Requiring signed drivers means that you, the user and owner of the computer can't do whatever you want with your own property anymore. Say goodbye to customized, obscure or hacked (in a good way) drivers. Say goodbye to custom or old hardware that will never get their drivers signed. Say goodbye to software like CloneCD or Total Recorder, if Microsoft decides they aren't worthy a driver signing.
(Of course, this mostly applies to home computers, but office envirnoments solve this problem better with user right management than with driver management anyway.)
Windows Media was cracked. (search for 'freeme' on google) Then Microsoft issued a 'patch' that changed the encryption scheme, and after that nobody has cared to create a new crack.
ISO files only contain the data part of a CD, nothing more, nothing less.
Bin/cue files have the ability to contain the raw CD sectors, which also contain error correction data. These ECC datas were earlier used as a simple form of copy protection.
Alcohol/CloneCD/BlindWrite goes even further, they also store subchannel data and sometimes other physical characteristics of the CD (MDS/Media Descriptor files), which are needed to overcome most game copy protections these days.
The downside is that the latter formats aren't as widespread in use as ISO/bin-files, and only a few tools fully support them. But, if you use DaemonTools and mount the virtual drive as passthrough in VMWare, this isn't really much of a concern.
This won't work with the versions of VMWare/VirtualPC I've tried. Those programs (atleast earlier versions of them) indeed does support CD images, but only the most basic ones of them, namely ISO images and bin/cue files. This works fine for applications and operating systems, that generally don't have any CD protection schemes, but for almost all games nowadays you've got to use a more advanced imaging tool like Alcohol or CloneCD, and I don't think any virtual machines support those kinds of images yet.
(Another problem with playing games in VMWare is that the virtual video card only supports the most basic Direct3D stuff, which only works if you want to play 1997-era games..)
That might be because Mac users have had a kickass store for their music for quite a while, and Windows users just recently got access to the same store? Just maybe?
Oh, and I agree completely with his no-cd philosophy. CD protections are completely useless, and are only annoying to the legitimate users.
Example: Some days ago I bought Diablo 2, but I had several crashes because the game insisted on checking the CD every few hours. The crashes happened because the game couldn't cope with the extremely slow spin-up time of my CD drive. I found a crack, and haven't had a problem since. Not to mention what a great advantage it is to have all my games installed, and being able to play all of them with the game CDs safely stored on a shelf.
In particular, the brute-force CDKey generators are particularly bad - they basically pound publisher CDKey validation servers with random keys as fast as possible, to try and find valid ones - creating a DOS attack in many cases.
If keys can be brute forced this way, it's the game company's own fault. Brute forcing can easily be avoided by temporarily banning any IP that tries $number invalid cd keys in a row. If the company hasn't put such simple measures in place then they need a harsh lesson in security.
If a game company is threatened by having their key check algorithms posted somewhere, they deserve what they get. Any game company worth their salt knows that CD keys should be generated through a good RNG, not some pseudo-random algorithm.
Does Magic Lantern even exist? The FBI claimed they'd begin using it, but I've never heard of it since then. If it were in real use, wouldn't there be documentation on this in the trial, like it was in the Scarfo case?
I've had a few incidents where spambots have hit the guestbook on my homepage. Since the gb is custom-made, I guess they go for certain searchable keywords. I wonder how long it will be until the spam senders become the leaders in AI developement;)
If you think Vertigo comics come from 'a long time ago' you are too young. Read the other posts here about the 'comic code' that almost destroyed the industry some decades ago.
If I was a programmer, I would create games where you try to kill the President or a game where you get points for each nun you rape. Why? Because it would offend people.
I was only referring to the background of the image, I am fully aware how hard it is to OCR the remailing distorted text. My point was only that adding such a fancy-looking background does not make the image any harder to read for a program.
To counter this point, I loaded up my favourite image viewing program (Irfanview), opened the picture, increased the contrast to the max, then reduced the number of colours to two.
The result: A near-clear, black and white representation of the letters remained. If wavy backgrounds can't defeat even the simplest of image software programs, how do you expect the same backgrounds to prove any challenge to custom-designed software?
This example is a bit stupid - what stops a computer program from filtering out everything of the wavy background by just eliminating everything non-black? There seems to be so much contrast in the image that it would be a really trivial job.
Why would the size forbid something like that? Remember, the GBA is quite small already. Another thing would be the licensing problems, but maybe that's been sorted out..
Right now, people aren't really of much use in space (apart from bragging value) so most space-faring nations have instead used their cash to get useful stuff, like sattelites, out there instead.
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Requiring signed drivers means that you, the user and owner of the computer can't do whatever you want with your own property anymore. Say goodbye to customized, obscure or hacked (in a good way) drivers. Say goodbye to custom or old hardware that will never get their drivers signed. Say goodbye to software like CloneCD or Total Recorder, if Microsoft decides they aren't worthy a driver signing.
(Of course, this mostly applies to home computers, but office envirnoments solve this problem better with user right management than with driver management anyway.)
If a bill is rare enough for a collector to scan in, chances are it won't be in the Photoshop currency database. Problem solved!
Windows Media was cracked. (search for 'freeme' on google) Then Microsoft issued a 'patch' that changed the encryption scheme, and after that nobody has cared to create a new crack.
ISO files only contain the data part of a CD, nothing more, nothing less.
Bin/cue files have the ability to contain the raw CD sectors, which also contain error correction data. These ECC datas were earlier used as a simple form of copy protection.
Alcohol/CloneCD/BlindWrite goes even further, they also store subchannel data and sometimes other physical characteristics of the CD (MDS/Media Descriptor files), which are needed to overcome most game copy protections these days.
The downside is that the latter formats aren't as widespread in use as ISO/bin-files, and only a few tools fully support them. But, if you use DaemonTools and mount the virtual drive as passthrough in VMWare, this isn't really much of a concern.
This won't work with the versions of VMWare/VirtualPC I've tried. Those programs (atleast earlier versions of them) indeed does support CD images, but only the most basic ones of them, namely ISO images and bin/cue files. This works fine for applications and operating systems, that generally don't have any CD protection schemes, but for almost all games nowadays you've got to use a more advanced imaging tool like Alcohol or CloneCD, and I don't think any virtual machines support those kinds of images yet.
(Another problem with playing games in VMWare is that the virtual video card only supports the most basic Direct3D stuff, which only works if you want to play 1997-era games..)
Shouldn't you have turned red instead?
That might be because Mac users have had a kickass store for their music for quite a while, and Windows users just recently got access to the same store? Just maybe?
Oh, and I agree completely with his no-cd philosophy. CD protections are completely useless, and are only annoying to the legitimate users.
Example: Some days ago I bought Diablo 2, but I had several crashes because the game insisted on checking the CD every few hours. The crashes happened because the game couldn't cope with the extremely slow spin-up time of my CD drive. I found a crack, and haven't had a problem since.
Not to mention what a great advantage it is to have all my games installed, and being able to play all of them with the game CDs safely stored on a shelf.
In particular, the brute-force CDKey generators are particularly bad - they basically pound publisher CDKey validation servers with random keys as fast as possible, to try and find valid ones - creating a DOS attack in many cases.
If keys can be brute forced this way, it's the game company's own fault. Brute forcing can easily be avoided by temporarily banning any IP that tries $number invalid cd keys in a row. If the company hasn't put such simple measures in place then they need a harsh lesson in security.
If a game company is threatened by having their key check algorithms posted somewhere, they deserve what they get. Any game company worth their salt knows that CD keys should be generated through a good RNG, not some pseudo-random algorithm.
Who wants to bet Napster 2 has died before then?
Opera warns you every time you try to access a site with a username in the URL - does Mozilla do this too? I know for certain IE doesn't ;)
Does Magic Lantern even exist? The FBI claimed they'd begin using it, but I've never heard of it since then. If it were in real use, wouldn't there be documentation on this in the trial, like it was in the Scarfo case?
I've had a few incidents where spambots have hit the guestbook on my homepage. Since the gb is custom-made, I guess they go for certain searchable keywords. I wonder how long it will be until the spam senders become the leaders in AI developement ;)
If you think Vertigo comics come from 'a long time ago' you are too young. Read the other posts here about the 'comic code' that almost destroyed the industry some decades ago.
If I was a programmer, I would create games where you try to kill the President or a game where you get points for each nun you rape. Why? Because it would offend people.
I think Running With Scissors has a job opening for you.
A better way to get screenshots in Media Player is to turn hardware acceleration down to zero. Then you can grab shots easily.
Hey, if DRM helmets are one step forward to getting full-immersion VR, where I can have sex with seven ladies at once, I'm all for it!
RAID is all well and good, until a virus/luser comes along and wipes out all files on it.
I was only referring to the background of the image, I am fully aware how hard it is to OCR the remailing distorted text. My point was only that adding such a fancy-looking background does not make the image any harder to read for a program.
To counter this point, I loaded up my favourite image viewing program (Irfanview), opened the picture, increased the contrast to the max, then reduced the number of colours to two.
The result: A near-clear, black and white representation of the letters remained. If wavy backgrounds can't defeat even the simplest of image software programs, how do you expect the same backgrounds to prove any challenge to custom-designed software?
This example is a bit stupid - what stops a computer program from filtering out everything of the wavy background by just eliminating everything non-black? There seems to be so much contrast in the image that it would be a really trivial job.
Why would the size forbid something like that? Remember, the GBA is quite small already. Another thing would be the licensing problems, but maybe that's been sorted out..
Right now, people aren't really of much use in space (apart from bragging value) so most space-faring nations have instead used their cash to get useful stuff, like sattelites, out there instead.
It has been going on for YEARS. This is what Securom/Safedisc does. The only new thing is the FADE stuff.