• The Author – Bart Busschots

  

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For my post yesterday on the HD-DVD key I needed to convert the 128bit HEX key into a decimal number and then divide it by two. I figured this would be easy. I’d wander over to Google, search for “convert hex to decimal” and hey-presto, I’d get a web-based converter somewhere to bang the hex key into and get out a decimal number. This soon proved not to work in practice for large numbers. All the converters I tried gave me back floating point numbers with very large exponents. The means loads of precision was lost and hence I couldn’t get the exact number the MPAA claimed to own. So I did what I always do when I can’t find a program to do what I want, I hacked something together in Perl! Now, when I say hacked I do mean hacked. It only took me a few minutes to do and what do ya know, Perl lost precision too, giving me an answer of 1.32562788879895e+37. So, I needed to re-implement this algorithm in a language that could give me basically unlimited integer arithmetic. I chose Java because of the java.math.BigInteger class and because Java is the language I know best. I implemented the same basic algorithm in both languages. It’s interesting to see just how much bigger the Java code is!

[tags]Java, Perl[/tags]

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‘An AACS Executive’ (AACS is the name of the copy protection on HD-DVD) has told the BBC that:

The key that has been leaked has now been revoked

It’s not clear when ‘now’ is. What we do learn is that the key was not one used in hardware players but rather in software. Could this be one of the revoked WinDVD keys? Who knows. It’s also not clear if this means the MPAA will stop threatening legal action over the publication of what is now definitely just a number.

However, it is clear that the MPAA have gotten away easy this time. Since the key in question is not a hardware key they were able to revoke it without breaking anyone’s hardware HD-DVD player. So, for now, they have avoided their Catch 22. However, I for one, believe it’s only a matter of time until a hardware key does get out, and they are facing the catch 22 I described yesterday for real.

You can find out more on this BBC article (link courtesy of Dave C in the comments on my original post on the HD-DVD key).

Anyone who reads this blog will know that I am no fan of DRM technology. I think it’s a stupid idea that is fundamentally flawed. Security by obscurity is always a bad idea. Every device that can play a HD-DVD has a secret key inside it, including all computers that can play HD-DVD. If one person finds one of these keys then they can remove the DRM from HD-DVD. Basically, the whole system is dependent on these keys remaining secret. This of course won’t happen. So, the MPAA’s system provides a mechanism for disabling all devices that use a compromised key. The idea being, if a key gets out it is not the end of their DRM, they just revoke the key. Slight problem, when a key is revoked all devices that use the key will stop working leaving thousands of very miffed consumers out for the MPAA’s blood!

The cat is out of the bag, a key has gotten out. I have a copy of the key. I’m just an ordinary pleb, if I can get it trivially, so can the bad guys! So, what will the MPAA do? If they revoke the key they will break loads of people’s players and make them very grumpy. If they don’t revoke the key they will be making all their DRM efforts totally null-and-void. The MPAA think they’ve found a third alternative, they are attempting to use their lawyers to magically make the key a secret again and in the process declaring ownership of a number.

[tags]MPAA, DRM, HD-DVD[/tags]

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Without a shadow of a doubt a motorway along the route of the current N3 is needed. Cavan, where I grew up, is along this route so I know just how over-loaded it is. For the most part the routing of this new motorway, the M3, was straightforward, except near the town of Navan where the N3 passes through a very historic valley near the famous Hill of Tara. This area is considered to be one of the most important archaeological landscapes in Europe. Most of Ireland’s history has been played out there since it has been an important site for over 5,000 years. For this section of the road there were four different possible routes which would have varying impacts on the Tara archaeological landscape. One route would have had zero impact, avoiding the valley altogether, however, the route chosen does not avoid the valley. In fact, it passes between the main site on the top of the hill and a fort known to be part of the ancient defences of Tara. In other words, it passes right through the heart of this historic landscape.

[tags]M3, Tara, Irish Government, Archaeology[/tags]

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This seems to be the time of year for 2.0 releases. Three pieces of software I use on a daily basis have gotten their big 2.0 update recently. Mozilla Thunderbird, the dashboard widget Pakze, and the iStat family of tools from iSlayer. (I discussed both Pakze and iStat in my post on Dashboard widgets for Techies.) In all three cases the most obvious change is a new coat of proverbial paint. Thunderbird and iStat in particular have really benefited from the addition of a little more polish to their interfaces. However, there is more to these upgrades than just looks.

[tags]Mozilla, Thunderbird, iStat, Pakze, Dashboard, Widget[/tags]

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What started off as a hack of a MacBook Pro at a security conferences has now been revealed to be a hack exploiting a vulnerability in the way Quicktime talks to Java. What does this mean? It means that this is not just an issue for Mac users, Windows users are vulnerable too! Thankfully the solution is simple, turn off Java (not JavaScript) in your web browser.

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Ireland is not a big country, only a small percentage of people in Ireland are interested in Astronomy, only a small percentage of those get actively involved. So, the Irish Amateur Astronomical community is small. Yet, it is plagued by a decades old feud. On one side you have the combined entity of Astronomy & Space Ltd (a company) and Astronomy Ireland (a club), and on the other you have everyone else, mostly combined under the banner of the Irish Federation of Astronomical Societies (IFAS). The level of animosity between both camps is astounding. The stories you hear are often shocking and the depth of emotion almost unimaginable. There are a few rare people like myself who straddle(d) the divide, but most are in one camp or the other. There are also many people who are new to the community and who don’t know nor care about the history that started the feud. Many of these get so put off by all the animosity that they just give up altogether and withdraw from the community to enjoy the wonders of the night sky by themselves.

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Apple laptops have very impressive battery lives. My MBP can run for almost 4 hours if I’m not doing anything too intensive on it (e.g. playing Solitaire on a plane). A big contributing factor to this great battery performance is very aggressive power management. If you have the back-lit keyboard turned on it turns off after a minute of inactivity, after only a few minutes of inactivity the screen dims to about half it’s regular brightness and so on. This is all good and well until you start doing something on your Mac that involves no user interaction but that goes on for a long time. The best example of this would be watching a video. You have to keep jiggling the mouse or the screen will dim. Good media players like VLC automatically stop this happening but many players, including Apple’s QuickTime, don’t. Also, with the popularity of sites like YouTube you often don’t use any media player to watch videos, just your browser. So, what you need is a simple piece of software that will prevent the power saving features kicking in while you’re watching videos. The answer – give you Mac Caffeine!

[tags]Caffeine, MacBook, MacBookPro[/tags]

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On the Mac you can turn anything you can print into a PDF for free right out of the box because the standard OS X Print Dialog has a button for making your print job into a PDF. Now you can get the same level of functionality for Windows for free with no strings attached (released under GPL) with PDF Creator. This works by providing a special printer driver that saves your print jobs as PDFs.

[tags]PDF[/tags]

At work we don’t have much use for FTP but every now and then we have to install an FTP client for someone and configure it to use our SOCKS proxy. We first try FileZilla, but it has issues connecting to some servers through our proxies (have yet to figure out a pattern), so, if that happens we try SmartFTP (free for Educational use) instead. In the past we always used SmartFTP 2.0 and setting up the proxies was simple. You just went to Tools -> Settings -> Connection -> Proxy and entered the details. Today we installed SmartFTP 2.5 for the first time and discovered that the proxy pane was gone from the Connection Dialog in Settings. Looking a little further revealed it was NOWHERE in settings anymore, or indeed in ANY of the menus in the menu bar. I did eventually find it, but the steps you have to take are absurd.

1. Select Favorites -> Edit Favorites ... (opens a new window)
2. In the new Windows go to Favorite -> New -> Favorite (opens another new window)
3. In this second new window right down at the bottom is a ‘button’ that is not so much a button as a piece of blue text labeled ‘Edit Default Favorite’, click on this.
4. Now, finally, you can edit the proxy settings under connection.

What ever idiot thought that this was an improvement over the way things were done in 2.0 should be fired at once and barred from writing software for life! This level of utter incompetence and total disregard for users and the basic tenets of HCI should be sufficient to end anyone’s career. If you value your sanity, AVOID SmartFTP!

[tags]SmartFTP, HCI, Proxy[/tags]

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