191–200 of 232 posts
He mentions archival as a motivation but can we trust the rest of the hardware to last more than a few decades? Isn't emulation the real archival solution?
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I'm not a lawyer, but I don't see how "I didn't steal anything; I just broke open the safe and told others how to get the money" would get you of the hook.
Well, it's a good thing you're not a lawyer then! By analogy, if the original comment had been "I will not give you a copy of the copyrighted harry potter book, but I can teach you how to use a scanner if you'd like, and I'm sure someone else will scan it" would you say that teaching someone to use a scanner is illegal? It's actually typically legal to make a backup of a copyrighted item you own for personal use if t…
I hadn't thought of the 'for personal use' defense, though.
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I'm going through this as a relatively new PS Vita owner. Sony decided to go with proprietary game cartridges, proprietary memory cards, and DRM'd digital distribution. Despite the quality of the games and hardware, the system didn't do well commercially and it appears Sony has lost interest in the system and it's sibling PS TV/Vita TV. There are a lot of great games (including PS1 and PSP games) for the system, but…
Players overwhelmingly vote with their wallets in favour of DRM. Just wait until some day Steam servers get shut off, the backlash will be massive.
There was a time when DRM was only visible when it broke your legitimately purchased game (e.g. SimCity, Diablo 3)
Now at least gamers are getting some decent perks from DRM (e.g. digital loaning, play anywhere, cross platform licensing) so it's a bit easier to stomach.
Wow. I certainly hope someone with a lot of power over company culture at, say, Apple is watching this. And that they get inspired to think about cultural preservation. I really think it should be a standard act of corporate responsibility and platform stewardship to make it so that work like that of Professor Abrasive's, is not the only spare key we have to current culture a few decades down the road. We as a global…
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Dreamcast games varied in size massively. Crazy Taxi was only around 100mb. So small in fact that when initially burnt to a CD the drive couldn't load files fast enough (as files were closer to the inner ring of the disc). Tools were then released to 'pad' the game files out to be closer to the outer edge with a dummy file. Files close to the outer edge can be read faster as the drive laser can cover more distance pe…
Oh yes, I remember padding the image, and Echelon, of course. I still have the tools somewhere in my backups. You mention the read speed issues, meaning the dreamcast drive was CAV. Were all data drives of the time CAV? Are audio CD players CAV? Not some 40 second skip protection discman, but like a hifi unit from the 80s (since my naive 80s implementation would not like the data rate changing across the disc)? Does…
Great work. These crazy reverse engineering projects kind of make me feel insecure about my own abilities, as weird as it sounds. I wonder if I would have been able to come up with the same solution if I worked at it. My fear is that I would not, but who knows. A lot of it is purely analytical, but there is a portion that relies on pure creativity and problem solving abilities. I understand the process he went throug…
Wow. I certainly hope someone with a lot of power over company culture at, say, Apple is watching this. And that they get inspired to think about cultural preservation. I really think it should be a standard act of corporate responsibility and platform stewardship to make it so that work like that of Professor Abrasive's, is not the only spare key we have to current culture a few decades down the road. We as a global…
To fix it, people should stop using DRM. Or as a first step to repeal crooked corrupted laws which declared breaking DRM illegal even for legitimate purposes. http://www.fixthedmca.org
Anyway, the world looks really bleak for open platforms right now.
The main example is Android. If you have like one toe dipped into a role related to infosec at the moment, you can't serioulsy recommend that people you work with or care for even touch mainstream Android phones. Because the patching situation is such a dumpster fire.
Even Google's Nexus crap that is getting patched, seems to be set on a 2 year lifecycle, with 2014 phones getting end of lifed a few months from now. Pretty weak sauce if Google's intention is to set any kind of example for vendor security support on Android.
My sister runs my first iPhone, a 2012 iPhone 5, fully patched. It's going to be supported for another year or two, probably.
https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/4457705#nexus_device...
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I don't particularly want it to be this way, but I have to almost force people I care about to buy iPhones. It feels bad, especially in cases when they'd have better use for their money.
So with Apple, specifically, they're really good at the closed platform game and I don't see them getting out of that, especially if they're getting more into things like payment services or automotive. Their crypto stance really implies that they want institutional-level trust from their customers. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/03/follow-t...
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Game consoles are unlikely to quit DRM too: the only thing that'd make them stop with DRM per se is probably to make all games just streamed from the, uh, cloud. Doable... maybe soonish but that'd rule out a lot of people and use cases where the connectivity just isn't there.
That's kind of why I suggested my half-baked idea to pressure, force and shame closed platform vendors into proper legacy support as part of the "social contract". Or whatever. Not that certain "social contracts", like the ones Western countries have with banks are working out all that great at the moment.
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But as I said, this idea of mine is half baked. Someone like Apple is only part of the puzzle, since apps and games increasingly rely on server backends to work properly. It's not like Apple could save the gaming world's cultural heritage in 2030 just by offering a binary blob that runs all iPhone apps from 2010.
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As an Aussie he's going to be subject to the TPPs DMCA-lite restrictions on circumvention devices once it's ratified.
I live in Australia and wrote Heimdall[1], an open-source reverse engineered tool for flashing Samsung phones. I can assure you, I am not looking forward to the TPP! [1] https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/Heimdall
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the most impressive part, to me, was how thoroughly he reverse engineered what looks to be a crazy complicated CPU architecture - the Saturn has four of them. Also, I love that his original motivation was to use the sound processor for mixing chiptune, and basically opening up the entire system at metal level is a happy by product. ALSO, the fact that he decided that his first working prototype was too hands on and f…
Wasn't it only one of those CPU's though? He mentioned there is a CPU dedicated to disk operation and that's the one no one had been able to get a ROM dump of, which in turn enabled all the other stuff? Not trying to downplay his achievement or anything, I'm new to all this but it's easy to see that this is some truly amazing work.
Echoing what others have said, I never knew about just how amazing the engineering on the Saturn was in terms of incredibly tight timing.
Was that a good thing?
Harder to program of course.