Re: Reading PAL's with the security fuse blown.

On Wed, 02 Jul 2003 14:38:13 -0700, John Robertson <jrr@flippers.com> wrote:

>There was a company in New York AIR that would read PALs and would also
>sell copies of their software. I forget the companies name but a google
>search first turned them up for me a few years ago when I was last looking.
>
>Play with the search words a bit, something like PAL Disassembly cracking
>decoding...jeeze I just spent a few minutes and can't find the
>company....they were out there...

Chances are they're gone. The Digital Media Copyright Act made disassembling
PALs, ROMs, etc. illegal.

For a very biased view of the DMCA (that I happen to agree with, which is why
you get this link and not another ;-), click here:

   http://zgp.org/~dmarti/dmca/

Basically because DVD manufacturers were too stupid to write decent encryption
codes (or too cheap to hire a contracting firm that *knows* how to write real
encryption code), they got their simple DVD encryption hacked. So they just got
together with other companies too stupid, and/or too cheap, and got a law passed
by a bunch of congressman/senators whose only definition of PAL is "someone who
shakes your hand and gives you lots of money", that makes it illegal to even try
to reverse engineer anything.

Adobe uses this law to protect their simple eBook encryption instead of simply
using something that works. Check out:

   http://www.freesklyarov.org/ the charges have been sort of dropped:

   http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/US_v_Elcomsoft/20010723_eff_adobe_sklyarov_pr.html

Or just do a google search on "DMCA Adobe" for many more hits. I'm not normally
too political (I do vote), but this is a stupid law, and anyone who has built a
"Multi-game" or written a emulator after the laws passage (2000 I think) has
broken this law. My reverse engineering of Cinematronics would be illegal now.

-Zonn
Received on Wed Jul 02 17:08:08 2003