heironymouscoward's Journal: MDPA/5 - The Granny Box

This is an old idea, I'm just putting it here for the record.

Problem statement: there are still too few people enjoying the wonders of massive copyright violations. This smallish number creates a viable target for the *A boys.

Solution: The Granny Box.

This is the hardware, roughly:

  1. small black box, domestic DVD player format
  2. DVD drive (read-only, nothing fancy)
  3. HFHD (huge flipping hard disk), 250Gb+
  4. low-cost tiny PC, 256MG RAM, 1Ghz CPU
  5. video: TV out, with IR remote controller
  6. audio: 5+1 decoder
  7. network interface
  8. USB ports
  9. 128Mb flash memory (bootable)

This, roughly is the software:

  1. Linux operating system
  2. Auto-configuring firewall/router/proxy
  3. UML running arbitrary images

The standard operating system software boots from the flash memory and loads a number of UML images as virtual machines. One of these is the firewall/router/proxy, which automatically connects to whatever network it finds, grabs an IP address, and locks down the system securely.

That is the standard, default package. Now we come to the hack.

This is a box meant to be modded. A Granny Box mod is a Linux distribution plus applications that is burnt onto CD and slipped into the Granny Box's DVD slot. The system detects it and loads it into a UML virtual machine.

Our first mod will be a media application that does something like this:

  - Inserting a DVD or CD of any kind will launch an application (mplayer is our first choice) that allows the user to select/play the media.

  - Simultaneously with this, the media is also ripped to disk and queued for encoding.

  - The user is encouraged to leave the box switched on through the use of a small blinking led that blinks orange when the box is encoding.

  - Lastly, and not leastly, the box joins a p2p network and shares everything it has.

The box crawls the p2p network finding media of a similar nature to that played by the user. This is done through several techniques, but the simplest is the 'More of the same' principle.

To protect privacy (Granpad likes Sylvia Saint, Granny has a taste for S&M), the media stored on the box can be segmented into user areas, each protected by a PIN code.

Not content with turning millions of honest citizens into pirates, we will produce other titles on loadable Linux disks: games, speciality media titles (like the complete works of Wagner on DVD/ogg), and so on.

Comments welcome.