VCR Virus Fake VHS Copy-Protection Warning Label (2016)
whyimnotanartist.net
whyimnotanartist.net
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.
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.
Still today, there is parents and siblings who don't know better and will not allow their kids to experiment.
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.
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?)
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
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).
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).
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.
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† 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.
https://whyimnotanartist.net/2016/03/08/vcr-virus-fake-vhs-c...