludicrous in the first place. As anyone who sits down to reallllly pirate stuff will tell you. An exact bit by bit copy sells exactly the same as a 'cracked' version. We the viewer care less about encryption, security, regions, CSS, or any of that. All we want to know is when is movie X coming out so we can buy it.
CSS was actually a 'decent' encryption. The alg was well understood. But the keys were unknown. They were unknown for 3+ years. Till one of the 'legit' players left one of their keys in the open. Someone then figured out the 'other' keys from it. Go ahead, give it a shot. Do not use the keys that are out there. Use just the alg and figure out what the keys are. You will not find CSS that easy to crack. CSS is about region control. So they can sell a DVD in one region for 20 dollar US, and in another region sell the SAME dvd for 30 dollars US.
... I for one do not watch.
But like you say MTV sucks. It does. Its was a sad sad sad day when vh1 is better than mtv. Course then again MTV was not all that good in the first place. If whiney teenagers doing stupid crap raises ratings for them
So I meander to Walmart and pick up a $25CDN DVD disc
This is the real reason for CSS. In this case region 1 disks. You can buy a 'CDN' or 'USA' disk and the both work on region 1 players. However say you are in France. You need a different region player if you buy your disk there. It is about trade control. CSS is not content scrabling system. The encryption was 'strong enough'. They figured it would last about 5-10 years before someone brute forced it. But they also figured the would have something way better by that time. Someone left the keys in the open and DeCSS was born. So now they are trying to fix a technical problem with law. They had the problem before anyway. How long before someone figured out how to copy the whole disk bit by bit and to hell with breaking CSS. Just let it do what it needs to.
The really fun part is that the studios are playing the money market game. Trying to leverage even more money out of people. We know it but they are trying to sell it as 'security' its not security. Its a trade control. Because if you make a bit by bit copy 'encryption and all' you still get a copy.
I for one have no problem making a copy of something I own. The problem comes in when someone gives away a copy of something they own. That is where the studios are getting bent out of shape. They are also starting to get odd ideas that they own each playing of the thing. They do not realize that we like our control. We do not want to pay for every play. They will figure it out when it costs them more to run the per play system than to sell copies outright.
The other fun part is that they are whining that they are 'down' in sales. They maybe should wake up and notice the recession thats going on. Someone that does not have a job will not be buying a luxury item like a music cd or a dvd.
This is true enough. I used to buy at least a cd a month. I think I am down to like 1 a year. I would always hear a song somewhere and would go snag the whole cd. I usually got one or two more that were rattling around in my head that way.
I do not even bother with mp3's or the like. I seemed to have peaked with the music I want to buy. I have my cd changer. I hit random and have like 2200 songs I can listen to. I have heard very little on the radio that I say hey THATS good I think ill buy that.
Now even when I find one I want I also find sticker shock. 20 bucks for a cd. I can buy a decent DVD for that. The music I may not even care that much about. But a movie Ill watch...
This is very true. They have not said anything because at first it was 'trade secret' then 'copyright' then 'a licence issue'. As by how they change their stance every week, we can deduce they are TRYING to either squeeze some money out of someone, or trying to get bought out, or both.
If they actually showed what the code is they would in effect remov the 'cloud of doubt'. We would know exactly what is going on. Because we have access to all the previous versions. We can figure out who did what. We can rewrite what we need. The last thing they want is that code to be gone. They want the money or the buy out.
To tell the truth im surprised IBM has been as quite as it has been. Course they may have done something wrong. Or they are getting ready to stomp SCO. Like the JFS they have, basicly SCO is claiming they own it. Even though IBM developed it. This is about the same as if I make a game using windows and its compiler and microsoft shows up and says they own the thing. The whole software industry would give a collective Whhuuuuu? all at once.
SCO is playing a tricky game. If IBM get sued for IP problems. They have ALOT of IP. They also have FULL access to SCO's code. Im sure they can dig up about 2 dozen things SCO is violating. It will not be pretty. How about this for a flip. SCO ends up with Linux, IBM put some code into Linux. IBM does not own it, SCO does. But now is not SCO by virtue of Linux violating IBM's IP? This is NOT that far fetched. My guess is that IBM will get off light. Some of the things IBM has contributed are not little trivial things. They are BIG IP things, and they have the patents to back it up.
what about minesweeper?
Wow thats a LOT of money. With my biggest question of who gets the money?
.5 is tacked on.
Several problems with this 'tax'. It can go up. Who do you think will pay for that 'tax'. It sure is NOT going to be Microsoft. They will simpily just tack it onto the cost of software, and blame the goverment. They will not be paying it. It will just increase the software price. Do not think for a second Microsoft will be loosing any money. The only people losing money will be the end user.
Secondly now there would be precident for a tax on just software. What about 'free' closed software. Should not those also be taxed? But they are free, so now they come up with 'fees'. States are loosing out on the huge amounts of money that could be generated by a extra 'software tax' is the sort of thing you will hear.
Third. Lets say this tax ends up going to free software orginizations. Now this is a tax on software I paid for. What if I do not agree what these COMPANIES are doing. Its a form of corperate welfare that should never be allowed. Who would be considered for this check being cut from the goverment. Even IF it ends up going to free software. There will be goverment overhead. Goverment overhead is not free, it costs money.
Fourth do not doubt for a second that local and state wouldnt want a cut of the loot. I can see it now "a '.5%' increase in the so called microsoft tax has been enacted to help schools" Three years later that money is diverted into a different discresionary fund. Suddenly its part of a pool of money that can be spent on anything. But there is no longer enough so another
Also there may be a free speech thing going on here as well. It could in a way be interperted as a form of free speech. Which could make it unconstitutional.
Also remember the same people that buy 20k copies of winxp are the same ones that have HUGE pockets and can get laws like that removed for them, called tax breaks. While the rest of us are stuck with it. Then even if they can not get it removed they will just simpily pass the cost along to you in a different form. YOU will be the one paying that tax. Not microsoft. Not some other company. You may even end up paying it even though you choose not to their stuff. You have very little control over what the banks, or the gas companies, or even the local store use for software. Which is what I always thought free software was about. Free as in free speech not as in free beer.
I for one do not want more tax's. I am already at 70 percent(state + fed + sales + property). Which is more than I really like to give away.
This actually works ive seen it done! And maybe perhaps have partaken of it myself. Oh sure there is a bit of guilt. But only till I get home.
My absolute favorite is 'oh your single you can work even MORE hours.' Ill take wrong answers for 500 alex.
Had one dude actually stand in front of all of us and say 'at this company we have NO comp time'. We would usually work a bit over and make it up somewhere else. Usually we would forget and just work over. He was expecting ONLY overtime and no 40's as it were. Well with that attitude the amount of people leaving at exactly 5 was amazing. There were very few people after 5 at that point. I found I couldnt actually get anything done so I started leaving around the same time. Never underestimate the power of stupidity, and dont get any on you.
This is PURE FUD. BOTH parties do the same crap. Do not doubt for a second that democrats did not vote for the fact that programers do not get to be called 'exempt' while others can be 'non-exempt'. Its a 'stick it to the rich' attitude that screws EVERYONE.
Also the last 'bubble' was a form of missmanagment. There are seriously HUGE companies that are disapering overnight because of missmanagment. These were STAR performers during the 'bubble'. Guess how they did it? They were jamming it to the workers. Who was in charge when this was going on? That is why you are seeing a change in the group of policy makers. If a Democrat has something sane and the Republican seems insane I will vote the way that hurts ME least.
Me? Currently I am voting republican because of the state I live in can not seem to figure out its tax base. And has mismanaged billions of dollars. They need a reminder once and awhile who actually pays the bills.
Which leads me to belive even if we had just 1 unique enough comment/piece of code we could figure out who the hell did what. There are plenty of archives out there that have every kernel version back to the linux dawn of time. Could find it within log(n) steps too. Most of them have changelogs and usually say who did what and when. But so far the 'evidence' has been rather scanty as you say. Also the nda they want to see the code is stupid you would never get to do any linux type thing again. For fear of being the one who puts something in. We can also look at other open source projects of the time and see what sorts of things they were doing. Maybe it wasnt even linux at all maybe it was inherited from some other project?
small colection of kernel source
yep. That is only losers in this situation are IBM and SCO.
SCO has come off looking REALLLLLLllllly bad. IBM has put SCO in a position of a catch 22. They can not say what the code was or where it is without giving up the 'secret'. Then from the point of view of the rest of the world its mostly. Hmm gee thats a shame. Thats what you get when you use trade secret instead of something that can protect you better.
It really matters not to us. Here is why, we HAVE the code already. We dont even have to know what it is. Its in there. It doesnt matter if its burried in some obscure mod or in the main path of code. We HAVE it. Its a trade secret. We have it but we dont know what we have. But the funny part is we dont even have to care.
SCO could have handled the problem alot better. Instead they tried to rip us all off. So we are actually cheering for IBM (gawd).
Civilian gps is supppppppppper flakey. Its effective +/- range without the interferance is about 20-50 ft. That averages out. But it does not mean you will get an average. It means it averages out for the goverment.
I have stood still and watched some badly made ones jump thousands of miles. The goverment says it will be fairly accurate 95% of the time, and it is for about that. The other 5% you may be off by feet, or by miles.
This one dude I worked with was tweaking some software for GPS. Another dude went out and put a small metal cup over the antenna. No signal. THAT easy to defeat.
and we thought the y2k prob was fun to solve. Raise of hands of how many people coded 6 chars or 3 bytes for zip codes?
Never mind all the software that reads these codes. Never mind the retraining of just about EVERYONE about the 'new' codes. Then just trying to remeber your basicly random text zip code. Never mind all the old data laying around that we still use. ALL of it would need to be converted.
Oh its doable but the return on investment is on...? As about a hundred other people have stated GPS would be a better choice with maybe a height. Nice simple and it means something to everyone.
Well trade secrets are not really covered under law other than by contracts. The NDA was just a way to back him into a corner he could not get out of. Meaning he could not REMOVE the lines of code either. Since it would be a 'diff' we would suddenly know what the 'secret' is. Then it would no longer be a secret. It would be almost trival to find it out. There was a 0 sum gain for him to even sign the NDA. He HAS the code already. It should mean very little to him. Other than something funny to watch...
The formula for coca-coke is a trade secret. Not a patent (which it could be) or copyright (which it can not be). IF someone were to figure it out they could sell it. But they could not say it was 'coke' because of trademark law. The reason it is not patented is so long as coke protects it they are protected from others 'stealing' their work. This is sort of the same situation SCO is in. Now that the code is out there but 'hidden' still they can try to squeeze someone to buy them out. Which is how they have been positioning it from the start. Come mid june IBM will probably be the one. As they have the most to loose with AIX.
However Novell COULD push SCO into revealing the code. As they are the owners of the code in the first place. Once that happens SCO would be screwed. As they have no big stick to wave over IBM. Other than a contract breach. Now that all this is public now though. IBM and SCO are going to duke it out. Its a matter of face now. Not which way is cheaper...
That may be true I can not prove or disprove what you say.
There is another side though. MS may have just cut a deal to shut them up. This sort of thing happens all the time. In all IP type deals. Such as 'your infringing on X', then youll see 'well so we are but your infringing on Y', and back and forth for awhile. Then someone will just give in and someone gets some cash.
Instead of paying millions they just pay up the extortion fee and 'get out'. They may not have the time nor the patients to do anything about it. IF they were smart they would have made SCO prove it before giving up one red cent. But it seemed more like a 'go away' sort of thing to me. Or it could be they are doing something else...
I think SCO is trying to position itself to be bought out buy one of the big players. Novell has called em on it. I would also be willing to bet there are some weasly escape clause Novell will be using on SCO soon. There is another bit here also most people have over looked. MS and Novell are bitter enemies. MS has destroyed Novells core busness. SCO and MS have allied with each other. This is a nice back handed slap in Microsofts face... 'NT4 gets the red out', and it did in a BIG way.
Less than one month and gif's will be free again. Can we unburn them?
You probably could get very close.
With straight C++ classes you probably could get something back resembling them. VC is a very regular compiler. Which is the one he used. Havent looked at what VC dose to templates. But I would be willing to bet it transforms them into type specific classes then into C. Would just need to use the preprocessor and see what it did to it.
Inline functions though would be imposible to get back. But then again they are inlined. So the code would be there. Just not necessaryly in the original form.
The VC compiler is just a transform engine. It transforms from C++ to C to PCODE to ASM. Course thats 5 year old info. When I used to care about what the compiler was doing to my code. Templates are probably similar.
Im sure the code that came back out of this thing would be UGLY. But if you look at the end of most exe's shipped these days most developers do not even bother stripping the exe anymore. You probably could even get back MOST of the classe names and function names maybe even the variables.