Idea: The ultimate CD/DVD auditing tool

[Sampo Syreeni]

On 2003-07-06, Major Variola (ret) uttered to cypherpunks at lne.com:

>There's a good reason why, viz: it would cost the drive developer to
>allow or export this flexibility.

But that's just the point. They need to have the raw signal available at
one time or another. Picking it up and sending it down the line should be
utterly trivial, too. It will have its price, but the price will also be
negligible. Especially since the ATAPI protocol has steadily grown more
complicated, which would suggest they are making libraries to handle it in
a standardised fashion. If they have such a library, and the raw data, why
shy away from yielding it to the user? I mean, the cost is far less than,
say, implementing digital rippping capability in the first place, with the
available chips.

I'd guess either because of a) terminal stupidity or b) benefits to scale
in making it sure people go with compatibility. As there probably have to
be some limits to how stupid engineers capable of making things like
writable CD's can be, I'd have to go with the second alternative.
-- 
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy at iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2