Why DVD encryption sucks

I bought the new Here Come the ABCs CD/DVD combo from They Might Be Giants back in February for David. He loves it. In fact, he loves it so much that if it's not in the DVD player already, he goes out, finds it, and gives it to us to put in for him.

Unfortunately, he hasn't yet mastered the nuances of handling optical media. So it's gotten all smudged, scuffed, and skip-prone, in only about two months. This is not good.

Well, since it's a DVD, it features both CSS scrambling and Macrovision copy protection, just to prevent us lawless consumers from making copies. Fortunately, though, DVD protection is actually a thing of the past. Because there's all kinds of utilities available to bypass said protection.

In my case, I used a freeware product called Mac The Ripper to read the original disc (after cleaning it as best as I could), and that wrote the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders on the DVD to my iMac G4's hard drive. That left me with what was essentially an unencumbered copy of the DVD that was otherwise indistinguishable from the original material.

Then, I used another program called DVD Imager (also free) to drop the folders I wanted copied to a ISO image suitable for burning back to a DVD blank. My only glitch came in burning - for some reason my iMac doesn't like the Memorex DVDs I stocked up on a while back, so I burned two coasters before giving up and transferring the 3.2 GB .IMG file to my PowerBook, where the burn not only worked fine, but worked at 4x. The iMac has a Sony 4x drive, the PowerBook has a Matsushita 4x - but the Memorex media only likes the latter. Who knows why. Anyhow, the disc worked perfectly, so all I have to do now is carefully file away the original DVD and write the title on the one I made with a handy Sharpie. Problem solved, at a cost of about $.50 (not counting the two coasters).

And for this (bypassing copy protection to make a backup for personal use), the Powers That Be would probably like to string me up a pole.

An irritating web peeve

I can understand subscribing to web-only news publications for money. Heck, I pay my $35/year for Salon - even though they have been allowing access for free if you watch an ad first. I can also see it making sense when the online edition of a print publication offers additional information and extra articles. And I don't mind web publications that make you register first - though I always use bizarrely faked info and/or just use www.bugmenot.com - if somebody wants to extract information from me in exchange for giving my what I want it's OK.

What really irritates me is when online publications require you to subscribe in order to get the exact same stuff that's in the dead-tree version. Time Magazine (and most of the Time-Warner family) does that - only releasing a smidgen of their articles online. And the local news conglomerate up here (run by the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune) does that as well - they let you read the front-page articles and the editorials for free, but to read anything else you have to subscribe to the paper. Which is really stupid of them - because if I've read it in the paper why should I give a crap about finding it online?

This is on my mind because of the recent redesign of the Eagle-Tribune's various websites - they look prettier, but now they give you even less info than before. Until the redesign you could read the front page news, sports, editorials, and letters, along with a daily specials section. Just local news and obits were withheld.

Now that it's just front page news and editorial (which has now become predictably right-wing), I hardly even bother viewing the site during the week - I know that the odds are against actually getting anything useful there. I still buy the dead-tree version on Fridays (when most of the best stuff runs), but their changes will have the net effect of lowering their impressions, rather than increasing them. Kind of stupid, don't you think?

Finally

This just in - Terri Schiavo has passed away, 13 days after having the feeding tube that was keeping her body alive removed. Her mind died 15 years ago - it just took humanity this long to do the right thing and let her body go, too.

What's going to happen next in the Great American Culture War?

Birthday shout-outs

Happy Birthday to Woodge who's age now represents the Answer. Happy birthday to my Dad, who I will start calling "Pop" any day now.

And happy birthday to Air America, who will turn one tomorrow. Especially since after a couple of months, the initial money had vanished and their survival was in doubt. Recently, they started being carried on-air here in Boston - in fact, simulcast on two different AM stations!

Of course, the two stations each only have sunup/sundown licenses, and broadcast at such low power that when somebody turns on their hair dryer in Peabody I get interference driving over the bridge to Beverly. But I've got 'em both on my AM presets in the car, and it's nice to have an alternative to the usual in-your-face right-wing talk radio. Right now, I listen to WEEI most of the time (since I'm a sports nut), except when Dennis & Callahan are on (who I despise - instead of a righty and a lefty like some shows do, they go righty/Cro-Magnon) or any non-Sox game (including preseason Sox). So other than Imus, I haven't had many alternatives to Right-Wing Radio in the car until Air America.

Imus' station is OK until 1 PM, when they give it over from the slightly right but populist Mike Barnicle (from 10 to noon) and the slightly left but funny Eagan and Braude (noon to 1) to O'Reilly and the utterly vile Jay Severin, with worse afterwards. Other than that, talk is a wasteland until 8 PM when raging moderate Paul Sullivan goes on at WBZ

I'm glad they made it this far. Now, if only Air America can get on a station with a transmitter more powerful than a Glade Plug-In, I'll be all set.

For you Mac folken

In today's rumor mill news:

Apple has reportedly finalized a MacOS X 10.3.9 update, to be released in the next couple of days. It's an effort to clear up the last few issues before shifting all their focus to MacOS X 10.4, which has seeded the first Final Candidate build as of this week. Supposedly Apple will be announcing it this Friday, with commercial availability scheduled for later this month.

I went to a developer conference on 10.4 late last fall, and there's a lot of cool stuff I can't tell you about. But it'll be worth it.

News Flash

Those "International Star Registry" ads you hear on the radio all the time (at least I hear them a lot)? They're total BS, in case anyone here was wondering. Though I suspect those stupid enough to believe them probably aren't reading this blog - they simply get all their information from talk radio and Fox News.

But, just in case you were wondering, only the International Astronomical Union actually gives valid names to stars. And they have a system for doing so, that does not involve you paying approximately $50 to them.

Media Boy

One of the entertaining little side projects I've been doing is trying to spread media (meaning mostly broadcast TV) around the house as much as possible, and do it on the cheap. It's been kind of a challenge for me. Anyhow, right now my media distribution systems consists of the following components:

TiVO Series 2, hooked up to our HD set downstairs

An ElGato EyeTV (USB) attached to my iMac

2 standalone DVD players, and one on each Mac in the house

Cheap Soundworks 5.1 surround system ($200)

One Linux (ClarkConnect) server in the basement

The TiVo and all the Macs are networked together. I recently took advantage of my Microsoft Partner status and the Action Pack subscription that I have for work to take an existing PC and convert it to run Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE). I'm running the '04 version on it right now, and after a long wait for a cheap tuner card I'd ordered back in January it finally arrived late last week - giving me an excuse to work on setting it all up.

Now, for the cheap plug part - A few weeks ago I created a second blog. The users' group I serve on the board of used to have a print publication called the LANtern. Originally a photocopied letter-size newsletter, when I ran the group it morphed into a full-size tabloid newspaper that we printed at a convenient web press. We used to have pretty wide distribution, too. But as the Internet became huge the demand for a printed newsletter vanished, and the LANtern has been in mothballs for around five years or so.

Well, we just brought it back as a technology blog, rather than as a traditional newsletter. Faster, simpler, and there's a bunch of board members with posting privileges, so we'll be tossing up content pretty regularly. So far, there's not much, just a few postings by jours truly, but I'm writing an MCE review that I'll post this week in the hopes of really getting things jump-started. So again, to see the cool things I've done with MCE, check out The LANtern Online in a day or so and you'll get to read it.

Storm fizzles, fo' shizzle!

When I was getting ready for bed last night, there were some light snow flurries and the TV weather nerds were breathlessly talking about 4-8 inches of snow by morning.

Well, morning came, and the snow did not. There's only enough to coat the grass in patches on some lawns. None on the roads, or sidewalks, or cars. Maybe winter's finally about over. And it's damn well time.

Unless the Supreme Court decides to be wildly unprincipled for the first time since December of 2000, the sad story of Terri Schiavo is finally almost over. If we're lucky as a nation, some of the idiots we call voters will wake up and see what kind of a theocracy the GOP is trying to impose on us. And maybe they'll start doing something about it. Remember, I don't much like Democrats either, but this past week has been a perfect illustration of just why the Republicans nowadays are downright evil.

I wish we could have a Centrist Party - splitting off most of the northeast Republicans (except for the New Hampshire Senators and the walking excrement that is Rick Santorum), some of the midwest and southern Democrats, and most of the non-wacky politicians nationwide. Your farthest-right member would be John McCain, and your farthest-left member would be Hilary Clinton (who's so far proven to be far more centrist than anyone expected). Jim Jeffords would join, as would Olympia Snowe and Lincoln Chaffee. We'd also have Chris Shays from Connecticut, John Kerry, a couple of the Mass. congressmen (like Lynch), Mary Landreau from Louisiana, and all the rest of the "mainly down-the-middle" political crowd.

The Centrists would run the country much more effectively than either the Republicans or Democrats would - leaving the far-left and far-right nutlogs to fight over the details. Please, folks, have a meeting and make all this happen!

Bahgans

That camera I bought the other day? CompUSA put it on sale for $250 this weekend, so I went and got price protection on it - equalling a $55 refund. So the camera cost me under $200 in the end. Sweet.

Bizarro Mac

A while back, I hopped onto a ludicrously attractive Apple business lease/discount program (for ACN members like me) in order to get a desktop for the office (I usually schlep an old PowerBook back and forth). So I ordered an iMac for my desk, with a 1.8 GHz processor, 17" screen, 160GB drive, Superdrive and Bluetooth. It finally arrived today, after lengthy delay. Sort of. What actually came was an iMac, and it was a 17" display, but otherwise every single option was the wrong one. The processor speed was wrong, disk size was wrong, the wrong optical drive was in it, the wrong amount of RAM, and it had an AirPort Extreme card instead of a Bluetooth module.

Needless to say, it's being dealt with, but it's rather annoying and I'm expecting it'll be another month or so before it's dealt with. Grumble.