You don't need any custom sensor hardware to read the disk as the original drives have signal lines that provide all that's needed. They usually have some automatic gain control, but it usually gives the right result.

You still need to connect the drive to a cheap device like the Greaseweazle (USB), which reads the raw flux reversals from the surface (plus timing information) as they're picked up by the drive head. All data decoding is done in software on the host system, which can handle ANY encoding type, and be smarter about error recovery.

The disks themselves sometimes need a bit of manual cleaning to be in a good position to read. Not everything can be recovered but older disks are generally more reliable than cheaper newer media.

CompatTelRunner.exe is the bane of my existence. As soon as I hear my CPU fans spin up I know it's off again.

DDG and Kagi and Brave are also bullshit due to AI.

FreeBSD is also free software as defined by the FSF. ZFS is too.

When were you born?

They were a membership organization run by 3 universities.

Blockchain as a technology is very useful. It's just how it's pushed as some kind of magic sauce that makes everything better just to sell things. There's a similar problem with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Blame the application not the technology.

ESP-32 is about twice the $4 price.

That will still be a problem, as any properly HDCP-compliant capture card will not (or should not!) give you access to the data either. Every device should check the downstream devices are compliant before passing any data on, and not provide any way to intercept it. Any that knowingly do are breaking the HDCP licensing agreement and are likely to be sued.