taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

This is pathetic. As noted in the link-blog a couple of days ago (as well as everywhere else), TiVo’s new DRM features have been spotted ‘in the wild’, protecting the valuable Intellectual Property that is Family Guy and Simpsons reruns.

The icing on the cake is that TiVo have come up with a hilarious hand-wavy explanation — apparently it was line noise. Marc Hedlund of O’Reilly and Cory Doctorow are having none of it, and rightly so; as a bonus, Cory asked a group of DRM experts, who ‘burst into positive howls of disbelief’ that line noise could corrupt the DRM bits and the corresponding checksums to match.

From my angle, though, there’s another noteworthy factor:

“During the test process, we came across people who had false positives because of noisy analog signals. We actually delayed development (of the new TiVo software) to address those false positives.” (– Jim Denney, director of product marketing for TiVo)

Interesting use of the term ‘false positive’ there. Sounds more like a good old-fashioned bug if you ask me ;)

Anyway, I’m glad I went for the home-built option. It was pretty obvious that TiVo are in the cross-hairs, and their product is only going to get worse as the DRM industry push harder…

Tags: cory, couple, drm, family, intellectual, line, noise, product, property, tivo

Hardware: This weblog is jinxed!!

That’s the only explanation I can come up with. The day before yesterday, I blogged about exploding monitors and various halt-and-catch-fire software instructions. Last night, my monitor made a popping noise, emitted a faint burning-plastic smell, and shrank the display into a thin stripe down the middle of the screen.

Great. It’s dead as a doornail — I’m working from Catherine’s iBook for now. Quite a step down from the lovely 21-inch CRT. Argh :(

BTW, needless to say, I wasn’t running any scary apps — not even Freedom: First Resistance — the only possible display-hosing culprits were Firebird, KDE, ExMH or gvim ;)

Tags: day, display, explanation, hardware, monitor, night, noise, smell, software, weblog, yesterday

so Athlon XP CPUs run pretty hot at full speed all the time, and my PC makes lots of noise as a result. I have a temperature-sensitive CPU fan, so reducing the CPU temp will reduce noise, too.

A while back, I came across this doc, the Athlon Powersaving HOWTO, which contains a great tip — namely a way to put the processor in ‘STPGNT Mode’ (Stop Grant Mode), which disconnects it from the FSB and turns off parts of the CPU when not in use.

It works perfectly, in most respects, although the Ensoniq 5880 onboard sound chip goes crazy when it’s active, as it can’t deal with the changed timings from the CPU. But when I’m playing music, I can’t hear the fans anyway ;)

The details — to keep it brief, just take a look at the commands for my chipset as described here. I’m using ACPI in the kernel anyway, since I’m using software suspend-to-disk as well.

Tags: athlon, cpu, cpus, doc, fan, noise, result, speed, temp, time