Month: February 2007

Why the Iraq war hurts the Republican party

A recent Op Ed piece in the Baltimore Sun has what I think is some very good insight into how the war in Iraq is hurting the Republican party. The author shows how much of the handling of the war is contrary to the expected values of the party.

According to the latest Gallup survey, Republican self-identification has declined nationally and in almost every American state. Why? The short answer is that President Bush’s war of choice in Iraq has destroyed the partisan brand Republicans spent the past four decades building.

That brand was based upon four pillars: that Republicans are more trustworthy on defense and military issues; that they know when and where markets can replace or improve government; that they are more competent administrators of those functions government can’t privatize; and, finally, that their public philosophy is imbued with moral authority. The war demolished all four claims.

He goes on to explain how the current situation shows the Republican party is viewed as performing opposite those typically held pillars.

[tags]How the Iraq war is breaking the Republican party[/tags]

Old-school gaming = hard to win

Most games these days are hard to lose.  Sometimes, though, you can find the simplest games are also some of the hardest.  Don’t believe me?  Check out all the ways to lose.

You have to be careful of the language, though.  You’ll get prompted several times to install Japanese language packs if you don’t have them installed and don’t have language pack prompting turned off.  If you don’t install the packs, your game will look a little different than what is in the above video.

[tags]Old school gaming – hard to win, A simple game that is very challenging[/tags]

 

Happy birthday, Tiffany

tiffany_80s-pop.jpg No, no – not the 80s mall-tour singer.

tiffiny_charles-resize.jpg Ah, yes, there we go.  Charles Tiffany.  Founder of the high-society department store that bears his name still today.

February 15 marks the birthday of Charles Lewis Tiffany, the man who gave the world some of its most preeminent symbols of wealth and status. Born in Killingly, Connecticut, in 1812, Tiffany headed to New York in 1837, where he and partner John B. Young opened a stationery and fancy goods shop. However, political upheaval in Europe in 1848 caused the prices of precious stones to plummet, giving Tiffany a perfect, and profitable, opening into the jewelry business. He snapped up a passel of suddenly cheap diamonds, including a few of the French Crown Jewels, which he later sold for a tidy sum, prompting the press to dub Tiffany “The King of Diamonds.” Around the same time, Tiffany set about manufacturing gold jewelry. He moved rapidly to expand his business, acquiring John C. MooreÝs leading silver operations in 1851. Two years later, Tiffany assumed complete control of the company and re-christened it “Tiffany & Co.” During the ensuing years, he opened Tiffany branches around the world and produced special items for luminaries like First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. By the time Tiffany died in 1902, his company and its products were firmly entrenched as enduring vestiges of high culture.

Wow.  So there you have it.  Get into the diamond business by catching a break on depressed gemstone prices during political upheaval.

[tags]Happy birthday, Born today – Charles Tiffany (1812)[/tags]

Today in history 2007-02-14: St. Valentine’s day massacre

In what is sure to be viewed as an amazing coincidence by many of the less bright people in the world, we recognize today the St. Valentine’s day massacre of 1929, which oddly enough happened on St. Valentine’s day.

In Chicago, gunmen in the suspected employment of organized-crime boss Al Capone murder seven members of the George “Bugs” Moran North Siders gang in a garage on North Clark Street. The so-called St. Valentine’s Day Massacre stirred a media storm centered on Capone and his illegal Prohibition-era activities and motivated federal authorities to redouble their efforts to find evidence incriminating enough to take him off the streets.

Continue reading “Today in history 2007-02-14: St. Valentine’s day massacre”

Next-gen video discs fully cracked

Not long ago, there was news of a successful crack of Blu-Ray and Hi-def DVD copy protection, but it wasn’t a general crack.  The crack relied on a weakness in extracting decryption information from discs, but it was a non-trivial effort.  The new method builds on that to successfully break any AACS protected disc.

As I can understand some of you are interested in how I retrieved the Media and Processing Keys. I will tell what i did.

Most of the time I spend studying the AACS papers. A good understanding of how things worked have helped me greatly in knowing what to find in the first place (and how to recognize something). I may write an explanation of (my understanding) of how AACS works in particular the subset-difference technique (which is by far the hardest to understand) at a later date if you guys want to.

But anyway. Since the moment I found the Volume ID (which was much simpler than I had thought) my thought was to try to find the Media Key. But after some discussion I thought it might be better to go directly for the Device Keys (bad mistake). After looking at files created and changed by software player and trying to recognize Device Keys in memory dumps I was starting to get worried a bit. I wasn’t making any progress.

So I went back to my original idea: do a bottom-up approach. So first I tried to find the Media Key. One of the logical things to do even before that was to search for the Verify Media Key Record in memory. But it wasn’t there. I then started to work on a little proggy that would scan a memdump and see everything as a Media Key: thus trying to verify it with the Verify Media Key Record. No luck.

This was frustrating: all kinds of information was in the memdump but not the Media Key (I sort of assumed/hoped it would). I made several memdumps at different moments but nada, nothing. After throwing it all away I remembered I still had a “corrupt” memdump from WinHex (it failed to finish it because WinHex said the memory had changed). It was really small compared to the others so I didn’t have much hope. But when running it with my proggy: voila! I found it. Which finally gave me hope I was going in the right direction.

There were just two major problems left: how do you detect the Processing Key and if its not in memory how do you find it at all? Well since I now knew how things worked I knew the Processing Key had to be combined with a C-value to produce the Media Key.

OK, I don’t get any of that.  But clearly others do, so I share this for their benefit.  (via boingboing)

[tags]AACS copy protection broken, Next-gen video disc format protections broken[/tags]