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]

Good news for Castlevania fans – Dracula X coming to the PSP

castlevania-dracula-x-chron.jpg

If you aren’t into the history of the Castlevania series, you won’t recognize the importance of this, but longtime series fans will. In 1993, Konami released Dracula X: Rondo of Blood in Japan for the PC-Engine console (known as TurboGraphx and later TurboDuo in America). Because the console sold so poorly in the US, the game never made it here legally (it’s a hot post in the TurboDuo usenet group and has been a highly sought after disc on Ebay). Now, nearly 15 years later, Castlevania: Dracula X will be available on the Sony PSP in the dual-game release Caslevania: Dracula X Chronicles (obligatory shorter link), which will include both Dracula X: Rondo of Blood and the associated title Symphony of the Night, originally available on the PlayStation 1.

For a bit more information on this, check out the video interview at TechEBlog (and the shorter link) that covers some of the changes and additions from the classic to the port.

[tags]Castlevania Dracula X for PSP, Update of classic Drac X for the PSP[/tags]

Eric and the Dread Gazebo

For every gamer who has had an overly serious teammate, here is The Tale of Eric and the Dread Gazebo.

…In the early seventies, Ed Whitchurch ran “his game,” and one of the participants was Eric Sorenson. Eric plays something like a computer. When he games he methodically considers each possibility before choosing his preferred option. If given time, he will invariably pick the optimal solution. It has been known to take weeks. He is otherwise, in all respects, a superior gamer.

Eric was playing a Neutral Paladin in Ed’s game. He was on some lord’s lands when the following exchange occurred:

Continue reading “Eric and the Dread Gazebo”

IP over SMTP

Way back in the early days of the Intarw3b, not everyone with a computer was surfing around. My first exposure to real use of the ‘net revolved around getting actual work done. At that time, I was a neophyte networking and security goob (today, I’ve advanced to just being an all-around good) and I spent a lot of my work time reading networking and security mailing lists and tracking down tools and documents squirrelled away in the corners of the ‘net.

One of the coolest things I remember reading from those lists was about one of the security gurus who needed some binary files while working at a site without general Internet connectivity but that did have e-mail services. He wrote some scripts to actually implement NFS file transfers over SMTP. I don’t remember the exact details, but I remember that he sent scripts to a co-worker back at his office who installed them as the mail processing scripts for a particular account and then did the same with some other scripts at the worksite. Using these he was able to make the worksite system and his office servers talk as if they had an NFS connection, but using packets 7-bit safe encoded and transferred via SMTP. If that makes no sense to you, it’s OK. I probably have some of the details wrong (it’s been over 10 years since I even read about this), and non-networking folks have no need to understand this. But to really geeky people (especially, if you can imagine it, people more geeky than I), this is really cool use of technology, and worthy of hacking recognition.

So, with all that information, here’s the reason I posted about this. While reading some older web articles I long ago tucked away for later review, I found a link to a Dutch site on which the author has posted a script for doing IP over SMTP. I can’t recall ever being in a situation where I’ve needed this functionality, but it’s really cool that it even exists and someone remembers well enough a time when it was useful that they would post it.

[tags]Script for running IP over SMTP, IP traffic via SMTP encapsulation – useless? But cool[/tags]

Kodak looks to churn up the inkjet printer market with substantially reduced ink prices

Assuming the printers perform as well as Kodak says, this new printer product line from Kodak should drop prices significantly from what current consumer printers offer.

Eastman Kodak Company (NYSE: EK) today entered the consumer inkjet industry with a revolutionary new product line for the home.

KODAK EASYSHARE All-in-One Printers will enable consumers to affordably print crisp, sharp documents and KODAK lab-quality photos at home using premium, pigment-based inks that will save consumers up to 50 percent on everything they print. The three new printers provide ultimate levels of print quality and ease-of-use, while offering low total cost of ownership compared to other leading consumer inkjet printers on the market.

. . .

The KODAK EASYSHARE AiO Printers use Kodak’s premium, pigment-based ink, priced at $9.99 for a cartridge of black ink and $14.99 for a five-ink color cartridge (US MSRP). For every $15 spent on color ink and $10 spent on black ink, consumers can print the same number of pages at half the cost of other consumer inkjet printers.When the KODAK Photo Value Pack is purchased, a 4 x 6-inch photo costs as little as 10 cents per print.

So all that remains is real world testing and reviews to see if the print quality stands up as well as consumables testing to verify similar printable pages/photos per cartridge as compared with competitors. If this is as good as Kodak says, I’m sure HP, Epson, and others will not be happy about legitimate price competition. Fuck ’em, I say. Competition is good for us, and I’m tired of paying $35 for a single color ink cartridge.

[tags]Kodak looking to shake up consumer inkjet market, New printer line from Kodak with low-price ($10) cartridges[/tags]