Reminds me of the "danger, radiation!" warning sign a local laundry put on its doors.
Probably pretty effective in dissuading intruders. But, they got shut down earlier this year with a "seized by the authorities" action typically reserved for drugs/arms dealers.
So, as with this copy protection label, I guess the effectiveness greatly depends on your target audience...
(Side-quest: would it have been possible to mount some kind of side-channel attack against VCRs? Over-driving the video/audio signals to blow up the CRT/speakers would be an obvious one, but would this also be possibly ONLY on copies and/or copier equipment?)
Maybe this works for elder people but this would've had the exact opposite effect on teens i guess.
I remember back in the day when we got our first 386, the person who installed it, told me specifically that I should never press the delete key or enter the CMOS.. no matter what.
This was pre-internet so his word was it. He even made up a horror story about a guy locking his PC 'forever' due a lost password (maybe he didn't want to do unneeded maintenance due to a kid exploring the CMOS settings).
Guess the first thing I did as soon as he left the house :D
The teacher who put this tape in a VCR back in the day probably graduated school before home VHS was even a settled standard. What sort of education could she have had that would reassure her that VCRs don't execute code from tape?
"...reassure her that VCRs don't execute code from tape"
That's were a good education comes in. A good education gives one an inquiring mind and thus she'd know from computers of that time that programs on tapes require computers and back then VCRs, at best, had dedicated controllers that had no way of running such a program (they could barely play video let alone do anything else).
Moreover, a reality check would come into play. How would any and every brand of VCR be able to respond such a program made after VCRs were designed - that feature having never been mentioned in the handbooks or elsewhere?
Even then and even if VCRs had the potential to do so, she'd ask herself the obvious question 'if this were true then everyone would be talking about it by now so why haven't I heard about it?'
Right, nothing's impossible, pigs may fly but I've yet to see one (the corollary being the gullible are easily fooled).
> That's were a good education comes in. A good education gives one an inquiring mind
Education isn't magic, and can't instill an inquiring mind reliably.
I went to a (at the time) $35k/yr private school that I consider to provide a fairly fantastic education. I remember being shocked when I discovered that my college roommate (a friend from the same high school) didn't know that you could delete installer files after installing software, taking up several GB of data back in the day when disk space was dear.
I had of course wondered the same thing at some pt in my life, and figured it years earlier by running a two-minute experiment in which I risked breaking the install of a game I didn't care that much about.
The difference between him and me certainly wasn't our education.
this reminds me about interesting web experiment. there was a page where you got some begging of number sequence, eg
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 ... and you could check if some number belongs to that sequence, and there was a question if you know algorithm of this sequence. the trick part was that most people would assume Fibonacci sequence and they only checked few next numbers of that sequence until they claimed to know what sequence it was. it wasn't it was just another one that just started like that and it was now very sparse, therefore container most of Fibonacci numbers, but most people would only check if numbers that they think they should be there are correct, and didn't try those they would not expect to confirm sequence.
this shows interesting thing about humans, that they do not want to do even simple experiments where the result would be a failure
"... didn't know that you could delete installer files after installing software, taking up several GB of data..."
Although I didn't state it, the point I was making was that there is a considerable - in fact a great difference between being able to solve problems by inference and logical deduction and knowing the specifics of some quirky design that's arisen in the mind of a developer - which, in essence, could be anything, and in fact may itself be illogical and deficient - as I show hereunder!
A good education allows one to develop one's skills and ability to be able to solve problems by inference and logical deduction, it does not teach one to read the minds of every Tom, Dick and Harry although if you have to do that a good education probably helps.
Moreover, no one who is unfamiliar with computer technology would be able to reasonably deduce the problem that you've raised simply because there are multiple and very logical ways (not to mention illogical ones) that installers could be installed onto a PC.
What you said about the removal of installation programs is not necessarily correct, in fact it's often wrong. With many programs installers are required to be left on the PC otherwise the programs will not work or it is impossible to uninstall them without those files!
Your suggestion of removing installers became such a problem for Microsoft that it deliberately removed its useful maintenance program Windows Installer CleanUp Utility† 2.5.0.1 from its website specifically because too many people were using it indiscriminately to do exactly what you suggested.
Again, the knowledge about cleaning up installer files by simply deleting them that you acquired from somewhere and that you found works for you doesn't necessarily do so for everybody - as Microsoft accurately asserts. What I say about that is no matter how bright you are you would NOT be expected to know that there are inconsistencies in this discovered procedure simply BECAUSE the procedure is illogical - that to say not all programs are equal in this respect when they ought to be.
__
† This is one of a number of Microsoft sites where it discusses this problem https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/window.... BTW, the program is still on my machine because I now know how to use it with care - that is, I've learned to do so after several fuck-ups.
If I'm not mistaken, you've completely misunderstood my comment. And as far as I can tell, your comment is making the opposite point that you think it does.
I didn't "acquire the knowledge" from a third-party; as I describe in detail in my comment, I figured it out through two minutes of experimentation with software I didn't mind risking (what you call "inference and logical deduction").
In fact, you're committing exactly the error you're being so dismissive of! Theoretical knowledge that installed software may retain hidden connections to their installers did not comport with my initial experiment. And indeed, I have never once encountered an issue deleting installer files.
There are very possibly edge cases that my experimentation didn't cover. But the path of experimentation and deduction put me in a position far superior to my incurious friend's, without any observed costs in the years since. This is part of the power of empiricism: I may be concerned with a subset of the situation (eg a certain type of installer) that isn't well-formulated in the theoretical question, but that is the relevant domain for my decision.
It's pretty clear that you've failed to understand my second comment as well. Perhaps the fault is mine, but I'm not sure it'd be productive to continue the conversation. Thanks for your thoughts
In mid 2000s when my father bought us a PC, we opened paint, I impressed him by drawing my country's flag in paint (cuz I saw a teacher in school do it).
Then, it comes the moment to leave the paint program (gonna use the old terminology), and as you know it ask you if you wanna leave without saving: Yes, No, Cancel? and it does with a warning sign. My father and me were so sussed out with that warning sign, so we did not click yes, I didn't have much of an idea what the message was about because it was in a language I did not understand. I kept clicking no and cancel repeatedly.
The store where my father bought the PC told him to not turn the PC using the turn off button either, so we kept trying with that message without clicking yes. In the end we just unplugged it.
That was my first interaction with a PC, and it was a bit scary.
This is probably what led to today's glut of vague "Oops, there was a problem :(" error messages. The next round will probably have an Alegria person slouching in despair, shrugging, etc.
It’s hard to remember back now but when I was probably about 8 or 9 years old my first family computer, a Commodore 64, had this program where it would “simulate” all sorts of catastrophic errors. Formatting disks, exploding, etc. As a child I was totally convinced and man that was scary. Funny to think back how silly that was now.
The realization that it is very hard to do something on a computer that could not be repaired via software was what allowed me to just try anything. I wasn't afraid to click on things, visit "scary" folders, or view hidden files. Even after doing something that forced a reboot into some sort of recovery mode to replace things showed that things were recoverable and not permanent. There are so many people with the notion that they will break their computer that are absolutely unwilling to experiment and try things. Fear is the mind killer!
With new products of today it might actually be such thing, there is many products, that do not have any official software recovery, eg many Android phones or consoles, so nowadays causing bug that would bootloop or crash your software means basically that you need to service it or throw it away if it's not supported or out of warranty
I think that ultimately it was that program that taught me this lesson. I was scared to death the first time but later it kind of became a rush, then just comedy - I came to realize that it really couldn’t have those effects.
Of course afterward I learned the hard way how you really could make mistakes - repartitioning my dads disk incorrectly to install Linux for example. Whoops.
That almost sounds like the "Sillycrisis" portion of a thing called "Silly 64", by "Silly Software". I can find almost no information about this program other than the actual program itself. Pretty sure the whole thing was written in BASIC.
Mid 90s, my father and I went to buy a computer. It was late afternoon and the company (some B2B in some huge conference center) was almost closing for the day. We decided on what must go into the thing (along lines "no, 16Hz is unnecessary, 12Hz will do) and were so truly disappointed to find out it would take two business days. Despite almost closing, they told us to wait and assembled the computer on spot. We returned home where I learned that computer without software is nothing (I was able to play with some DOS commands this evening). I remember a strong 'aha' moment... "ok, that's computer PLUS software."
So... do these tapes have Macrovision on them? I always thought this was just a weird way to brag that you had it. I imagine the wild video artifacts that Macrovision causes would look like your VCR was getting utterly destroyed by the tape.
"In the real world, if a company knowingly created tapes that damaged playback equipment, lawsuits would go through the roof"
Shortly after this, Sony deliberatly created and distributed a virus (some code that installed itself on a computer and hid itself from the owner) on millions of CDs (the code which breached copyright law too to rub salt in the wound)
From what I can tell there was very little comeback for the people who did this other thna a "don't do it again"
I'm familiar with the history of that but I also 75% blame microsoft for having a windows default setting to execute as the current user, any .exe binary that's specified in the autorun.inf file in the root of a CD or DVD-ROM, when inserted into the computer (in the windows 98SE/millennium/2000 era).
same issue that was still biting the US military in the ass 6, 7, 8 years later they learned that any usb flash drive inserted into a computer would autorun the binaries on it, and they resorted to putting hot glue into the USB ports of desktop PCs as a stopgap measure.
> Real VHS copy protection, like Macrovision, relied on signal interference that the playback device wouldn’t even detect, distorting the signal received by the recording device.
This isn't quite true and in fact Macrovision caused a great deal of issues for legitimate users--not all TV sets were able to track the not-quite-standard signal-- and there was some question of legality. (Can companies advertise their product VHS or NTSC if they didn't quite meet those standards, etc.)
Macrovision worked by tricking the AGC (automatic gain control). The part of the signal that was affected was in the vertical blanking so it was not normally visible to viewers. The AGC was typically a feature of the recorder so that if a signal was perceived to be too hot/bright, it would clamp the signal causing the recorded image to become darker. Sort of like auto-exposure on cameras. The resulting recorded image would ramp back and forth from too dark to normal which would hopefully cause the person doing the recording to not want to keep the recording or to continue doing these types of recordings. Macrovision was easy to defeat with the right equipment, but Macrovision worked because pretty much no consumer would go to the expense of buying that equipment. Another example of keeping honest people honest.
It's a little tricker than that. A good explanation is here:
> What Macrovision does is to introduce false synchronization pulses followed by false back porches at a very high voltage level (~15% over white level). The VHS VCR looks at the signal and thinks that it is fed with an extremely high-amplitude signal and adjusts the gain control to minimum --> the real picture gets very dim (see pictures 4 and 5).
"Can companies advertise their product VHS or NTSC if they didn't quite meet those standards, etc."
All television standards are incredibly strict (once I worked in a prototype laboratory at RCA, there we designed professional television equipment, later I worked in a TV station with the responsibility for ensuring that TV standards were maintained to comply with government regulations/broadcast specifications - i.e.: in keeping with the standards).
It's somewhat of a miracle that cheap domestic VCRs work at all. The only reason they do is that it is easier for TV set manufacturers to build flywheel syncs that allow horizontal and vertical oscillators to be pulled to frequency than it is (as it was back then) to phase lock them to known precise frequencies (say for PAL: 50 and 15,625Hz). TV stations always broadcast extremely stable frequencies but even so getting a domestic TV to sync with them could be difficult. By the 1980s TV station standards were even tighter as by then they were locked to atomic standards (this made network syncing much easier).
Mechanical VCRs had inordinate difficulty in maintaining good TV standards, that is their horizontal and vertical sync blocks looked like something the cat dragged in. It's only the excellent sense of early designers who designed the television standards - and that's all of them, NTSC, SECAM and PAL - that they included equalizing pulses in the synchronizing signals. These equalizing pulses were integrated by TV circuitry, mainly resistors and capacitors, to produce pulses that were easy to lock on to. If it were not for this cleaver farsighted thinking then cheap domestic VCRs would not have been possible.
It shows how the equalization pulses, which are transmitted by TV stations (as required by the standards) allow TV sets to generate pulses that are easy for TV set oscillators to lock onto and thus sync with incoming TV images. A VCR records a TV signal complete with its sync pulses and upon playback the by now very 'dirty' sync pulses that also vary in frequency due to mechanical playback drift can still be separated by the TV set's sync separator and fed to the line and vertical oscillators which then lock onto the signal. That these pulses vary from the clean ones broadcast by the TV doesn't matter much as the system was designed to be sufficiently robust to cope with bad incoming signals (even though VCRs weren't on the minds of the standards people at the time standards were set).
Essentially, domestic VCRs exhibit quite remarkable technology and its only through the dogged persistence of Japanese TV manufacturers in the early 1970s and '80s that we got VCRs at all.
In that sense it's very hard to criticize VCR and TV set manufactures when the standards were built with only electrons in mind! That is, TV standards designers knew that electrons could respond very quickly but they never envisaged that mechanical parts would also need to move hellishly quickly (the risetime of a domestic TV signal about 90ns and TV sync pulses are measured in microseconds).
It reminds me the warning on the back of my child schoolbooks: "Danger, le photocopillage tue le livre" ("Warning! copying kill the book" but with a pun between "photocopy" and "pillage"). It had a logo with a book hit by a flash. I was scared when a teacher put a book in the copier because I thought it would burn the book or something like this.
41 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 84.4 ms ] threadProbably pretty effective in dissuading intruders. But, they got shut down earlier this year with a "seized by the authorities" action typically reserved for drugs/arms dealers.
So, as with this copy protection label, I guess the effectiveness greatly depends on your target audience...
(Side-quest: would it have been possible to mount some kind of side-channel attack against VCRs? Over-driving the video/audio signals to blow up the CRT/speakers would be an obvious one, but would this also be possibly ONLY on copies and/or copier equipment?)
I remember back in the day when we got our first 386, the person who installed it, told me specifically that I should never press the delete key or enter the CMOS.. no matter what.
This was pre-internet so his word was it. He even made up a horror story about a guy locking his PC 'forever' due a lost password (maybe he didn't want to do unneeded maintenance due to a kid exploring the CMOS settings).
Guess the first thing I did as soon as he left the house :D
And for that matter, the successor to VHS, DVD-Video, does have some code execution features. http://dvd.sourceforge.net/dvdinfo/vmi-sum.html
That's were a good education comes in. A good education gives one an inquiring mind and thus she'd know from computers of that time that programs on tapes require computers and back then VCRs, at best, had dedicated controllers that had no way of running such a program (they could barely play video let alone do anything else).
Moreover, a reality check would come into play. How would any and every brand of VCR be able to respond such a program made after VCRs were designed - that feature having never been mentioned in the handbooks or elsewhere?
Even then and even if VCRs had the potential to do so, she'd ask herself the obvious question 'if this were true then everyone would be talking about it by now so why haven't I heard about it?'
Right, nothing's impossible, pigs may fly but I've yet to see one (the corollary being the gullible are easily fooled).
Education isn't magic, and can't instill an inquiring mind reliably.
I went to a (at the time) $35k/yr private school that I consider to provide a fairly fantastic education. I remember being shocked when I discovered that my college roommate (a friend from the same high school) didn't know that you could delete installer files after installing software, taking up several GB of data back in the day when disk space was dear.
I had of course wondered the same thing at some pt in my life, and figured it years earlier by running a two-minute experiment in which I risked breaking the install of a game I didn't care that much about.
The difference between him and me certainly wasn't our education.
Although I didn't state it, the point I was making was that there is a considerable - in fact a great difference between being able to solve problems by inference and logical deduction and knowing the specifics of some quirky design that's arisen in the mind of a developer - which, in essence, could be anything, and in fact may itself be illogical and deficient - as I show hereunder!
A good education allows one to develop one's skills and ability to be able to solve problems by inference and logical deduction, it does not teach one to read the minds of every Tom, Dick and Harry although if you have to do that a good education probably helps.
Moreover, no one who is unfamiliar with computer technology would be able to reasonably deduce the problem that you've raised simply because there are multiple and very logical ways (not to mention illogical ones) that installers could be installed onto a PC.
What you said about the removal of installation programs is not necessarily correct, in fact it's often wrong. With many programs installers are required to be left on the PC otherwise the programs will not work or it is impossible to uninstall them without those files!
Your suggestion of removing installers became such a problem for Microsoft that it deliberately removed its useful maintenance program Windows Installer CleanUp Utility† 2.5.0.1 from its website specifically because too many people were using it indiscriminately to do exactly what you suggested.
Again, the knowledge about cleaning up installer files by simply deleting them that you acquired from somewhere and that you found works for you doesn't necessarily do so for everybody - as Microsoft accurately asserts. What I say about that is no matter how bright you are you would NOT be expected to know that there are inconsistencies in this discovered procedure simply BECAUSE the procedure is illogical - that to say not all programs are equal in this respect when they ought to be.
__
† This is one of a number of Microsoft sites where it discusses this problem https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/window.... BTW, the program is still on my machine because I now know how to use it with care - that is, I've learned to do so after several fuck-ups.
I didn't "acquire the knowledge" from a third-party; as I describe in detail in my comment, I figured it out through two minutes of experimentation with software I didn't mind risking (what you call "inference and logical deduction").
In fact, you're committing exactly the error you're being so dismissive of! Theoretical knowledge that installed software may retain hidden connections to their installers did not comport with my initial experiment. And indeed, I have never once encountered an issue deleting installer files.
There are very possibly edge cases that my experimentation didn't cover. But the path of experimentation and deduction put me in a position far superior to my incurious friend's, without any observed costs in the years since. This is part of the power of empiricism: I may be concerned with a subset of the situation (eg a certain type of installer) that isn't well-formulated in the theoretical question, but that is the relevant domain for my decision.
Then, it comes the moment to leave the paint program (gonna use the old terminology), and as you know it ask you if you wanna leave without saving: Yes, No, Cancel? and it does with a warning sign. My father and me were so sussed out with that warning sign, so we did not click yes, I didn't have much of an idea what the message was about because it was in a language I did not understand. I kept clicking no and cancel repeatedly.
The store where my father bought the PC told him to not turn the PC using the turn off button either, so we kept trying with that message without clicking yes. In the end we just unplugged it.
That was my first interaction with a PC, and it was a bit scary.
As a child, I was frightened to death. I didn't tell anyone otherwise the authorities would whisk me away.
Still today, there is parents and siblings who don't know better and will not allow their kids to experiment.
Of course afterward I learned the hard way how you really could make mistakes - repartitioning my dads disk incorrectly to install Linux for example. Whoops.
Shortly after this, Sony deliberatly created and distributed a virus (some code that installed itself on a computer and hid itself from the owner) on millions of CDs (the code which breached copyright law too to rub salt in the wound)
From what I can tell there was very little comeback for the people who did this other thna a "don't do it again"
same issue that was still biting the US military in the ass 6, 7, 8 years later they learned that any usb flash drive inserted into a computer would autorun the binaries on it, and they resorted to putting hot glue into the USB ports of desktop PCs as a stopgap measure.
https://whyimnotanartist.net/2016/03/08/vcr-virus-fake-vhs-c...
This isn't quite true and in fact Macrovision caused a great deal of issues for legitimate users--not all TV sets were able to track the not-quite-standard signal-- and there was some question of legality. (Can companies advertise their product VHS or NTSC if they didn't quite meet those standards, etc.)
> What Macrovision does is to introduce false synchronization pulses followed by false back porches at a very high voltage level (~15% over white level). The VHS VCR looks at the signal and thinks that it is fed with an extremely high-amplitude signal and adjusts the gain control to minimum --> the real picture gets very dim (see pictures 4 and 5).
See: http://cd.textfiles.com/group42/HACK/TV/MACROV.HTM
All television standards are incredibly strict (once I worked in a prototype laboratory at RCA, there we designed professional television equipment, later I worked in a TV station with the responsibility for ensuring that TV standards were maintained to comply with government regulations/broadcast specifications - i.e.: in keeping with the standards).
It's somewhat of a miracle that cheap domestic VCRs work at all. The only reason they do is that it is easier for TV set manufacturers to build flywheel syncs that allow horizontal and vertical oscillators to be pulled to frequency than it is (as it was back then) to phase lock them to known precise frequencies (say for PAL: 50 and 15,625Hz). TV stations always broadcast extremely stable frequencies but even so getting a domestic TV to sync with them could be difficult. By the 1980s TV station standards were even tighter as by then they were locked to atomic standards (this made network syncing much easier).
Mechanical VCRs had inordinate difficulty in maintaining good TV standards, that is their horizontal and vertical sync blocks looked like something the cat dragged in. It's only the excellent sense of early designers who designed the television standards - and that's all of them, NTSC, SECAM and PAL - that they included equalizing pulses in the synchronizing signals. These equalizing pulses were integrated by TV circuitry, mainly resistors and capacitors, to produce pulses that were easy to lock on to. If it were not for this cleaver farsighted thinking then cheap domestic VCRs would not have been possible.
There's an excellent drawing of a vertical field block at the very bottom of this link: https://www.brainkart.com/article/Vertical-Sync-Details_1202...
It shows how the equalization pulses, which are transmitted by TV stations (as required by the standards) allow TV sets to generate pulses that are easy for TV set oscillators to lock onto and thus sync with incoming TV images. A VCR records a TV signal complete with its sync pulses and upon playback the by now very 'dirty' sync pulses that also vary in frequency due to mechanical playback drift can still be separated by the TV set's sync separator and fed to the line and vertical oscillators which then lock onto the signal. That these pulses vary from the clean ones broadcast by the TV doesn't matter much as the system was designed to be sufficiently robust to cope with bad incoming signals (even though VCRs weren't on the minds of the standards people at the time standards were set).
Essentially, domestic VCRs exhibit quite remarkable technology and its only through the dogged persistence of Japanese TV manufacturers in the early 1970s and '80s that we got VCRs at all.
In that sense it's very hard to criticize VCR and TV set manufactures when the standards were built with only electrons in mind! That is, TV standards designers knew that electrons could respond very quickly but they never envisaged that mechanical parts would also need to move hellishly quickly (the risetime of a domestic TV signal about 90ns and TV sync pulses are measured in microseconds).