It will, though the game will have to be delayed a bit more so that it can be rewritten to take advantage of this advance... and the next one... and the next one... and....
"You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe." -- Ranger Marcus Cole
So, until then, the key will be revoked, and the company have two choices. Update with a new key (that will probably be copied out from the player the same day)
I think you can be assured that company that created the exploited software player won't be given a new key until that company changes the software so that the same exploit will not work.
The people who control who gets keys will see to that.
Many "customers" act as criminals then bitch and moan when they're being treated as such.
Only because exercising fair use is acting like a criminal. Except its only acting; it isn't being.
The actions of a criminal can also be the actions of a law-abiding citizen legally exercising his rights. It is to what ends the acts are performed that (are supposed to) define them as criminal.
I can swing my fists in the air as long as I like as long as I don't hit your nose. It's bad laws like the DMCA that would make swinging my fists in the privacy of my single-occupancy home a crime.
Except you're recording the original compressed stream, not the HDMI or DVI uncompressed output.
And really, you want to copy the compressed stream. If you copied the uncompressed data, you'd have to recompress it to make it useful and make it lossy to reduce the size.
Unless you are able to get that data to an analog recordable medium with sufficient fidelity.
You could use a striped RAID to increase write speed. Then it becomes a matter of whether there's enough bandwidth available to send the data to the RAID controller.
The current approved code is 1.4.2 for Sara (SciAtl) boxes.
I see now, after doing some research (Googling), that the problem here is that we jumped straight from the Passport software right past Sara to Mystro (a.k.a. Time Warner Digital Navigator), TWC's attempt to roll their own software. And worse, I'm in a market where they decided to inflict beta versions of the software upon us (Lincoln, NE).
So it seems my opt-out choices are: get rid of digital cable, get a TiVo Series3 and use CableCards to get away from their software (maybe, and give up TiVoToGo functionality), or switch to satellite, because despite being drafted into their beta test, they don't seem interested in my feedback.
It's almost as if TWC wants this software to discourage people from using their own DVRs and instead rent theirs. But surely they wouldn't deliberately engage in such an anticompetitive practice and abuse their localized monopolies, would they?
In any case, thank you, CheSara, for taking an interest in my plight. Alas, it seems I have little to no choice over the issue, at least until July, barring industry appeals.
This is a failure of current DRM schemes, not DRM in general. It would be easy enough to design DRM so that the DRM no longer applies after a certain date.
Which would require the date to be locked on the machines so I cannot defeat it by simply moving the date ahead 100 years.
No, because it would also have to be tied to an on-line service to monitor the state of the latest extensions to copyright law as well as the obituary pages.
Consider that even if an artist was the last of his bloodline, owned all his copyrights, and did not will those rights to anyone, you still couldn't copy any of his works for however long Disney decided they should be extended.
Thing is, there's no hard line between what is illegal and what is fair use. No computer DRM algorithm can independently determine whether a particular use is illegal or fair. Fair use is a defense, its validity determined by the court, not code. The only DRM necessary is the law.
Actually, that's not quite true. Fair use exists only so far as potential plaintiffs don't sue and, if they do, defendants don't settle. If copyright holders always sued and defendants couldn't afford to defend their rights, they'd be gone.
After work today (or maybe over lunch), I'll restart one of them by holding select and info (or whatever the two buttons are) to get what version the box is currently running and report back.
OK, on page 12 pr 22, "Software Versions" I have:
PTV: v3.12.9.1sp. Thu Dec 16 2004, 3:51:17 PM PS[rest off-screen] Apps... Dflt: vnot found, not found Res: 2.3.11Z-ptv Oct 11 2006,10:13:40 DAM: 0.9e Oct 11 2006,10:13:06 PE: 3.9c48f MDN 2.3 Jul 15 2006,17:16:10 Host: 0.1a Oct 11 2006,10:12:31 HTRA: 4.0.47p Jun 19 2006,13:00:13
Focus: 139 = Screen_Saver
Active: (139)
Loaded: (128 131 133 139)
And apparently, according to page 18 of 22, "Connections & Tiers", they could set "Guide Mode" to something other than "46 (GUIDE Enabled)" which might resolve the problem. If I can convince TWC that there is a problem.
You seriously have to wonder what were they thinking when they named it the iPhone without an agreement in place.
I think it's very simple: they were dead set against leaking anything about what they were going to announce at MacWorld, so they couldn't risk divulging anything about it to Cisco and felt they could just smooth things over after the fact. They bet they could negotiate for the trademark with Cisco later. They didn't count on Cisco actually releasing a product first, but by then Apple's secret plans were already set in stone.
Apple was bit by their own desire for secrecy, that's all. They didn't want anyone talking; it's the not talking that's gotten the whole company in trouble this time.
Actually the Porn industry is the most innovative. They are the only ones that use the multi-angle function on current DVD's
Some concerts on DVD also support the multi-angle feature.
Back to the Future Part II should have used it during the revisit to 1955.
However it is problematic to do. During multi-angle sections you pretty much have to stick with a constant bit rate, further reducing how much you can fit on a disk.
The DVDs that use subtitle feature for overlaying video, now that's a neat hack!
After work today (or maybe over lunch), I'll restart one of them by holding select and info (or whatever the two buttons are) to get what version the box is currently running and report back. Right now I have three 3250HDs. I have not tested the one with Firewire for the problem (it isn't TiVo-controlled). I guess that makes the known problem units' hardware at least 2.75 years old, if the company has complied with the FCC's rules on procurement, the more recent hardware untested.
The 3100 I had was the first to get updated and that's where my problems began. (That unit was hard fought for as several other 3100s I'd had had overheating problems.) Replacing it with a 3100HD had me discover that the 3100HD also would not downconvert HD. Other than that, it was fine until it got updated too. The other 3250HD got updated nearly the same time and started giving me problems as well. I did one more exchange of the 3100HD for a 3250HD and I got downconverting, but it too updated to the new software. (A couple days later they finally acknowledged they had Firewire boxes, and I got one of those. I'm still working on getting it to work the the Macintosh.)
The glitch is, when you start changing channels, the on-screen display (OSD) at the bottom of the screen comes on. If for example the time changes from 08:59 PM to 09:00 PM while you're entering digits, the OSD updates to reflect the next show's data on the channel you're leaving. When it does so, it throws out the digits you'd entered. A human could notice this and re-enter the digits, but a TiVo can't. It's a user interface glitch.
Except for the two HBO Bill Maher incidents, that's the regularly reproducible form of the bug. I've had the "mystro" reboot screen recorded at the start of recordings that have glitched in this way. For those HBO incidents, it was spontaneous at the hour, no OSD, and I was tuned to HBO, not HBOHD nor HBOHDP.
If it does turn off if idle too long, turning TiVo's Suggestions back on would resolve that. Unfortunately, on-schedule Suggestion recording trips this bug, so only the box-less TiVos get to record them. That's less value for premium channels for me.
I use S-Video and L&R Audio out of the cable box into the TiVos. The cable boxes get first access to the coax. I don't think they'd work at all getting their RF in from the TiVo's RF out. I have cable-provided splitters rated for digital cable and have had my signal strength tested.
The only good thing I can say about the new software is that it works better with my (RCA) 4:3 HDTV, though still not perfect: the stretch option appears to stretch a bit too much. I'm not so concerned about that. I'd gladly sacrifice that just to roll back to the previous revision.
I've been through four recently, both 3100 and 3250 models, HD and not. All problems came from the latest software update. And before this I had had a terrible time with overheating boxes shutting down Friday afternoons.
You're right, the TiVo can't be the cause of the problem; it is a race condition between the data stream of guide data coming into the box and trying to change channels. If I was as reliable as the TiVo at changing near the hour and half-hour, I could make it happen every time myself. But my cable company's clock and my TiVo's clock are in just the perfectly wrong sync with each other so that trying to change to channel 106 will occasionally turn to channel 6, or trying to change off channel 18 at the wrong time will turn off the box. These two specific examples have happened tonight.
I've seen it happen and I've had recorded instances of it happening. The strangest of all is when it's recorded a crash twice in two weeks after the same show right at the hour when the TiVo would have stopped recording had I not set it to pad the end by 5 minutes, and that was Real Time with Bill Maher. Of course, it happens twice just before it goes on Winter hiatus.
So it dies on errors in the guide data stream, it can die when being interrupted while receiving a guide data stream, and receiving a guide data stream can cause it to throw out a perfectly good channel change at any point during it.
A normal user wouldn't get tripped up by this, but a precision automated timed device can every time. It still happens to me with two different TiVos each controlling a 3150HD box. The TiVos are a Series1 and a Series2. I'm about to move one box from the Series1 to another Series2 just to get mitigation by soft-padding.
And when they tell me to reconfigure it so that the cable box controls the TiVo as if it were a VCR I want to scream!
I've had to endure the worst version ever for these damned Scientific Atlanta cable boxes. I use them with standalone TiVo boxes, but I've had to disable Suggestions and pad all recordings by a minute before and after just to get them to work with the latest update forced upon me by Time Warner Cable.
It's all about their new guide data system. Now, if you try to change the channel at the hour or half hour when the channel you're leaving has another show coming on, the data update can throw out some or all of the digits your TiVo sent to the box so you are left on the same channel or tuned to the wrong channel, both cases recording the wrong show.
But that's not the worst of it! Another failure mode is the cable box crashing, restarting, and staying off until you physically press the power button again. *Every* *single* *Wednesday* *morning* the box crashes as a result of TiVo recording their Teleworld Paid Program without any padding and I have to make sure to turn them back on again before I go to work.
Further, I've had it crash twice on HBO without an attempt to change channels, both right after the last two episodes of Real Time, so even if I could find a way to bias the TiVo by 5-10 seconds to avoid the critical window, spontaneous crashes will still occur!
Time Warner Cable is completely unsympathetic and doesn't give a damn about my complaints, not even to roll back my boxes to a functioning revision. I'd go buy a Series3 and get two unidirectional cable cards if I could afford it now and had assurance that the same glitch won't follow me to those cards. (I don't give a damn about PPV or other OnDemand programming and have thought about putting a unidirectional trap on the line to keep my boxes from requesting their guide data.)
I'm even considering switching to DirecTV, even though I've seen how much they compress the hell out of animated programming to practical unwatchability.
I'm not sure I can even last until July when I can (theoretically) get my own cable box and return their buggy units.
Yet this is precisely the sort of "we don't need your money, customers" attitude that screwed Sony out of the last big format they pushed (aside from UMD, which IMO isn't a 'major' format).
SACD? MiniDisc/ATRAC3? MMCD?
Beta died fast and hard...
Oh, right. Whereas those intervening formats were total successes. I guess it's all relative (they weren't big enough?).
It's not that everything Sony touches fails; it's more that when something of theirs does fail, it's spectacular.
In the previous discussions about pornography decided the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray battle, I'd always said that the porn industry was fully capable of going both ways, and a few others besides (with the double-entendre wholly intended).
However, hearing that Sony itself has been pressuring the porn industry away from the Blu-Ray format, it seems they've shot themselves in the foot and mooted their brand from competition.
I suspect they want to keep the format that is used in their gaming system free of purient-interest content and not be a portal for pornography, preserving it as a "kid friendly" device. And with a limited number of facilities able to produce BD disks compared to DVD houses refitted for HD-DVD production, that scarcity allows Sony more control. Perhaps Sony is still stinging with the parental backlash against kids putting porn on their PSPs. How many more PSPs to adults did that revelation sell again?
Slashdot Mirror
If you buy 100 HD DVDs you will have spent upwards of $2000.
Are there even 100 HD DVD titles out there?
the Vice President on the use of the letters: "It's perfectly legitimate activity."
I would have called it "cromulent".
Prepare to Joost
Boozard Bait!
The signalling rates are measured in GT/s not Gbps (correct me if I'm wrong).
I'd have to know what a GT/s was first. Gross Tonnes per second? Gigatonnes per second? Gigatexels per second? Gran Turismos per second?
It will, though the game will have to be delayed a bit more so that it can be rewritten to take advantage of this advance... and the next one... and the next one... and....
"You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe." -- Ranger Marcus Cole
I'm guessing the "not" I've noted should have been "now".
I think you can be assured that company that created the exploited software player won't be given a new key until that company changes the software so that the same exploit will not work.
The people who control who gets keys will see to that.
Many "customers" act as criminals then bitch and moan when they're being treated as such.
Only because exercising fair use is acting like a criminal. Except its only acting; it isn't being.
The actions of a criminal can also be the actions of a law-abiding citizen legally exercising his rights. It is to what ends the acts are performed that (are supposed to) define them as criminal.
I can swing my fists in the air as long as I like as long as I don't hit your nose. It's bad laws like the DMCA that would make swinging my fists in the privacy of my single-occupancy home a crime.
Yeah, because that worked sooo well with the DIgital Video eXpress (DIVX) format.
Except you're recording the original compressed stream, not the HDMI or DVI uncompressed output.
And really, you want to copy the compressed stream. If you copied the uncompressed data, you'd have to recompress it to make it useful and make it lossy to reduce the size.
Unless you are able to get that data to an analog recordable medium with sufficient fidelity.
You could use a striped RAID to increase write speed. Then it becomes a matter of whether there's enough bandwidth available to send the data to the RAID controller.
I see now, after doing some research (Googling), that the problem here is that we jumped straight from the Passport software right past Sara to Mystro (a.k.a. Time Warner Digital Navigator), TWC's attempt to roll their own software. And worse, I'm in a market where they decided to inflict beta versions of the software upon us (Lincoln, NE).
So it seems my opt-out choices are: get rid of digital cable, get a TiVo Series3 and use CableCards to get away from their software (maybe, and give up TiVoToGo functionality), or switch to satellite, because despite being drafted into their beta test, they don't seem interested in my feedback.
It's almost as if TWC wants this software to discourage people from using their own DVRs and instead rent theirs. But surely they wouldn't deliberately engage in such an anticompetitive practice and abuse their localized monopolies, would they?
In any case, thank you, CheSara, for taking an interest in my plight. Alas, it seems I have little to no choice over the issue, at least until July, barring industry appeals.
No, because it would also have to be tied to an on-line service to monitor the state of the latest extensions to copyright law as well as the obituary pages.
Consider that even if an artist was the last of his bloodline, owned all his copyrights, and did not will those rights to anyone, you still couldn't copy any of his works for however long Disney decided they should be extended.
Thing is, there's no hard line between what is illegal and what is fair use. No computer DRM algorithm can independently determine whether a particular use is illegal or fair. Fair use is a defense, its validity determined by the court, not code. The only DRM necessary is the law.
Actually, that's not quite true. Fair use exists only so far as potential plaintiffs don't sue and, if they do, defendants don't settle. If copyright holders always sued and defendants couldn't afford to defend their rights, they'd be gone.
OK, on page 12 pr 22, "Software Versions" I have:
And apparently, according to page 18 of 22, "Connections & Tiers", they could set "Guide Mode" to something other than "46 (GUIDE Enabled)" which might resolve the problem. If I can convince TWC that there is a problem.
You seriously have to wonder what were they thinking when they named it the iPhone without an agreement in place.
I think it's very simple: they were dead set against leaking anything about what they were going to announce at MacWorld, so they couldn't risk divulging anything about it to Cisco and felt they could just smooth things over after the fact. They bet they could negotiate for the trademark with Cisco later. They didn't count on Cisco actually releasing a product first, but by then Apple's secret plans were already set in stone.
Apple was bit by their own desire for secrecy, that's all. They didn't want anyone talking; it's the not talking that's gotten the whole company in trouble this time.
Actually the Porn industry is the most innovative. They are the only ones that use the multi-angle function on current DVD's
Some concerts on DVD also support the multi-angle feature.
Back to the Future Part II should have used it during the revisit to 1955.
However it is problematic to do. During multi-angle sections you pretty much have to stick with a constant bit rate, further reducing how much you can fit on a disk.
The DVDs that use subtitle feature for overlaying video, now that's a neat hack!
After work today (or maybe over lunch), I'll restart one of them by holding select and info (or whatever the two buttons are) to get what version the box is currently running and report back. Right now I have three 3250HDs. I have not tested the one with Firewire for the problem (it isn't TiVo-controlled). I guess that makes the known problem units' hardware at least 2.75 years old, if the company has complied with the FCC's rules on procurement, the more recent hardware untested.
The 3100 I had was the first to get updated and that's where my problems began. (That unit was hard fought for as several other 3100s I'd had had overheating problems.) Replacing it with a 3100HD had me discover that the 3100HD also would not downconvert HD. Other than that, it was fine until it got updated too. The other 3250HD got updated nearly the same time and started giving me problems as well. I did one more exchange of the 3100HD for a 3250HD and I got downconverting, but it too updated to the new software. (A couple days later they finally acknowledged they had Firewire boxes, and I got one of those. I'm still working on getting it to work the the Macintosh.)
The glitch is, when you start changing channels, the on-screen display (OSD) at the bottom of the screen comes on. If for example the time changes from 08:59 PM to 09:00 PM while you're entering digits, the OSD updates to reflect the next show's data on the channel you're leaving. When it does so, it throws out the digits you'd entered. A human could notice this and re-enter the digits, but a TiVo can't. It's a user interface glitch.
Except for the two HBO Bill Maher incidents, that's the regularly reproducible form of the bug. I've had the "mystro" reboot screen recorded at the start of recordings that have glitched in this way. For those HBO incidents, it was spontaneous at the hour, no OSD, and I was tuned to HBO, not HBOHD nor HBOHDP.
If it does turn off if idle too long, turning TiVo's Suggestions back on would resolve that. Unfortunately, on-schedule Suggestion recording trips this bug, so only the box-less TiVos get to record them. That's less value for premium channels for me.
I use S-Video and L&R Audio out of the cable box into the TiVos. The cable boxes get first access to the coax. I don't think they'd work at all getting their RF in from the TiVo's RF out. I have cable-provided splitters rated for digital cable and have had my signal strength tested.
The only good thing I can say about the new software is that it works better with my (RCA) 4:3 HDTV, though still not perfect: the stretch option appears to stretch a bit too much. I'm not so concerned about that. I'd gladly sacrifice that just to roll back to the previous revision.
I've been through four recently, both 3100 and 3250 models, HD and not. All problems came from the latest software update. And before this I had had a terrible time with overheating boxes shutting down Friday afternoons.
You're right, the TiVo can't be the cause of the problem; it is a race condition between the data stream of guide data coming into the box and trying to change channels. If I was as reliable as the TiVo at changing near the hour and half-hour, I could make it happen every time myself. But my cable company's clock and my TiVo's clock are in just the perfectly wrong sync with each other so that trying to change to channel 106 will occasionally turn to channel 6, or trying to change off channel 18 at the wrong time will turn off the box. These two specific examples have happened tonight.
I've seen it happen and I've had recorded instances of it happening. The strangest of all is when it's recorded a crash twice in two weeks after the same show right at the hour when the TiVo would have stopped recording had I not set it to pad the end by 5 minutes, and that was Real Time with Bill Maher. Of course, it happens twice just before it goes on Winter hiatus.
So it dies on errors in the guide data stream, it can die when being interrupted while receiving a guide data stream, and receiving a guide data stream can cause it to throw out a perfectly good channel change at any point during it.
A normal user wouldn't get tripped up by this, but a precision automated timed device can every time. It still happens to me with two different TiVos each controlling a 3150HD box. The TiVos are a Series1 and a Series2. I'm about to move one box from the Series1 to another Series2 just to get mitigation by soft-padding.
And when they tell me to reconfigure it so that the cable box controls the TiVo as if it were a VCR I want to scream!
I've had to endure the worst version ever for these damned Scientific Atlanta cable boxes. I use them with standalone TiVo boxes, but I've had to disable Suggestions and pad all recordings by a minute before and after just to get them to work with the latest update forced upon me by Time Warner Cable.
It's all about their new guide data system. Now, if you try to change the channel at the hour or half hour when the channel you're leaving has another show coming on, the data update can throw out some or all of the digits your TiVo sent to the box so you are left on the same channel or tuned to the wrong channel, both cases recording the wrong show.
But that's not the worst of it! Another failure mode is the cable box crashing, restarting, and staying off until you physically press the power button again. *Every* *single* *Wednesday* *morning* the box crashes as a result of TiVo recording their Teleworld Paid Program without any padding and I have to make sure to turn them back on again before I go to work.
Further, I've had it crash twice on HBO without an attempt to change channels, both right after the last two episodes of Real Time, so even if I could find a way to bias the TiVo by 5-10 seconds to avoid the critical window, spontaneous crashes will still occur!
Time Warner Cable is completely unsympathetic and doesn't give a damn about my complaints, not even to roll back my boxes to a functioning revision. I'd go buy a Series3 and get two unidirectional cable cards if I could afford it now and had assurance that the same glitch won't follow me to those cards. (I don't give a damn about PPV or other OnDemand programming and have thought about putting a unidirectional trap on the line to keep my boxes from requesting their guide data.)
I'm even considering switching to DirecTV, even though I've seen how much they compress the hell out of animated programming to practical unwatchability.
I'm not sure I can even last until July when I can (theoretically) get my own cable box and return their buggy units.
Only on slashdot will a story about high-definition porn devolve into an argument about the superiority of star-wired token rings vs. Ethernet.
I think it depends on whether you are talking about budgets or returns on investments.
People will tolerate more crap in porn than they will in a movie, and that's not including the actual crap.
I personally like how everyone skips over or omits the, "and a few others besides".
It's like it's something no one really wants to (be/admit to) thinking about.
Yet this is precisely the sort of "we don't need your money, customers" attitude that screwed Sony out of the last big format they pushed (aside from UMD, which IMO isn't a 'major' format).
SACD? MiniDisc/ATRAC3? MMCD?
Beta died fast and hard...
Oh, right. Whereas those intervening formats were total successes. I guess it's all relative (they weren't big enough?).
It's not that everything Sony touches fails; it's more that when something of theirs does fail, it's spectacular.
In the previous discussions about pornography decided the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray battle, I'd always said that the porn industry was fully capable of going both ways, and a few others besides (with the double-entendre wholly intended).
However, hearing that Sony itself has been pressuring the porn industry away from the Blu-Ray format, it seems they've shot themselves in the foot and mooted their brand from competition.
I suspect they want to keep the format that is used in their gaming system free of purient-interest content and not be a portal for pornography, preserving it as a "kid friendly" device. And with a limited number of facilities able to produce BD disks compared to DVD houses refitted for HD-DVD production, that scarcity allows Sony more control. Perhaps Sony is still stinging with the parental backlash against kids putting porn on their PSPs. How many more PSPs to adults did that revelation sell again?