Found an interesting run down of some information about the leaked builds of Windows 7 from WinHEC China by Robert McLaws. Theres also some juicy bits about the much loved boot-screen in the upcoming Windows 7 release.
Developer, Kernel / Internals, Operating Systems, Security, Windows, Windows 7, software
BD+ is the DRM system for Blu-ray discs, as Wikipedia puts it:
BD+ is a component of the Blu-ray Disc Digital Rights Management system. It was developed by Cryptography Research Inc. and is based on their Self-Protecting Digital Content concept. BD+ played an important role in the past format war of Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD. Several studios have cited Blu-ray Disc’s adoption of the BD+ anti-copying system as the reason they supported Blu-ray Disc over HD DVD.
One of the more humorous observations was that unlike DVD (which used DeCSS for its copy protection system) and AACS which powered the bulk of the HD-DVDs of the time that BD+ would uphold its protection for atleast the next 10 years. This may have been one of the key factors in the HD-Wars, but alas it seems someone has found a way of traveling into the future and finding the break.
Oopho2ei (who claims is not a professional programmer :O) from the Doom9 forums along with a few others (bmnot, schluppo, Disabled, evdberg) have (it seems) successfully broken the BD+ protection scheme in a grand total of 5 weeks and 3 days (started on the 24th of August). They have restored the BD+ protected “The Day After Tomorrow”:
I am glad to announce the first successful restoration of the BD+ protected movie “The Day After Tomorrow” in linux. It was done using a blue ray drive with patched firmware (to get the volume id), DumpHD to decrypt the contents according to the AACS specification and the BDVM debugger from this thread to generate the conversion table. The conversion table is the key information to successfully repair all the broken parts in m2ts files to restore the original video content. This small tool was finally used to repair the main movie file “00001.m2ts” according to the conversion table.
To verify the correctness i compared my 00001.m2ts with the one AnyDVD-HD creates and they both match. The MD5 hash of this 30GB large file is in both cases “0fa2bc65c25d7087a198a61c693a0a72″.
Breaking the code is no simple feat, Oopho2ei and team has had to reimplement the VM that runs the BD+ protection layer and realises that there’s a fair chance that it could be blocked at a later stage and may phone-home:
There has to be some kind of firewall around the virtual machine which validates all communication between the ( potentially hostile ) content code and the outside world (traps and events). Part of the rules which are enforced by that firewall are the parameter checks on every trap call. It’s obvious that the traps and the event handling itself has to be carefully implemented. I believe this additional effort is necessary to prevent the content code from breaking out of it’s sandboxed environment and do nasty things like gathering user information and “calling home” when it detects an unlicensed emulator. So because these additional security measures make things more difficult i suggested to test this code first with the easy traps.
Even a guy from SlySoft (who makes the ever popular AnyDVD-HD product) chimes in early on but backs off after realising he could well get the sacker.
I’ll just say: due to certain properties of BD+, once you’re past a certain point, you can handle it pretty much without reversing - BD+ itself then helps you out - on any player
…
Actually you’d have to know how BD+ really works, to know what I meant (and even then you probably wouldn’t ).
But if I start unraveling that, I’d be finding myself looking for a new job by next week
Love this bit in one of Oopho2ei posts:
I would like to stress again that this project wasn’t intended to circumvent copy protection and promote piracy. This can already be done using commercial software like AnyDVD-HD. Instead this project was an attempt to enable users of open source operating systems (like linux) to playback their BD+ protected discs without having to use proprietary software. Furthermore only two movies “I Robot” and “The Day After Tomorrow” have been proven to be handled correctly so far. Obviously there is still a lot of debugging to be done.
Classy! Download a copy of the BDVmDbg build for educational reasons and try PortableBDVM which comes in C99 source form.
Developer, Kernel / Internals, Linux/Unix, Operating Systems, Security, Windows, hardware, software
If you like discussions about deep internals you’ll most definately have subscribed to the Going Deep series on Channel 9. Today they just released a fascinating interview with Kernel Guru, Mark Russinovich - of Sysinternals fame, who is now a Technical Fellow at Microsoft. One of my favourite books would have to be Windows Internals 4th Edition, and reference it quite frequently. Cant wait for the 5th edition!!!
One very important change in Windows 7 kernel is the dismantling of the Spin Lock Dispatcher and redesign and implementation of its functionality into separate components. This work was done by Arun Kishan (you’ve met him here on C9 last year). The direct result of this great work is that Windows 7 can scale to 256 processors and enabled the great Landy Wang to tune Windows Memory manager to be even more efficient than it already is. Mark also explains (again) what MinWin really is (heck, even I was confused. Not anymore…). MinWin is present in Windows 7.
There are some really interesting topics covered in this video, especially the content behind the scheduler and the thread dispatcher.
Channel 9 Going Deep: Inside Windows 7
Download Offline versions: WMV | WMV HD | MP4 (iPod) | ZUNE
.NET / CLR / C#, Developer, Kernel / Internals, Operating Systems, Security, Windows, Windows 7, software
An interesting bit-o-javascript posted by Mike-On-Ads that exploits an age old trick of leaking out the browsers navigated history. Armed with the info a cunning developer can workout what gender the viewer is.
The blog posting on the site explains the method used and allows you to try it out. Give it a ago and see how accurate it is 
Here are my results:
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 34%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 66%
| Site | Male-Female Ratio |
| slashdot.org | 1.74 |
| theage.com.au | 1.13 |
Damn, I knew I shouldnt be browsing SlashDot that much, atleast it wasnt Cosmopolitan or Womens Weekly (ooops!). Unfortunately, only my current session records the history as I clear my page history when firefox closes. I’ll have to try it again and see if it changes.
MSY(.com.au - dont go there yet!), one of the most competitive IT hardware stores in Australia recently got hacked and the site has embedded Net-Worm.JS.Aspxor.a worm. Only realised after I went to the site and Firefox blocked the page. You can read all about the hack and the effects on the Whirlpool Thread or Google Safe Browsing diagnostic page.
Its always nice when someones got your back. Who knows MSY might actually endup making a proper website now instead of the messy FrontPage site that was.
