Hi, Gene Heskett wrote: > I believe being able to update the drive firmware in that manner it is > part of the Orange Book specification.
The rainbow books describe CD media and what the drives shall be able to do with them. No command specs, no wiring specs, no relation to drive firmware, DVD, or BD. > Since region codes are part of that also, Region codes do not apply to CD media. There is a one-time copy restriction called SCMS together with a "Digital copy permission" bit, to be given with the SAO CUE Sheet or by the CD press mastering program. A copier is supposed to refuse on SCMS bit 1 and copy permission 0, and to set the SCMS bit to 1 if the copy permission bit is 0. So a copy of a copy shall be prevented. Question is how the 0-setter of the copy permission bit wants to make a legal contract with the provider of the writer program so the SCMS bit gets set. And copy permission = 0 with SCMS = 1 is not illegal to read. Reading drops the copy permission bit and the SCMS bit. So the whole idea was a boss idea. The malware was to correct that boss idea by another one. Two times. The last version being strictly illegal. Then came DVD and region codes. > a fav trick is to update the drive to make it an aussie > player. Plays anything from anyplace. This time it needs a whole continent to make them look like stupid bosses. Well, maybe for Blu-ray freedom we will have to wait until mankind reaches planet Mars. I wrote: > > But Blu-ray drives do not contain video player software. Gene Heskett wrote: > Since when? Not that I am a blue ray expert. >From the start. At least i know how a drive is connected to a computer and how this cabling allows to exchange data with the computer. Video decoding is not the job of the drive. The drive only has to hand out the stored data blocks from the medium. The Blu-ray way of blocking seems to be to hand out decoder keys only to entities which can apply a key that documents their submission to the license rules. This is best done in software, because each update has the power to change the whole cryptography system, then. No need to bother the drive which sees illegibly encrypted data, anyway. Sonyware only has to ask the drive what region code is set currently. > I can update the firmware in my seagate drives simply by > downloading the update, burning it to a blank cd, and pressing the reset > button. Its 100% self-contained. An own little operating system booting from DVD, i assume. MooseDT-SD1A-2D-8-16-32MB.iso i: PC-BIOS bootable from CD by a boot image at block 21. No MBR. 1.6 MB. The OS seems to be in the El Torito boot image, which emulates a 1.4 MB floppy disk. Some DOS ? strings MooseDT-SD1A-2D-8-16-32MB.iso | grep DOS yields lots of hits. Among them FreeDOS System Installer v3.2, Aug 18 2006 After mount -o loop,offset=$(expr 21 * 2048) MooseDT-SD1A-2D-8-16-32MB.iso /mnt/fat one can do ls -l /mnt/fat to see COMMAND.COM, AUTOEXEC.BAT, et.al. That's really nice of Seagate. If you can forward the drive on SCSI level to a VM, this might work even without rebooting the host system. (If you can umount the disk, of course.) > Sony, who thought they were > justified in bricking your cd/dvd player/recorder just to prevent > piracy. They bricked MS-Windows and MacOS, not the drive and not the living room CD players. It was done by installing malware via automatic program execution on CD insertion. A matter of OS security settings. Have a nice day :) Thomas
