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From: (no name) (no email)
Date: Tue Nov 09 2004 - 15:57:09 EST
In a message dated 11/1/2004 5:13:24 PM Eastern Standard Time,
writes:
We've been building a library for cruising for a bit now and had no idea
DVD's were restricted this way.
Could someone point me to a definitive www site where I can learn the ins
and outs of all this.
I can't give you a site but from what I can gather the movie companies have
forced the drive manufacturers to emplyoy this system so they can sell more
DVDs. Each drive can only play movies that are encoded for one area of the
world. You can change this area in your drive five times, after that the last area
chosen is permenant.
You are warned in the instruction book that using software to defeat this
scam may permenantly disable the drive. I don't know if this is a scare tactic
or not.
The British have some excellent magazines. My favorite is PC Utilities. It
comes with a CD crammed with freeware, shareware and demo software. I get it
at Barnes and Noble. The Brits, being much less affluent than the rich
Americans, are always seeking to do things at lower cost so there is much discussion
about issues like this. Seems there are programs available to work around
this area restriction scam but one has to be sure that the program one uses is
made specifically for the model drive one uses it on. Because the program
changes the firmware in the drive, the wrong program could make the drive
permenately inoperative. No guts, no glory, sort of thing.
While you're at B&N get a copy of 2600 (The Hacker's Quarterly). I don't
understand 90% of it but it is an interesting read. One useful article lately
was about a fellow whose business was attacked by the IRS (they always go after
the little folks who can't fight back) who demanded his accounts going back
six years. Seems his partner, who did the books, departed two years ago without
revealing the file passwords.
Our hero used FC.com, a file compare DOS program included in Windows, to
compare a password protected file with a new unprotected file. In the first few
bytes he found a string of characters in the protected file that were not in
his newly made unprotected file. When he applied a hex editor change them to
nulls as in his new file he could read all his old records and was saved from
recreating them from scratch. Most of the articles are much more technical,
but I enjoy the read anyway because it gives me insight unto what all the hacker
fuss is about.
Norm
S/V Bandersnatch
Lying Norfolk VA
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