Sony and Robots...shows how crazy the "anti-hacking" regime has become

[mmotyka at lsil.com]

Tim May <tcmay at got.net> wrote :
>Saw this interesting application of the new hardware 
>copyright/anti-tampering/anti-reverse-engineering regime in place"
>
>http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20011107/tc/sony_robot_hack_1.html
>
>This shows how crazy the laws have gotten. These robots are essentially 
>computers, and the "hacks" are just new computer programs.
>
>Imagine:
>
>"Dell has announced they are are suing anyone who makes available 
>software for their machines that Dell did not authorize."
>
>
>--Tim May
>
I have my own gripe about this and related items. We've all read about
MS's nasty license agreements and how they affect the spread of
alternative operating systems. Well, I wanted to pick a decent graphics
card that would be well supported under Linux. ATI has a lot of hooplah
on their site about how they are Linux-friendly so I started there. The
card I tentatively chose was the All-in-Wonder Radeon. It has MPEG2 HW,
TV Tuner, Graphics engine, TV out. There is XFREE86 support and there is
a project that has video capture working but no matter where I looked I
couldn't find technical docs for the thing. Isn't that where most driver
projects begin? It's what I've always stared with anyway. So I called
their Developer Support number and was told, in spite of the talk about
Linux support on the website, that they don't give that technical
reference out to just anyone but that some information had been released
to the Linux community. I have yet to locate exactly what was released.
I know it does not include the register set description for the TVout
portion and having seen SW DCT code in project sources I wonder if the
HW is being put fully to use. A HW DCT makes a huge difference in
performance. The net effect is that Linux development is hobbled. Is
this because ATI is protecting some sort of IP?

Anyway it kind of ticks me off.

So there's more, I'm pretty suspicious of BIOS and MS OS snoopiness.
Wouldn't it be nice to have open source BIOS? There is a Sourceforge
project called FreeBIOS and a cousin called LinuxBIOS. Again, I like to
start with documentation. Well the motherboard mfr offers little in the
way of technical info. Same for the chipset mfr. Unless you're a
corporate customer.

I don't really have a lot of time to reverse engineer this shit but I'm
just about mad enough to make time.

Mike