Freedom to Tinker ? Blog Archive ? Making and Breaking HDCP Handshakes

Freedom to Tinker ? Blog Archive ? Making and Breaking HDCP Handshakes: "In the real system, where the secret vectors have forty entries, not four, it takes a conspiracy of about forty devices, with known private vectors, to break HDCP completely. But that is eminently doable, and it’s only a matter of time before someone does it"

The great white copy-protection hope of the Media industries destroyed by simple combination of equations - what I'd call GCSE level maths. I don't think Private Industry is more efficient than Public, I believe that private companies just make enough unfair profit and pay their employees, on average, unfairly less so that they can spend some of it on marketing. Hence I'm not at all surprised at this or Crapita's endless bollixing up of national databases.

NINTENDO

NINTENDO: "Introducing… Wee.

As in 'we.'

While the code-name 'Revolution' expressed our direction, Wee represents the answer.

Wee will break down that wall that separates video game players from everybody else.

Wee will put people more in touch with their games… and each other. But you’re probably asking: What does the name mean?

Wee sounds like 'we,' which emphasises this console is for everyone.

Wee can easily be remembered by people around the world, no matter what language they speak. No confusion. No need to abbreviate. Just Wee.

Wee has a distinctive 'ii' spelling that symbolizes both the unique controllers and the image of people gathering to play.

And Wee, as a name and a console, brings something revolutionary to the world of video games that sets it apart from the crowd.

So that’s Wee. But now Nintendo needs you.

Because, it’s really not about you or me.

It’s about Wee.

And together, Wee will change everything."

(The Nintendo revolution's real name has just been revealed to be "Wii".)
Here's a sample of the variety of colours it will come in.


Wee in England means micturate and causes hilarity.
Oui in France means yes sounds kinda cool.
Wee in Dutch means sickly and causes worry.
I couldn't find any more translations, but if you've got any, comment!

Also, Chris posted on the forum

I'm stuck

I'm stuck. Sometimes, when I'm feeling a bit ill and I've got lots of things to do, I can't do anything. My head's been like that all week. S'just stuck. It's not writer's block, it's just anything block – can barely get up and come into work, can't sleep, can't write or email, can't motivate myself to even drink a glass of water or go home at the end of the day. Very odd, but it's definitely a "number of things" problem.

DevilDucky - The Atheist's Nightmare

DevilDucky - The Atheist's Nightmare

Because a banana fits perfectly in a human hand, because a banana looks yummy and because a banana fits perfectly in your mouth, Ray Comfort asserts (on this film) that this indicates it was intelligently designed. Never mind that bananas have been selectively bred by humans for ten thousand years (so selectively bred, the main clone cultivar "Cavendish" will soon be extinct due to its total susceptibility to Panama Disease), never mind the millions of edible things that don't fit perfectly or look good, never mind the initial horror and repugnance their appearance elicited in Victorian England, here's a feller who thinks that they're a sign of God's divine benevolence.

Taking the Nandollar

Taking the Nandollar

I wrote about Nando's chicken, incidentally, in a big review I did recently (the Elder Scrolls Oblivion – my quotes are all over London posters advertising it at the moment), mentioning that we'd been talking about the game over dinner at said Peri-peri bound establishment. I went on holiday, ahem, a Press Trip, and came back to find that Nandos (in the person of their friendly PR) have sent me several vouchers for free meals for two at their restaurants. Altogether, considering Nando's prices and my wage, it's a substantial sum of money – enough freebies that I need eat nothing else for a week. Woo, lucky me!

Howwwww…ever.

Obviously, this means I am now a whore, I've taken Nandos' shilling, I shall in my not-too-distant dotage be forced to don a chicken suit and stand outside the futuristic Nandos with its evanescent chicken steak and traditional reformed longpig patties, and entice passers-by in with cock noises...

I'd like to protest I intended none of this, but the Nandobots tracked me down and reeducated me into their poultry loveness. Who shall I reference next though? Chupa Chups? Barratt's homes? Pamela Anderson's wotsits? What do I want in life, and what am I willing to sell to get it?

Alcatraz #1

Bothered & Bewildered

"Couldn't sleep,
Wouldn't sleep,
Til lag came and told me I shouldn't sleep.
Bewitched, bothered n bewildered
Am I…"

Been to L.A. & San Fran for pre-E3 stuff again this year. Disappointingly, depressingly, there seem very few new games for the 360 over the next few months, let alone year. Never mind, I had a lovely time; went to Magic Mountain, got extremely sunburnt, went to bed, had delirium (again), ate lots of good food and hung around with persons of good humour. Spent last Wednesday in a $12 million mansion in the Hollywood hills, with a view right across L.A. to where the Sierra Nevada rises out of the smog, surrounded by geeks and models. Was in San Francisco on the 18th, the 100th anniversary of the earthquake there, but everything seemed very lo-key. I get the feeling that the city is one of those places that has much more under the surface. Got on a boat with the delightful Ben Richardson from Games Radar and sailed round Alcatraz and under the Golden Gate. Twas very welcome.

Get back and I'm jet-lagged, ill and feeling much-abused. Getting a little tired of this job now – I can see the magazine's not doing as well as it should be and the contents of the magazine aren't always as good as they should be (for which I take my share of the blame). I really should move to a different profession or just go freelance but I'm entirely too scared/lazy. Sigh. Give it three months, if there are no more games announced and no signs of promotion, I'll move on and go travelling or something.

Life without numbers in a unique Amazon tribe. Piraha apparently can't learn to count and have no distinct words for colors.

Life without numbers in a unique Amazon tribe. Piraha apparently can't learn to count and have no distinct words for colors.: "1 1=2. Mathematics doesn't get any more basic than this, but even 1 1 would stump the brightest minds among the Piraha tribe of the Amazon.

A study appearing today in the journal Science reports that the hunter-gatherers seem to be the only group of humans known to have no concept of numbering and counting.

Not only that, but adult Piraha apparently can't learn to count or understand the concept of numbers or numerals, even when they asked anthropologists to teach them and have been given basic math lessons for months at a time.

Their lack of enumeration skills is just one of the mental and cultural traits that has led scientists who have visited the 300 members of the tribe to describe the Piraha as 'something from Mars.'"

Machine Readable: The Cure for Information Overload

I may be bandwagonning a bit late, but the cure for information overload - Machine Readable: The Cure for Information Overload - is well worth a read.

SUPERREEFA

Reproduced entirely from the BLDGBLOG cos of its wonderfulnessness:
The reef's history, from New Scientist: "About 200 million years ago the sea level rose throughout the world. A huge ocean known as the Tethys Seaway expanded to reach almost around the globe at the Equator. Its warm, shallow waters enhanced the deposition of widespread lime muds and sands which made a stable foundation for the sponges and other inhabitants of the reef. The sponge reef began to grow in the Late Jurassic period, between 170 and 150 million years ago, and its several phases were dominated by siliceous sponges."
Rigid with glass "created by using silica dissolved in the water," this proto-reef "continued to expand across the seafloor for between 5 and 10 million years until it occupied most of the wide sea shelf that extended over central Europe."

Thus, today, in the foundations of European geography, you see the remains of a huge, living creature that, according to H.P. Lovecraft, is not yet dead.
What –
"We do not know," New Scientist says, "whether the demise of this fossil sponge reef was caused by an environmental change to shallower waters, or from the competition for growing space with corals. What we do know is that such a structure never appeared again in the history of the Earth." (You can read more here).
For whatever reasons, meanwhile, this story reminds me of a concert by Akio Suzuki that I attended back in London in 2002, at the School of Oriental and African Studies. That night, Suzuki – a Japanese musician and sound artist – played a variety of instruments, including the amazing "Analapos," which he'd constructed himself, and a number of small stone flutes, or iwabue.
The amazing thing about those flutes was that they were literally just rocks, hollowed out by natural erosion – and Suzuki had simply picked them up from the Japanese beach years before. If I remember right, one of them was even from Denmark.
In any case, Suzuki chose the stones because of their natural acoustic properties, their musical playability: he could attain the right resonance, hit the right notes, and so their music was really a factor of geology and landscape design. The accidents of natural erosion.
Rocks everywhere, hiding instruments.

But the idea that there might be a similar such stone flute – only the size and shape of a vast fossilized reef, stretching from Portugal to southern Russia – would suddenly seem like a real possibility. In other words, locked into the rocks of Europe is the largest musical instrument ever made: awaiting a million more years of wind and rain and even war to carve that reef into a flute, a buried saxophone, made of fossilized glass, pocketed with caves and indentations, reflecting the black light of uncountable eclipses until the earth gives out.
Weird European land animals, evolving fifty eons from now, will notice it first: a strange whistling on the edge of the wind whenever storms blow up from Africa. Mediterranean rains wash more dust and soil to the sea, exposing more reef, and the sounds get louder. The reef looms larger. Its structure like vertebrae, or hollow backbones, frames valleys, rims horizons, carries any and all sounds above silence through the reef's reverberating latticework of small wormholes and caves.

Equivalent to a hundred thousand flutes, embedded into bedrock, per square-mile.
Soon the reef generates its own weather, forming storms where there had only been breezes before; it echoes with the sound of itself from one end to the next. It wakes up animals, howling.
For the last two or three breeding groups of humans still around, there's an odd familiarity to some of the reef-flute's sounds, as if every two years a certain storm comes through, playing the reef to the tune of... something they can't quite remember.

It's rumored amidst these dying, malnourished tribes that if you whisper a secret into the reef it will echo there forever; that a man can be hundreds of miles away when the secret comes through, passing ridge to ridge on Saharan gales.
And then there's just the reef, half-buried by desert, whispering to itself on windless days – till it erodes into a fine black dust, lost beneath dunes, and its million years of musicalized weather go silent forever.