HDFury use the leaked HDCP master key table to generate a new key.

Or they stuff the entire MKT into ROM, and make the thing generate a new key if the authentication fails.

What's that I hear? Could it be a game of Whak-a-Mole merrily chirruping away in the background? I think it is!

I dunno, the dark blue metal-box Netgear LAN switches are pretty decent.

And the DG834GT (with UberGT firmware) is a great little DSL modem/router -- I run mine in modem mode, though, and use Ubuntu+Shorewall to handle routing, firewalling and NAT, and my SixXS IPv6 tunnel.

.... Do a zero-wipe instead.

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=16M

Replace '16' with the buffer size of your HDD in megabytes...

Wiping the first 1MB or 1GB (depending on your taste) is usually good enough, unless you're selling the machine. In which case, zero-wipe is mandatory!

They do make nice laser pickups (and I think the Philips players use them almost universally), but the CPU, MPEG decoder and error-corrector circuitry (all designed by Philips) is astonishingly bad. If the disc isn't perfectly clean, scratch free and absolutely perfectly mastered, the ECC engine falls over and the picture starts to break up. The CPUs are generally WAY underpowered for what they're doing. I used to hit Record on my Aiwa VCR and it'd start recording within a second or two. The Sony DVD recorder hooked up to the TV downstairs takes almost a minute to start recording. The MythTV box is almost instant. Guess which one gets used more often... the DVD recorder is used more-or-less like an expensive DVD player (the Myth box falls over on some DVDs).

Oh, my MD players have been through a ton of punishment. The RH1 has been absolutely babied, but my MZ-N710 (bought as a refurbished unit several years ago ago) was dropped, banged, and got dragged to Terra Firma by its USB cable once or twice. Still works fine. The RH1 lives in a Lowepro camera pouch, and only comes out occasionally. I've been meaning to try time-syncing it with my brother's camcorder -- if only as a "can this be done?" experiment.

As I understand it, most of the BBC Regional Radio off-site interview / RNG teams still use Sony MD recorders for field recording. If they're good enough for Auntie Beeb... well...

Here's an interesting factoid for you: design and manufacture of most of the Sony video hardware is outsourced...

Sony VCRs: usually made by Samsung. There's a lovely design cockup in the FX-series -- a capacitor was installed the wrong way round, which screwed with the controller and ended up wiping the EEPROM. Only way out of this is a VHS alignment tape (custom to Sony/Samsung and only available to their service centres) and a full reset. Oh, and a new capacitor.

Sony DVD players: Samsung or Philips. Usually bottom-of-the-barrel crap.

Sony DVD recorders: Almost always Philips. Utterly crap, slowest processors and worst laser pickups imaginable. Hit STOP then PLAY and you'll be waiting a good minute for the thing to get its act together.

I like my Bravia and my MZ-RH1 Minidisc recorder (great for recording lectures) but the rest of my Sony kit (not much)? Crap.

I love how they use proprietary connectors for the camera USB ports, and change them with every new model series. They do the same with the batteries too... absolute evil. Point of comparison -- the Canon NB2LH battery from the 400D? Used in almost all their SD-card camcorders. Costs about £30, runs the thing for 90 minutes or so. Sony equivalent? £69, and there are four variants depending on which camera you have. Upgrade your camera, and you get to replace all your spare batteries. The chargers are (usually) cross-compatible, but that's about it. Lose a Sony charger, expect to pay a good £50-£60 for a replacement. Lose a Canon one and you can probably replace it for £20-£30, or less on Ebay.

As far as I'm concerned, Sony can FOaGDIAF. Canon are getting first-dibs if I need any new imaging gear -- my Pixma iP4600 is the first inkjet I've had which didn't suffer a fatal head clog just by leaving it idle for a few months, and my 7D has taken the worst the British weather can dish out and kept on going. I've seen customers bring Canon 10Ds back into the shop, wanting to try out a new lens. The cameras usually look like hell, but work perfectly. That kind of reliability gets you lots of brownie points.

I've exchanged emails with Bill Mensch... Well actually it was more like:

I bought a couple of W65SC02 chips. Wired them up, and two of them wouldn't do as they were told -- the logic analyser said the data was good, but the 6502's ALU wasn't returning the right results for some reason.

Anyway, Bill gets hold of my original email, then proceeds to send me a rather long list of things to check. Never did get those two chips working, but if that isn't customer service, I don't know what is!

Also: the "missing" ROR instruction isn't a bug. It was intentionally left out of the CPU, until -- in Bill's words -- "with market feedback, we realised we needed to add it and then modified the design."

LOL!

Actually, I'm looking into buying a basic Mac Mini for development work -- someone asked me to port a bit of my code to OSX, which I can't really do without a Mac of some description...

One of the (many) nice things about Linux is the way the printing system is designed. For CUPS, you generally only have to write a format converter (which takes a PNM and spits out printer control codes). CUPS deals with the issues of talking to the printer, and rasterising incoming PostScript vector data into PNM data.

Plus most of the major format converters are OSS/FS -- HPLIP (the PCL converter), Gutenprint (nee Gimp-Print), and a bunch of add-ons (like the P-touch label printer driver). Write a format converter and a quick PostScript PPD and you're in business. Porting to a new platform is often as simple recompiling, assuming the code is bit-width agnostic (32/64/128bit clean).

On the Windows platform, it seems the driver interface changes with every major version iteration, for better or worse... Win2k drivers could occasionally be coaxed into working on XP 32-bit (and vice versa), but that's pretty much the end of it. WinXX drivers run in kernel-space, even if all they're doing is printer data generation, where they don't actually *need* any hardware access which couldn't be provided in a better way by a HAL...

How are they different?

On a hardware level: the Embedded Controller chip which stores the OSX encryption keys.

On a software level: the pretty GUI, covered in chrome :)

But seriously, I borrowed one (via VNC) the other day, and I'm starting to want a Mac.. and I'm a dyed-in-the-wool PC user (Linux, thankfully).

As I understand it, you'd still need a valid "software verification" certificate (signed by AACS-LA) to get the drive to talk to you. Once you've done that, you need an AACS key set to actually decrypt the data...

Alternatively they could whitelist the known-valid game signatures. Block the old key, except where it's used by a game that is known to have been legitimately signed with $OLD_KEY. Everything else has to be signed with $NEW_KEY.

Unless, of course, Sony haven't been keeping track of what they've been signing... in which case, ROFLMAO!

DOSBox is a reverse-engineered re-implementation of the PC BIOS (int13h et al) and DOS APIs (int21h et al) and the x86 CPU. There's no Microsoft, Digital Research, IBM or whatever code in there. At all.

The problem with a phone number on the ID itself is pretty obvious... what if the impostor sets up his own (fake) number?

All you'd need to make a passable fake authentication service is a VoIP connection (with a landline phone number) tied to a software DTMF decoder.

Of course, there's always the option of calling Directory Enquiries to get the number of the agency in question (Police, FBI, ...) and ringing *that* number. Though whether they'd be able to (or want to) help you is another matter.

Indeed. But on how many systems is that the default?

The problem in industry tends to be one of authority: someone with some clout (read: one of the CEO's golfing buddies) wants to run Dancing Bears.

IT tell him it's a virus and put their foot down.

Joe Clueless then goes whining to the CEO, who overrules IT ("it's just a screensaver with some dancing bears, what harm can it do?"), who reluctantly allow Joe Clueless to install it (all the while telling the CEO that it's a Really Bad Idea). Joe installs it and, oh look, Steve the Script Kiddie just got access to the corporate LAN and all the company's secrets, source code, and other juicy tidbits.

CEO fires the IT manager, conveniently forgetting the fact that the manager had told the CEO that allowing Joe Clueless to run Dancing Bears was a really bad idea....

Point taken -- I forgot about that (I don't have a machine running Vista or Win7).

I run XP and 2000 in my virtual machines (it's not exactly hard to delete the snapshot file and start over if need be) but that's the extent of my Windows use.