Now imagine if this technology was expanded on, and you had a DVD-ROM and a DVD-*RAM* on the same disk. Same effect, but there's no write-cycle limit on your saves anymore!
This brought back memories. I bought an iD Software shareware disc at Walmart (Kmart?) for five bucks. It had unlockable full versions of all the games. I used a hex editor and found the secret key, unlocked ALL of them. I then copied them all off, created a batch file installer with said key, and burned fresh copies. May or may not have distributed for ten bucks per disc at my junior high school... Security back then was hilariously bad, and so much fun!
From what I remember reading in Masters of Doom, the original shareware CD release of Quake I had a similar issue; namely that it was totally crackable to get the full game, and that was discovered pretty quickly.
In those days, software companies did not deserved to be pirated, but nowadays they do. I don't do it, still i understand why people do this if you look at these idiotic prices, and how they treat consumers, with halfassed unfished games, making money with unannouced downloads, paying for online gaming. They fraud consumers
@@eventhorizon2873 piracy is illegal regardless, but it's immoral only if you do it to developers that rely on the money from each individual sale to to get a salary developers working for big studios get paid for the work they do on the game, and even if it financially flops, their pay likely won't suffer unless it leaves the studio as a whole short of money but at that point, people are pirating it so hard because the execs made shit decisions and the devs are better off working elsewhere
@@LonelySpaceDetective Yup, that's exactly what happened. What id was trying to do was function as their own publisher. Doom II was a retail game and they had GTI basically handle the creation of the discs, the selling of the boxed copies, etc. Some within id didn't feel like giving GTI a large cut of the profits was worth it. So the whole idea was they'd basically sell Quake shareware with the whole game encrypted, then have people call a phone number and give credit card info over the phone to unlock the whole game. So now they had no need for a middleman. But it was hacked very quickly and they supposedly had a warehouse full of tens of thousands of CDs they couldn't sell.
I love your humility to speculate and try things without knowing for sure. Some people pretend to be experts when they're not and I love that you admit what you don't know, while still showing us everything you do know about a product or technology. You've shown some things I really haven't heard of before and we might not ever see them if someone wasn't willing to say "here's the thing. But, I'm not 100% sure on how it works. I'll show you what I know."
That is for me how I partial gauge a person's intelegence, the idea of about how much all of us don't know collectively, which also gives me a insatiable curiosity. The belief that learning begins when you start be thinking as if there is no box at all in which you begin to think from within or from without some hypothetical box which exists where exactly?
“CD-Rs are mostly interchangeable” Flashback to interminable wars over AZO vs. taiyo yuden, disk rot and overburning capability and whether or not PSX-style black dye discs were better or not. * eye twitches * 31:37 Yoooo greetz to theiCEKreAM massive
Based on my experience from the time, and going through old discs now, the Mitsubishi azo discs (like Verbatim) had better contrast, which made them work better with the garbage Playstation laser assembly. In terms of longevity though, they died horrible deaths over the years, while the Taiyo Yuden pthalocyanine discs are still readable. Those black discs were dumb they were just visible light filters in the polycarbonate. They only became fashionable because Sony used the same plastic for playstation discs to make them look unique.
> Flashback to interminable wars Wars? The dyes did not affect much beyond long term stability. certain manufactures like Verbatim used AZO (which is what I prefer) whilst some used others eventually settling on a type of phthalocyanine dye. None of that was anything much more than marketing and product development. Nothing like a "war" between formats as they were all the same format. It would be like describing fashion as a war with different shoes and clothes of different shapes sizes and colours, even though every shoe is a shoe and works like a shoe works.
The exploit part was really cool. Props to the person that found that key and password so fast! I imagine someone could figure out what encryption it is using and crack that ten digit alphanumeric password super fast on today's hardware.
I agree with Jon, probably a basic xor cipher, with the best case being either (single) DES or RC4. If anyone has the driver software to share I could easily find out ...
If the password is included on the disk, it might not even be encrypted with the password. It could just always "encrypt" data the same way, and then the software checks the password.
I still wish they’d make 10 terabyte CDRs. Magnetic and flash storage is extremely cheap to manufacture now. The industries just collude to fix prices to keep the cost from collapsing to the affordability of CDRs.
you can buy Blu-Ray burnable discs (BD-R) that are up to 100GB per disc. theyre not cheap though. Tape storage is used a lot in enterprise as its cheaper per gig, but you have to have a sequential backup routine, and wait for the tape to seek if you want to restore a specific file. if BD-R 100GB were the same pennies per disc of CD-Rs, then we'd have a real good storage alternative.
@@jameslangridge8849 100gb BDRs go for about $70 per terabyte now - but I wonder if that’s due to them being a niche product that does not benefit from any economy of scale. They might profitably settle at $5 per terabyte at the sales volume CDRs had in 2002.
Who prefers optical media over flash in 2022? And if you want high capacity on inferior/legacy formats, you can always go out and grab an LTO-8 tape drive… you’ve got 12TB to work with on a super annoying format relegated to the same things CDs/DVDs are nowadays- which is archive storage.
You know what I miss? DVD DL. No one knew any consumer drive could read like 8.5GB unless you had to burn an OSX disk. I used to drop an entire season of star trek on one disk for long car trips
I never had enough of them. Always seemed to run out when I was trying to ... lend .. a copy of a DVD-Video disc to someone. I've also tried my hand with Hackintosh, and had to download OS X from the App Store, extract the contents, and burn it to DVD for a clean-slate install with modified loaders and such. It became immediately obvious that the OS X distribution team definitely spent some time optimizing the file layouts on their media. When you just burn them willy-nilly, the drive spends an absolute _eternity_ seeking all over the place, and a typically 30-minute install takes well over an hour.
I mean you can still buy them, and multi-layer BD-Rs are normal. What I miss was the stupid DVD-R and DVD+R dichotomy, with DVD-R being more compatible until it was discovered that DVD+R let you set book type even though that was not an advertised feature.
I rarely use DL DVD media these days, simply because the single layer stuff is so much cheaper and I have the room! I have a few DL discs and have noticed that the quality scan degraded slightly faster at the layer transition, I suppose that is to be expected at the layers switch at the edge of the disc like with BD-R DL.
This is your most fascinating video ever. The facts that I had never heard of the product, and have never had any use for it and therefore would've turned my nose up at it if I had heard of it, is entirely beside the point. This is the exact sort of info for which I love your channel. That, plus you just provided the best explanation I've ever seen or read about how multisession CD-R works.
Thank you! I will caution: My summary of multisession is *very* abridged. I have read a half dozen detailed explanations of how it works and it hurts my head every time.
About 24:00 the obnoxious "let's use OUR controls for no good reason" habit: it's all over the place. Even Microsoft, who make the APIs, use their non-standard controls in _Office_ products. Office 95 had its name in Italic in the title bar, Office 97 had the Tahoma font in its menus, which is ______ing ugly on screen (it's meant to be used in print, some screens don't have to resolution needed to make Tahoma look good even today), and 2004 (IIRC) had those weird menu bars which popped open in a different way than the standard ones. Firefox saves some screen real estate these days by using the title/menu bar area for tabs (but then wastes a lot of it by making the tabs double height), they used to use ugly rounded tab styles for years, etc. Chrome introduced a CPU-unfriendly realtime glow effect on its top (even on the old versions FOR XP) and rounded corners you couldn't deactivate. Even _LibreOffice_ changes icon appearances for no reason other than to annoy people and make companies lose productivity each time a user has to look for the icon because they haven't memorized how it looks _TODAY_ . Really, these days, just about every industry (not just software) is a fashion industry. No matter if better or worse, just make it _different_ . . .
Yes, these could have been made for exactly the same price and on the same stampers as regular CDR and CDRW disks, as all you need is the correct stamping master to use. But yes use case is very limited, in that whatever you burned as software on the fixed side would need to be small, or useful, and nothing really was that, unless you had some form of recordable karaoke, that stored the player, and then the recording, on the media for later playback of poor singing.
I love everything about this video. It's got the full arc of weird intrigue, excited anticipation, confusion to understanding. disappointment, a community effort to explore the topic (of course it's a furry that recovered the password). Well done.
@@CathodeRayDude the government uses them www.oit.va.gov/Services/TRM/ToolPage.aspx?tid=14198 There required for medical records because HIPPA. media.datalocker.com/manuals/encryptdisc/EncryptDisc%20User%20Manual_v11.3.1.pdf
16:12 here's the thing: as early as the late 90s we were using imaging software that would make an exact physical copy of the disc from 'start' to finish, ignoring the specification of the PMA (and TOC) altogether. This software was so literal we were cautioned to clean the disc beforehand, because any dust or physical deformations on the disc would be copied over to the image. The use case at the time was copying PS1 games for use in a hacked console because the standard PS1 protocol used a unique way of burning which iirc effectively wrote the data to the disc 'in reverse'. By the time these Ricoh discs were even released to the market, I'd expect anyone working in data security/infiltration to be using a similar piece of software, once again rendering even the dream case irrelevant for at least covertly making a copy of said disc and working on breaking the encryption remotely...
@@chronossage ah yeah, good call. Going back into the memory archives when it comes to the specific quirks of physical game discs 🤣 Still, any decent 'non-standard' disc imaging software would overcome the physical limitations of the so-called dream case 'encryption'...
@@handlesarefeckinstupid quite possibly, I haven't done any PS1 back ups since the late 90s and I was barely 14 at the time... 🤷♂️ Point is, software existed back then that ignored the PMA/TOC and would make an exact physical copy of a disc, rendering ways to mask the data redundant.
I agree with everyone else, you did a great job explaining those security concepts. IMO, it looks to me that they were just trying to mimic Zip File Encryption, since clear text metadata and only asking for password on extraction are the same defaults as basic Archive encryption. At least Zip let you change the defaults to obscure file names though lol.
This was the first thing I thought of as well. I remember playing with ZIP encryption once, when I first got a copy of PKZIP 2.04g. I was surprised, even then, as a kid in front of a DOS prompt, that you could see the filenames if it was supposed to be encrypted. Never had any use for it, but thought it was a weird oversight anyway.
@@nickwallette6201 agreed. I only used Encrypted zip once, for when a client had wanted to secure some files without Full Disk Encryption or Individual file Encryption, because the client's Boss only knew how to use simple stuff like WinRAR and Office lol.
@@QualityDoggo that's completely right, I shouldn't have forgot about that. I guess I normally associate PGP with email and didn't think about it lol. Thank you.
16:09 fun fact! This is one of the security methods used by the Xbox 360 to prevent copying of game discs! Of course, software was made to instruct your disc drive to ignore that and games were dumped fairly easily. However, there were also other sections of the disc where it would make your DVD reader lose track of the groove. These portions are called "security sectors" and most 360 disc dumps just jump over that area, leaving 0s in its place. To fight the console complaining that the security sectors were not correct, pirates made custom firmware for the actual drives that came with the 360 to *lie* to the console that those security sectors *were* actually on your burned DVD-R-DLs and *had* the right data in them.
I remember when I got my first 2x CD writer, blanks were over $12 a piece and I was using a 486 at the time, I quickly learned that if anything happened in the background even the screen saver activating would crash the disk, I actually used a sharpie to write coaster on every one because I was not throwing $12 into the trashcan.
Intersection Pride support flag tucked into the set... Voynich Manuscript reference drop... Shade and love for Fry's at the same time... my friend, you have hit a trifecta of awesome and I'm barely a minute into this. Love your work, thanks for being a great human, as well as a great creator. 💚👍
18:48 I'm just amazed by how your wall works well as a chroma-key wall. Today I worked at a green-screen studio. And I had a hard time to get the wall lit evenly _(although most modern keying-filters are very forgiving)_ Your wall is very de-saturated cyan. It's very close to the color of your shirt... from a filter's point of view. Good job!
@@daemonspudguy Yeah, I hear good stuff about Resolve. I mainly use Premiere. And with all the custom MOGRT _(Motion Graphics Templates)_ I created I'm kinda stuck with Adobe 😕
I highly recommend watching a Captain Disillusion's video about chroma keying (it's titled "Chinese Invisibility Cloak Hoax Destroyed"), it's full of hints how to fix bad green screen.
I worked for a small company that made CD-i software between 1994 and 1995. The company had one of the first CD recorders and it was huge; this was years before they shrunk them down to a 5.25" drive bay. I learned a lot about CD and CD-R in that time, and I contributed to the CD-R FAQ page in those days. I even was a Plextor beta tester for a couple of years. I've seen most of the colored books (we had copies of the Red, Yellow, Green, Orange, Pink and White books). But I'd never heard of this format. I think I have a good understanding of how this works: yes you need a disc with a recordable section followed by a non-recordable section with an open session, followed by a recordable session. I can imagine how an encrypted CD can work because as it happens, I'm currently in the middle of a software project that has nothing to do with CD but everything with security. That hybrid non-recordable / recordable CD is a great idea for a purpose like that. You could of course do the same thing with a plain CD-R: just copy the files from the first session of your special disc into a non-closed session on a CD-R and the program will probably work just as well. Or maybe that driver that hides itself, does some checking to make sure that it can detect if it's actually a hybrid disc (not just a CD-R with one open session). It's really too bad that the whole implementation is such an afterthought. Store the password in clear text? Nobody at any time thought that was a good idea. And that user interface? Get me a bucket. I agree this was never going to be a popular product even if they did their best to just implement a drag-and-drop interface, but this looks like some intern wrote it in 3 weeks, where the first 2 weeks were spent on replacing all the good things the Windows user interface has to offer, by owner-drawn dialogs. Ugh! Anyway, excellent video with lots of good info as usual. Thanks for posting! By the way, one thing you left out but I agree it's not really relevant: Putting multiple sessions on one disc takes STUPID AMOUNTS of space because the lead-out of an open session is crazy long so that a 1992-ish microcontroller and laser pickup can find it and potentially switch the electronics to write mode. Also when you put a multi-session disc in a drive, the drive has to read the start of each session and the end of each session, which can take crazy long and is super annoying. So yeah that was another reason why this was such a bad idea.
9:51 *Philips and their CD's...* *Fun fact:* The diameter of the dutch dime coin _(10 cent piece)_ was used as the size of the center hole of the CD. @Cathode Ray Dude... if you are interested... I can get you some a _dime_ coins. Since the early 2000's, we switch to the €-euro. So, the _"dubbeltje"_ is no longer common.
There were actually quite a few "secure" CD-R's. I used to work in contract manufacturing & yeah, no intermediaries were supposed to be able to access the data. Often it was just test data and fixed schematics, but at that time paranoia of leaked data was the rule not the exemption.
I once had the idea _(way back when)_ to apply a magnetic sticker that would be applied to the center part of a CD, that transparent part that is not used to read the music from. A special CD player could write last playback-position, playback order, _an-what-not,_ on that part of the CD. Back than, it sounded like a nice patent to have. Of course _(and obviously)_ it never made it past my drawing board.
Thats a good idea. Or maybe the top half of the CD could be magnetic and the bottom would stay the same. Then the top could be read and written to like a floppy disk while the bottom would be read by a laser. Even if the capacity wasn't very large it could save small amounts of data like save data for games etc.
@@JaredConnell Back in the day, it would have worked. But with the internet it is hardly making a chance to survive. I was thinking to add custom playlist _(playback order)_ info, last playback position, and stuff like that. But additional goodies like games would have been nice
I used to burn hybrid CD-Rs all the time back in the time when mp3 capable car stereos and portable cd players were around. Some friends had car stereos that could read mp3s from the discs, and some didn't have. So I always had some audio tracks on my mp3 discs to have at least some music available.
My buddy had an early CD player that didn't recognize that data tracks were a thing and would attempt to "play" the data. God awful sounds, and very confused teenagers. One of the Bare Naked Ladies CD's had a whole interactive program on the data track for PC that had cool extras, but that one CD player would still try to plays us the song of its people.
@@dustysparks I’m not exactly sure when the cutoff was, but I think every CD player until the mid-90s (maybe even late 90s) was unaware of data discs and played the noise.
You can't actually write 99 sessions on a CD-R, each lead-in will consume some space, and you'll run out of space i think after at most 60 or so sessions.
Verbatim tried something similar on DVDs with software called - Secure Save. I wish someone made a dump of both for archive purposes as it really seems to be fun to explore. I wasn't aware of this until now.
Even before I saw exploit #2 I was going to say that encryption software is an execrable executable. Files like docx have some contents that can very easily be guessed by the user. Makes it easier to guess an encryption scheme. And then you've got a 12-character maximum for the password (always a sign that they're not doing proper hashing). And then you show that they're even storing *the password itself* in the encrypted data and it's clear they've made some huge mistakes here, but even if they hadn't I can't see these things surviving market ubiquity with their security algorithms intact. As security people say, if you're not a security expert (so it's the specific thing you do for work) never try to roll your own crypto. I mean it's not like key exchange is a new idea, and it's clear they didn't do anything like that. Like you've suggested there are ways to do this that generally work (after all any hard drive can be bitlocker'd) and while it security wasn't what it is in the mid-00s, they egregiously missed the mark on this one.
3:11 GD-ROM (the format used by the Dreamcast) has a warning track that will play in a standard CD player. CD Video (not to be confused with Video CD) is a format that contains analog video (it's basically a scaled down LaserDisc).
A long time ago Roland made the VS8F-3 effects expansion boards for some of their mixers and multitrack audio recorders. Different effects plugins were released on cd that could run on the chip. The plugins software would install from data on the cd then other data would be written back to the cd finalizing it with data that keyed the cd to the effects chip.
This reminds me of the backup DVD things. Memorex SimpleSave Photo & Video Back-Up, or EASY BACKUP - DIGITAL PHOTO & VIDEO BACKUP by Clickfree. Are those hybrid too? or just standard DVD-R (w+?) with the first session burned. Anyone know?
Probably was simply the first session recorded, as that would be cheaper than making a master, until the software was stable and they had volume. Cheaper to make an open session that had the burner software on it, then simply make a wrapper that used something like Nero and a custom interface do the work. Then for mass market use a stamped master that simply took one of the final version disks and used it to make the metal master, warts and all. Screen print the front and it looks pro, even if it is just the same cheap generic no name blank underneath.
I SWEAR I've seen these discs (or knockoffs or rebrands) in one of those do-it-yourself living will kits, along with special paper that prints the word 'copy' across your text when you photocopy it.
The concept you suggested is such a brilliant on that it would have cost a lot to develop it, and that would have translated into a lot of product cost - with no guarantee of success. Until a company had a government contract, they would never dare develop something like that.
You completely underestimate the investment climate before 2008. Companies would sink millions into products in the hope of making billions on the commercial market. The incredible stupid security software on this model feels like a technology demonstration made in the 1990s when proper encryption wasn't allowed to be shipped globally even as a teaser demo. Tech demonstration is probably the reason expiry could be undone with a quick deletion of a hidden file in order to return to showing the unexpired situation during a product demonstration.
@@johndododoe1411 "proper encryption wasn't allowed to be shipped globally" and now it magically is allowed - presumably because NSA has a means for reversing such encryption.
Brings me back to my time at a big defense corp, sending CDs with encrypted data. I became the “go to” person when someone else tried to write CDs in multisession, or didn’t close the disk or didn’t double check the data. 🤦🏻♂️ Good times.
Oh I remember that when we just bought random no-name bulks of 50 CD's in a box, how they failed so often. I came across cases where most of the discs didn't burn at all. Some you had to burn at 1-4x speed just to get through without "error burning disc". Not to mention how sensitve burning was, you literally couldn't walk in your room, you had to tip-toe during the 15-50 minutes it took to burn a disc. And if you dared run some software that LOADED while you BURN a disc, oh boy - you're getting a "buffer underrun or overrun or something" and it fails. RIP disc, here goes another. I don't miss this era at ALL.
Underrun. Tape drives do the same thing, but even worse. A lot worse. To the point that tape drives are often paired with a high-speed disk array that has no purpose other than to provide temporary space for the tape drive, so it won't be affected by load on whatever you are backing up from.
@@JaredConnell Agreed , i could only afford the tech towards the latter part of its run and as long as the write speed was low the cheap media worked.
@@JaredConnell Yeah thats true, later at work we bought a NEC Burner, that one never failed, it was expensive but amazing. In the later years I had 6 Toshiba DVD-burners fail on me, they all died after a short while.
Man I am glad you are making some attempt at preserving this weird stuff. I hope if you, and your people, can dissect this more so it can be explained you post a video update or a written explanation available to the public.
I was checking out your back catalog and noticed that you've _significantly_ ramped up your output over the past year, which pleases me greatly. I love that all your videos are longer-form. While I do watch them at 1.5x (sometimes 1.75x), it's just so I have time to watch more of them. CRD, LGR, MJD, TC, and TM (yay initialisms) give me endless, tech-focused enjoyment. I very much appreciate your consistent efforts in producing extended, engaging, and overall stellar content.
As an aside, anyone remember when Nintendo filed for a patent for similar hybrid rewritable storage? Presumably for the exact use cases of games software (dlc and saves) that were mentioned for these discs? And nothing came of it? How the changing times have meant that some things haven't changed lmao
You read the definition for a hybrid CD and I wasn't confused by it at all. .-. The CD data format is weird, but as far as I know you basically got it. You just missed bit stuffing and error correction. Bit stuffing is to prevent long runs of a pit or land so timing isn't lost.
I used to make CDs with the good tracks off a CD + the music videos related to said CD. At first I had to use track 1 for data, but eventually I got a 2x Mitsubishi industrial scsi CD-R which could put the data at the end of the disc instead! 😁
I used to do something similar: I would write an audio CD-R with a second session data track that had the MP3 versions. I don't exactly remember why. Usually I would just play them in my car, on an audio CD player that didn't have MP3 playback capability. I think maybe it was "because I could."
The guys at Verbatim did release something similar quite recently in Japan only, an SSD drive that could be written only once via a proprietary software, and then it could be read elsewhere as it was a CD-ROM drive. It's said that it's meant to keep accounting registers in a digital, unmodifiable form according to Japanese laws...
Anyone computing in the early 2000s produced more than their share of....... CDR's tilted: "FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8" for some strange reason. Someone should do a video on that one.
God I love optical media. Thanks for the microscope close ups, I saw the CD-R side and was like what the fuck is that "distortion" in the groove? Then, just as you put up the explanation I realised I was seeing the wobble. That was a fun moment. It is one of the reasons why I prefer DVD+R vs DVD-R. DVD+R uses a higher frequency bi-phase wobble which allows much finer addressing of the disc surface. I mostly use dual layer blu-rays these days, not moved to BD-XL yet. However I still use DVD+RW and DVD+R for many things and have CD-R's around if required, typically that would be for audio. Back in "the day" when it was an issue, I recall only having a very few number of coasters. I was very careful to make sure my early machine was able to provide a decent data rate to the drive, having defragged my HDD and creating the ISO before burning. Now it is just dependent on the media being ok. As I only use Verbatim media I rarely have an issue.
"You gotta be smarter than the things you're trying to collect." My favorite teacher ever had "The 40% rule" which states that you should be at least 40% smarter than the object you're trying to use. I stand by it to this day, though I do enjoy driving so I might cheat occasionally.
There were Sega Saturn dev disks that used a similar concept, except it was the outer rings that were prepressed. After hearing this, I wonder if a new session would have allowed developers to test new versions of the software up to the point that the disk became full.
10:06 with the 1992 CD-R, I wonder if this was how Kodak Photo CDs were done since they were all 1-offs. It mentions a layer of gold and I remember those discs being gold. Those could be read with the Macintoshes of the era. The timing is also right since I remember it being 92/93. I would love to see how they did that with the technology of the time.
Kodak sold blank CD-Rs with the same archive quality gold dye. Photo CD was big enough that systems like Macintosh would include built in support for the multi-resolution file format. Film development companies all over the world would buy genuine Kodak equipment to offer properly licensed Photo CD as an option for customers sending in their KodaChrome film rolls for development. This later devolved to the lower resolution PictureCD option, which was an ordinary disc with JPEG files in lower resolution.
13:58 if you're using proprietary software for encryption, 1) you've been ripped off, and 2) your files are almost certainly not safe. proprietary software can't be independently audited for exploits, bugs, and backdoors. GPG, LUKS, and other open-source encryption tools are free of charge, completely transparent, and are widely used by security experts everywhere
I think the overall point still stands however; you're going to use software you're already familiar with and trust, or at least heard good things about, rather than just whatever came for free with the CD-R you bought.
Yup I loved the concept, sadly I don't think I have a use for them. And now the only reminants is that weird message:"You have files waiting to be burnt to disc"
The driver the disc software installed is likely a filter driver, specifically an "upper filter" that would interface between the standard CD-ROM driver and Windows. You can see these in Device Manager by opening the device properties and looking at the filters listed in the Details tab. Filter drivers were also used by a lot of multimedia software back in the day and problems with them were a common reason your optical drive might suddenly stop appearing in Windows.
You are correct on this count. On Windows 2000/XP, a filter driver is installed, and they use a utility from their burning package to add the filters. However, there's apparently no corresponding function for removing filters, so there's no driver uninstall function, which is quite odd.
Yeah, the 1980s basic ZIP encryption is better than this, still showing the file names and having deliberately weak strength. In fact until the video showed the boring implementation, I expected it to be a trivial wrapper around a ZIP program. In the mid 200x's I was already doing OTP encrypted CD-Rs.
So Ricoh set up a whole hybrid CD-R manufacturing and mastering line, only to fumble at the goal line with the software implementation? Why? Is there some hidden hybrid CD-R startup that Ricoh bought and drove into the ground? Why make this, then make it suck?
Ricoh was a prominent player in the optical disc market as it was emerging. They probably didn't have to set up a whole manufacturing line, just develop the tweaks necessary to mix pressed and recordable media on the same disc. And that, I agree with CRD, is a really cool innovation that could've been an industrial triumph for them.
My favorite parts was that in its hay day, you could buy different color cd's. Not just the label, but the actual plastic. Then you could put your color coded CD's beside your color coded floppies.I miss you Memorex. And RIP AOL coaster, wherever you are.
No, but I have sketchy CD-Rs which are listed at 800+MB. 🤔🤔🤔 They use every bit of the disc not absolutely needed to make the CD work. Almost 100% could write 840, and I used them to burn compressed audio Dreamcast games.
@@hicknopunk this disk says it is 1.2gb. I assume it’s similar to a dual layer dvd but cd with a regular cd laser. It lives in my collection of odd format media.
@@mmmlinux Yeah those Sony DD CD-Rs. I remember them. They actually are single layer but have tighter tracks and shorter pit length, with more aggressive error correction. I guess they were basically just pushing near-infrared lasers as far as they could go.
I once had a DVD burner malfunction and burn a spot on a disc. I mean, the motor wasn't working properly, so the disc would stop spinning but the laser was focused on the one spot for a while and literally burnt through the dye and reflective layers, leaving a black spot on the disc. I'm wondering if something like that could be used to destroy the previously written session, or even specific files in a session.
Another banger of a video, this channel is so interesting and the videos are very well put together. Congratulations on 100K!! Definitely well deserved, I'm sure that number will get a lot bigger very quickly!
You understood it *perfectly*. Pit and groove are solid mirrors on different depths. Depth of pit relative to land is picked so that the edge between them causes the laser beam to diminish due to destructive interference (half the beam reflects of a groove, half the beam reflects of a pit half a wavelength deeper).
These must have been a pretty big failure. I was pretty into finding and trying different brands or weird CDR/CDRW's back when they were popular and I don't remember seeing these at all. If I had known about them or found then I probably would have been duped by them and live out my spy movie fantasies at school.
I'm honestly surprised that its not just using off the shelf Zip encryption as the method of creating the Archives in the Session folders. Truly a bizarre half attempt at the product.
Although Zip existed and had encryption many years before these EncryptEase discs did, Zip conversely also only became a "standard" format several years after these discs existed. And even at that point this standard excluded the encryption aspect of the format.
There were also Blue Book CDs aka CD Extra which are a hybrid of sorts. Audio tracks, then a mode 2 data track on the end in a separate session. In most cases audio players will ignore the data track, possibly something to do with how the sessions are structured. A common use case was CD singles with the title track, a couple of B-sides or remixes, and the music video in the data track. A have a few of them from way back. Some of them may be Aqua. ...one of them may be Barbie Girl.
i imagine some engineer was very grumbly about the session tabs thing a decade and a half ago i hope they stumble on this video and feel vindicated about everything they complained to management about during design meetings
on games, that tech would have been used for DRM to burn the serial of the first console it was put in to lock to it, a workaround would be that some games might have run anyway if there was an error reading that portion of the disk, so people would place pieces of tape on specific areas of their games 🤣
In 2005, locking a disc to a console would have been a non-starter. Even in the early 2010s, the prospect of locking a disc to your account on the Xbox One was so toxic it ruined Microsoft's brand reputation, and it hasn't fully recovered a decade later.
@@SuperSmashDolls Yup, but you know they would have tried it.Though as the poster mentioned, it might be defeated with a sharpie. Instead Microsoft tried to go with the DIVX-style (the disc scheme, not the unrelated codec) system of locking to a console. At least nobody tried those self-destructing oxidizing discs for games.
What a fascinating little piece of weird technology. I was excited to hear you describe the way that it would work, and disappointed like you when it was more or less useless. As a fun aside, when I was in the army security was largely broken into 2 categories. Physical Security, the security of the location and the items contained inside. Information Security, the ways we guard the information that is contained in the location or items. These two had a symbiotic relationship and together they made things work. So, while the Info Sec team made sure that everything was labeled correctly and the passwords were strong enough, the Phys Sec team was making sure people who visited the location only went to the places they were allowed to go. Thanks again for the great video!
I'm curious why it needs to install a driver; initially I assumed the driver was needed because it wrote using some sort of proprietary format that made that was unreadable without the software, but as it turned out it's just some weak-ass encryption on what is essentially a standard CD-R I can't for the life of me work out what it needs it for. Given that you couldn't find the driver afterwards, maybe it doesn't actually install anything and the reboot is some sort of placebo to make it seem like it's more advanced than it is? The whole thing feels a bit like Ricoh were in a "we can make hybrid disks, but what do we *do* with them" situation and this is all they could come up with. A dumb idea poorly executed!
Yeah, the driver part is definitely interesting. I did notice that when you run the software, the contents of the disc disappear in Explorer, and that made me wonder if the driver is getting involved there, but I don't know what possible benefit that would have.
@@CathodeRayDude I guess doing that makes it appear more secure to the poor sap who's using the software - look, your super secret files are hidden! - but beyond that I can't see any benefit, and given that they show up in the software without a password and anyone without the software running can also see them it's a bit of a stretch, but in fairness I have seen *much* worse security in my time so I guess it's fractionally better than nothing. (Although also worse than nothing; if you believe your data is secure you may be less careful with it.)
I hate that Optical Discs are gone as they made 1TB Optical Discs in 2014, The cost is so cheap and great for backups. Why does no one care for 1TB Optical Discs? They do make 3.3TB Optical Discs read only but they cost 150$
1:45 - comment before I watch the rest of the video. The data on the CD very well could be encrypted. It would require depending on the era perhaps a terminate and stay resident program, or any number of different software programs to correctly decrypt the data contained on the disc. It could definitely be set up to be able to be read by a standard Windows File system and require the overlay if you will think of something like double-disc from the old dos days. Now I'm going to watch more than the first minute and 45 seconds of this video and since I know my boy is well-researched and always informative, I'm waiting to see what I'm missing!
I’d like to mentioned that, technically. The recordable optical discs “grooves” does contain some data. It’s in the form of “wobble” and this wobbling grooves (in the CD-R and DVD+ variants) contains the Absolute Time In Pregroove or ATIP data, it allows the CD burner to recognize how much the discs space is left and also allow positioning of the laser head. (DVD+ called it Address in Pregroove or ADIP) DVD- variants still uses Wobble too but as far as I know, it uses Land Pre Pit system (LPP) instead. DVD-RAM has physical sectors encoded during the production so it doesn’t use wobbling groove encoding system.
@@CathodeRayDude Ah I see, it's still an awesome video! I actually never come across these hybrid optical media myself, it'd be a very interesting concept indeed to have a user-accessible space in a commercial software CD. Although I'd imagine it'd be painfully slow, even if its a Re-Writable discs.
CD-Rs are super popular still in the defense industry since things move slowly and they want to make sure CDs can’t be rewritten after being password protected, virus scanned, and then labeled.
Neat! The good ol days of burning all your media to disk before formatting was a blast. I still have most of them but notice they are starting to Rot away.
Back when I still bought CDR's.... I would always go for discs from Taiyo Yuden ....they just worked so much better. And after burn-free/burn-proof drives came out, the number of coasters basically dropped to zero. (unless the pc crashed/rebooted while burning).
There was another dead-by-arrival optical disk product. A kind of copy-protected disk "format", but those disks required application, stored on the disk, to be autorun to enforce protection. Suppressing autorun, for example, by holding Shift key in Windows, does defeat the "protection", because, "protected" data was actualy stored on the disk usual way, without any additional protection.
I wasn't one of those that stood and pointed at the screen, however as the video went on, I had the realization that I was familiar with the tech already just not on a technical level. Nice to see an explanation on it, finally explains those "but how does it do that when physically it can't" SOFTWARE!
The most surprising part of this video is that you got CDBurnerXP to work properly. It fails every single burn I've tried across multiple systems & drives, where Nero and Roxio worked flawlessly. I've only ever had luck using it as an ISO creation tool.
That's so strange. I've burned many hundreds of discs with it, and when I worked in used computers, we sold thousands of machines preloaded with it and nobody ever complained.
I never really had issues with it either. It was vanilla as it gets, inefficient, and I never suffered using it for long (before installing something better), but it never actually let me down.
@@CathodeRayDude It definitely worked for me in the past, or else I wouldn't have kept trying it on so many systems. I have memories of it being my go-to disc burning software when the "XP" moniker was current. But the last time I tried it, about a year ago, it failed every burn within seconds of starting.
Do you know anywhere I could download a dump of the encryption tool that is on the disk? Or have you dumped it somewhere? I almost found one on an archive of their website but sadly the internet archive didn't capture it. Also, did anyone ever figure out how exactly the encryption works?
HA! In 1998, my final project in college was a hybrid CD-ROM. I made a dual-platform (Mac and Windows) interactive disc which you navigated through video interviews, photos, audio, and gear from a band my brother was in. Then the audio partition had the songs you could play from any audio CD player. I recently busted out my Clamshell iBook G3 and fired up MacOS 9 to relive those glory days. Good times indeed. Thanks for this look into another hybrid disc format.
Please be aware. You could easilie been sued for this Masterlock section. I could barely hold my balance and not fall over to break my arm multiple times while continue laughing. It made your point VERY clear. But it looks like you have already a good link to a lawyer who can get you out of jail - one way or another. :D Very nice video!!!
I have always wondered if it was possible to have a "writable" or "rewritable" portions of discs. This could have been a great way to store update data on physical media meaning that it will never be redundant when the game servers turn off. But then there won't be enough free space for that (unless they could use dual layers or double sided)
Isn't that how DVD copyright protection works? There is a section of a movie DVD that contains keys required to play it and this area is not writable on DVD-R or DVD+R, so when you do a 1-to-1 copy of a DVD, you do in fact copy all the data exactly but you cannot copy that one area, which means your copy misses those keys and thus your copy is not playable. There are master DVD-R/+R where this area is writable and you need a special burner to burn those, yet this stuff is incredible expensive and IIRC uses some DRM protection to still stop you from just copying commercial DVDs.
The problem with the imagined scenario is that drivers have to target specific computer hardware. i.e. the CD-R drive itself, which would obviously differ between computers. Also that level of control is even lower than driver level; the software would have to flash the firmware of the CD drive, something obviously not viable for a commercial product intended to be used in any PC.
Everything described could be done with standard ATAPI/SATA/SCSI CD-R drives, with the possible exception that the standard protocol might lack a command to force overwrite part of the old data (specifically wherever the decryption key is stored under password encryption).
@@johndododoe1411 Maybe we are thinking of different parts of the video, I was referring to 16:30. After doing a little research, I found the CD layout is actually at the filesystem level. Yes, you could install a driver to work between the OS and ISO9660 file systems, but it would be a pretty risky thing to do. It also wouldn't be very effective, because you could just take an image (ISO) of the drive and get everything. I'm not sure where you are coming from in terms of overwriting data. Actually overwriting it is impossible on a CD-R.
I think I had one of these. There was an AOL CD that came in a DVD style box labeled something like "special CD re-write disc, pass files to a friend" and it had something like 300MB of usable storage on it. Just like the discs in the video, it had a visible differentiation between the stamped and burnable areas of the disc. I can't find an example on Google image search of what the disc looked like. Probably worth a decent bit as a collectable by now. Figures I'd have likely trashed it or given it away in a move.
How does the system handle folders? Any reasonably sized project would likely have files in one (or more) folders. This is one area where USB drives have an advantage. They have their own hardware (likely some sort of microcontroller) that can be used to encrypt the disk at the file system (or even partition) level. CDs don't have any hardware themselves, so while it's feasible to encrypt the filesystem, support would need to be offered at the OS level or within the drive's firmware. Had security been as much a concern then as as it now, it's likely that the drive and disk manufacturers would have got together to determine some sort of standard for supporting encryption in the firmware. A USB drive doesn't have that limitation. You aren't going to use another manufacturer's USB drive with your drive's firmware. Their drive will come with it's own firmware, which can optionally support encryption. I have a Samsung external SSD that supports encryption at the filesystem level. If you opt to use the drive's built in fingerprint reader, you don't need to install any software on your machine. If you opt not to, the drive includes a small utility that you can use to manage the drive, and enter the password for encryption, which does need to be installed.
There were encrypted USB sticks that operated just like what you were saying it should have worked like. I believe they were made by SanDisk. I remember using them for medical/financial documents many years ago. When you first plugged it in, it would show up as a 50MB volume or so that was not writable, and that small volume contained the encryption software and a small manual/how to PDF. When you ran the encryption software and entered the password it would decrypt a previously invisible volume on the drive which was the remaining capacity. I think the ones I used were 1 or 2GB. If Ricoh could have figured that out with CDs that would have been really cool.
I actually have a different set of recordable hybrid disks, that I got when I was pretty young at a gift shop. It was just about the same shape as a CD business card (but with round edges, rather than squared off ones on the long end of the rectangle). I know I still have them somewhere, and they also have a program that is mastered onto the disk already. If I can find a picture, I will post a reply
In my senior year of college, I participated in a group software project to make a backup application. I got put in charge of encryption, and even without thinking about it much topped this application by encrypting the filenames. You couldn't even tell how many files were in the backup without the key. That was in 2003, so while commercial encryption tools were awful, the concept of hiding metadata was not.
This product was for no one really. In the late 80s we had to produce a list of company information in CSV for discovery. I encrypted the data by using RAR and a password that encrypted the data with the password as well as splitting the file into 1.02 megabyte files so that they would fit on floppy discs for sending. Floppies were still the way, and it was discovery so we were under no obligation to make it super super easy. However, I did want to protect the data, as well as make it easy to deliver. Yeah, you’d think I had sent NSA encrypted state secrets. Their attorneys had a tech company working for them and not only could they not figure out what to do with the RAR files, nor could they figure out how to put in the password I had given them to open the compressed RAR archive. This was one of largest attorneys on west coast, and a 400/hr tech company at the time. Think about that in today’s dollars. They were clueless. Dumb. People were not ready for this type of stuff back then and it showed.
The only DualDisc I ever personally encountered was the DVD release of 'Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2,' which also had the CD soundtrack on the flipside.
![I eliminated CD swaps FOREVER. [Nakamichi MJ-5.16]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/oRuhRfvIkn0/mqdefault.jpg)
![I eliminated CD swaps FOREVER. [Nakamichi MJ-5.16]](/img/tr.png)
Whoever thought naming it EncrypTease was a good idea?
They only tease the idea of encryption. Seems perfect to me.
Read it in your voice
encryptease NUTZ
I think it is
Kellogg‘s Encrypties! The new secret breakfast cereal!
CRD:"Imagine a CD-ROM and CD-R on the same disk"
me:"Meh"
CRD:"You could have a game and put the save file on the same disc"
me:[mind explodes] 🔥🔥🔥
Is it wrong that when he first mentioned that my brain was immediately thinking about save files for games, and not Windows updates?
Now imagine if this technology was expanded on, and you had a DVD-ROM and a DVD-*RAM* on the same disk. Same effect, but there's no write-cycle limit on your saves anymore!
@@wesleymays1931 Dude my mind was already exploded it can't explode anymore..
@@TheSonicsean some video game cartridges have this i think
That was my dream back in the day of how to make CDs work like cartridges.
This brought back memories. I bought an iD Software shareware disc at Walmart (Kmart?) for five bucks. It had unlockable full versions of all the games. I used a hex editor and found the secret key, unlocked ALL of them.
I then copied them all off, created a batch file installer with said key, and burned fresh copies.
May or may not have distributed for ten bucks per disc at my junior high school...
Security back then was hilariously bad, and so much fun!
From what I remember reading in Masters of Doom, the original shareware CD release of Quake I had a similar issue; namely that it was totally crackable to get the full game, and that was discovered pretty quickly.
In those days, software companies did not deserved to be pirated, but nowadays they do.
I don't do it, still i understand why people do this if you look at these idiotic prices, and how they treat consumers, with halfassed unfished games, making money with unannouced downloads, paying for online gaming.
They fraud consumers
@@eventhorizon2873 Making a copy of a digital file is not theft. Glad to see people are starting to see that with the rise (and fall) of NFTs.
@@eventhorizon2873 piracy is illegal regardless, but it's immoral only if you do it to developers that rely on the money from each individual sale to to get a salary
developers working for big studios get paid for the work they do on the game, and even if it financially flops, their pay likely won't suffer unless it leaves the studio as a whole short of money
but at that point, people are pirating it so hard because the execs made shit decisions and the devs are better off working elsewhere
@@LonelySpaceDetective Yup, that's exactly what happened. What id was trying to do was function as their own publisher. Doom II was a retail game and they had GTI basically handle the creation of the discs, the selling of the boxed copies, etc. Some within id didn't feel like giving GTI a large cut of the profits was worth it. So the whole idea was they'd basically sell Quake shareware with the whole game encrypted, then have people call a phone number and give credit card info over the phone to unlock the whole game. So now they had no need for a middleman.
But it was hacked very quickly and they supposedly had a warehouse full of tens of thousands of CDs they couldn't sell.
Hey now, not all of us burning hybrid data + audio CDs were pirating games! Some of us were pirating music: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_CD
And a tiny handful of people were developing games. not me I'm too young for that, I just put the audio in the data partition, but some people!
I love your humility to speculate and try things without knowing for sure. Some people pretend to be experts when they're not and I love that you admit what you don't know, while still showing us everything you do know about a product or technology.
You've shown some things I really haven't heard of before and we might not ever see them if someone wasn't willing to say "here's the thing. But, I'm not 100% sure on how it works. I'll show you what I know."
That is for me how I partial gauge a person's intelegence, the idea of about how much all of us don't know collectively, which also gives me a insatiable curiosity. The belief that learning begins when you start be thinking as if there is no box at all in which you begin to think from within or from without some hypothetical box which exists where exactly?
“CD-Rs are mostly interchangeable”
Flashback to interminable wars over AZO vs. taiyo yuden, disk rot and overburning capability and whether or not PSX-style black dye discs were better or not.
* eye twitches *
31:37 Yoooo greetz to theiCEKreAM massive
I remember paying so much money for Taiyo Yuden blanks to burn Dreamcast games reliably.
Based on my experience from the time, and going through old discs now, the Mitsubishi azo discs (like Verbatim) had better contrast, which made them work better with the garbage Playstation laser assembly. In terms of longevity though, they died horrible deaths over the years, while the Taiyo Yuden pthalocyanine discs are still readable.
Those black discs were dumb they were just visible light filters in the polycarbonate. They only became fashionable because Sony used the same plastic for playstation discs to make them look unique.
@@NozomuYume Azo discs aren't durable? That was the main marketing point for them. :\
> Flashback to interminable wars
Wars? The dyes did not affect much beyond long term stability. certain manufactures like Verbatim used AZO (which is what I prefer) whilst some used others eventually settling on a type of phthalocyanine dye. None of that was anything much more than marketing and product development. Nothing like a "war" between formats as they were all the same format. It would be like describing fashion as a war with different shoes and clothes of different shapes sizes and colours, even though every shoe is a shoe and works like a shoe works.
@@NozomuYume > Sony used the same plastic for playstation discs to make them look unique.
It was a way to detect counterfeit discs
Alec from Technology Connections had a great series on the CD and does a pretty good job at explaining how the whole pit and land system works.
It’s a comfort watch for me, I’ve watched every video in that playlist at least five times lol. Same with the history of television.
He really needs to watch Technology Connections and Techmoan, they explain so much.
He also needs to look up MultiLevel recording (also known as M-Ary)
Alec from Technology Connections is in bed with the Heat Pump and Dishwasher consortium.
@@NillKitty At least that bed is clean and toasty warm.
The exploit part was really cool. Props to the person that found that key and password so fast! I imagine someone could figure out what encryption it is using and crack that ten digit alphanumeric password super fast on today's hardware.
I bet you it is just some basic xor encryption. I doubt they are actually using something proper like AES.
The bytes to decode are hard coded in the exe or dll... So a disassembler would expose it.
I agree with Jon, probably a basic xor cipher, with the best case being either (single) DES or RC4. If anyone has the driver software to share I could easily find out ...
@@skillaxxx Although it doesn't matter how secure the cipher is if the key is included with the data :D
If the password is included on the disk, it might not even be encrypted with the password. It could just always "encrypt" data the same way, and then the software checks the password.
I still wish they’d make 10 terabyte CDRs. Magnetic and flash storage is extremely cheap to manufacture now. The industries just collude to fix prices to keep the cost from collapsing to the affordability of CDRs.
you can buy Blu-Ray burnable discs (BD-R) that are up to 100GB per disc. theyre not cheap though. Tape storage is used a lot in enterprise as its cheaper per gig, but you have to have a sequential backup routine, and wait for the tape to seek if you want to restore a specific file.
if BD-R 100GB were the same pennies per disc of CD-Rs, then we'd have a real good storage alternative.
I dunno, I bought a 128 gb flash drive for €35 in a supermarket the other day, the price per GB on flash memory is comically cheap now.
Chocolate rain.
@@jameslangridge8849 100gb BDRs go for about $70 per terabyte now - but I wonder if that’s due to them being a niche product that does not benefit from any economy of scale. They might profitably settle at $5 per terabyte at the sales volume CDRs had in 2002.
Who prefers optical media over flash in 2022? And if you want high capacity on inferior/legacy formats, you can always go out and grab an LTO-8 tape drive… you’ve got 12TB to work with on a super annoying format relegated to the same things CDs/DVDs are nowadays- which is archive storage.
You know what I miss? DVD DL. No one knew any consumer drive could read like 8.5GB unless you had to burn an OSX disk. I used to drop an entire season of star trek on one disk for long car trips
oh man don't remind me of the misery of trying to get a pirated OSX disc burnt lmao
Sounds like you found the printer driverless version that could fit on a STANDARD DVD-R. What's the matter, don't have the $6/disk for DVD-R-DL?
I never had enough of them. Always seemed to run out when I was trying to ... lend .. a copy of a DVD-Video disc to someone.
I've also tried my hand with Hackintosh, and had to download OS X from the App Store, extract the contents, and burn it to DVD for a clean-slate install with modified loaders and such. It became immediately obvious that the OS X distribution team definitely spent some time optimizing the file layouts on their media. When you just burn them willy-nilly, the drive spends an absolute _eternity_ seeking all over the place, and a typically 30-minute install takes well over an hour.
I mean you can still buy them, and multi-layer BD-Rs are normal. What I miss was the stupid DVD-R and DVD+R dichotomy, with DVD-R being more compatible until it was discovered that DVD+R let you set book type even though that was not an advertised feature.
I rarely use DL DVD media these days, simply because the single layer stuff is so much cheaper and I have the room! I have a few DL discs and have noticed that the quality scan degraded slightly faster at the layer transition, I suppose that is to be expected at the layers switch at the edge of the disc like with BD-R DL.
This is your most fascinating video ever. The facts that I had never heard of the product, and have never had any use for it and therefore would've turned my nose up at it if I had heard of it, is entirely beside the point. This is the exact sort of info for which I love your channel. That, plus you just provided the best explanation I've ever seen or read about how multisession CD-R works.
Thank you! I will caution: My summary of multisession is *very* abridged. I have read a half dozen detailed explanations of how it works and it hurts my head every time.
Your document wouldn't be a .docx file in 2005. Docx was not introduced until Office 2007.
About 24:00 the obnoxious "let's use OUR controls for no good reason" habit: it's all over the place. Even Microsoft, who make the APIs, use their non-standard controls in _Office_ products. Office 95 had its name in Italic in the title bar, Office 97 had the Tahoma font in its menus, which is ______ing ugly on screen (it's meant to be used in print, some screens don't have to resolution needed to make Tahoma look good even today), and 2004 (IIRC) had those weird menu bars which popped open in a different way than the standard ones.
Firefox saves some screen real estate these days by using the title/menu bar area for tabs (but then wastes a lot of it by making the tabs double height), they used to use ugly rounded tab styles for years, etc. Chrome introduced a CPU-unfriendly realtime glow effect on its top (even on the old versions FOR XP) and rounded corners you couldn't deactivate. Even _LibreOffice_ changes icon appearances for no reason other than to annoy people and make companies lose productivity each time a user has to look for the icon because they haven't memorized how it looks _TODAY_ .
Really, these days, just about every industry (not just software) is a fashion industry. No matter if better or worse, just make it _different_ . . .
Technically every CD-R already comes with some data on it, in the "Absolute Time in Pregroove" (ATIP).
Yes, these could have been made for exactly the same price and on the same stampers as regular CDR and CDRW disks, as all you need is the correct stamping master to use. But yes use case is very limited, in that whatever you burned as software on the fixed side would need to be small, or useful, and nothing really was that, unless you had some form of recordable karaoke, that stored the player, and then the recording, on the media for later playback of poor singing.
I love everything about this video. It's got the full arc of weird intrigue, excited anticipation, confusion to understanding. disappointment, a community effort to explore the topic (of course it's a furry that recovered the password). Well done.
most of his videos are like this. he is my favorite new youtuber of all time probably
Furries are lovely people, but I've learned never to get on their wrong side. Collectively they can do anything.
I just watched this man eviscerate a 17 year old product, which was using a technology that was never used when it was new, and i loved it
Believe it or not, I am pretty sure I had some of these back in the day. Didn't know there was anything special about them.
Yeah I can't wait for all the people who are gonna go "oh, those were special?" I'm thinking it'll be a surprising number.
@@CathodeRayDude I'm 99% sure I used them to make MP3 CDs. I'm from Europe, if that makes any difference. Perhaps they were more common here?
@@CathodeRayDude the government uses them
www.oit.va.gov/Services/TRM/ToolPage.aspx?tid=14198
There required for medical records because HIPPA.
media.datalocker.com/manuals/encryptdisc/EncryptDisc%20User%20Manual_v11.3.1.pdf
16:12 here's the thing: as early as the late 90s we were using imaging software that would make an exact physical copy of the disc from 'start' to finish, ignoring the specification of the PMA (and TOC) altogether. This software was so literal we were cautioned to clean the disc beforehand, because any dust or physical deformations on the disc would be copied over to the image.
The use case at the time was copying PS1 games for use in a hacked console because the standard PS1 protocol used a unique way of burning which iirc effectively wrote the data to the disc 'in reverse'.
By the time these Ricoh discs were even released to the market, I'd expect anyone working in data security/infiltration to be using a similar piece of software, once again rendering even the dream case irrelevant for at least covertly making a copy of said disc and working on breaking the encryption remotely...
Sony was printing ps1 disks with an intentional wobble in the data spirals. Nintendo was the one printing disks in reverse.
@@chronossage ah yeah, good call. Going back into the memory archives when it comes to the specific quirks of physical game discs 🤣
Still, any decent 'non-standard' disc imaging software would overcome the physical limitations of the so-called dream case 'encryption'...
@@chronossage and Nintendo didn’t even do that!!
There was never any "writing in reverse".
@@handlesarefeckinstupid quite possibly, I haven't done any PS1 back ups since the late 90s and I was barely 14 at the time... 🤷♂️
Point is, software existed back then that ignored the PMA/TOC and would make an exact physical copy of a disc, rendering ways to mask the data redundant.
I agree with everyone else, you did a great job explaining those security concepts. IMO, it looks to me that they were just trying to mimic Zip File Encryption, since clear text metadata and only asking for password on extraction are the same defaults as basic Archive encryption. At least Zip let you change the defaults to obscure file names though lol.
This was the first thing I thought of as well. I remember playing with ZIP encryption once, when I first got a copy of PKZIP 2.04g. I was surprised, even then, as a kid in front of a DOS prompt, that you could see the filenames if it was supposed to be encrypted. Never had any use for it, but thought it was a weird oversight anyway.
@@nickwallette6201 agreed. I only used Encrypted zip once, for when a client had wanted to secure some files without Full Disk Encryption or Individual file Encryption, because the client's Boss only knew how to use simple stuff like WinRAR and Office lol.
PGP is similar, metadata like subjects and addresses are not encrypted
@@QualityDoggo that's completely right, I shouldn't have forgot about that. I guess I normally associate PGP with email and didn't think about it lol. Thank you.
16:09 fun fact! This is one of the security methods used by the Xbox 360 to prevent copying of game discs! Of course, software was made to instruct your disc drive to ignore that and games were dumped fairly easily.
However, there were also other sections of the disc where it would make your DVD reader lose track of the groove. These portions are called "security sectors" and most 360 disc dumps just jump over that area, leaving 0s in its place.
To fight the console complaining that the security sectors were not correct, pirates made custom firmware for the actual drives that came with the 360 to *lie* to the console that those security sectors *were* actually on your burned DVD-R-DLs and *had* the right data in them.
I remember when I got my first 2x CD writer, blanks were over $12 a piece and I was using a 486 at the time, I quickly learned that if anything happened in the background even the screen saver activating would crash the disk, I actually used a sharpie to write coaster on every one because I was not throwing $12 into the trashcan.
In 1992 they where 12 bucks in bulk. 29.99 for one plus shipping. Burners where 999.99 to 1999.99.
Wow you were an early adopter
Intersection Pride support flag tucked into the set... Voynich Manuscript reference drop... Shade and love for Fry's at the same time... my friend, you have hit a trifecta of awesome and I'm barely a minute into this. Love your work, thanks for being a great human, as well as a great creator. 💚👍
I like how it looks like a VHS tape.
Impressive compliments from the deviant.
Is fry's a hub of scum and villany?
Never went there.
I only have my local microcenter🤣
@@MattePurple1 I think it may actually be a vhs slipcase
Damn the man himself. Loved your stuff. And you're totally not a toool.
@@jackkraken3888 haha, right on. thanks for enjoying cool folk online
18:48 I'm just amazed by how your wall works well as a chroma-key wall.
Today I worked at a green-screen studio. And I had a hard time to get the wall lit evenly _(although most modern keying-filters are very forgiving)_
Your wall is very de-saturated cyan. It's very close to the color of your shirt... from a filter's point of view. Good job!
He mentioned in a previous video that he color matched it to the old Windows desktop color
He does use an incredibly powerful NLE, specifically Da Vinci Resolve.
@@AltimaNEO Yeah, I remember that.... 😊
It's just cool to see how good the chromakey filter can deal with that shade of green, next to his shirt.
@@daemonspudguy Yeah, I hear good stuff about Resolve. I mainly use Premiere. And with all the custom MOGRT _(Motion Graphics Templates)_ I created I'm kinda stuck with Adobe 😕
I highly recommend watching a Captain Disillusion's video about chroma keying (it's titled "Chinese Invisibility Cloak Hoax Destroyed"), it's full of hints how to fix bad green screen.
One could say that the version you dreamed of was an EncrypTease
I worked for a small company that made CD-i software between 1994 and 1995. The company had one of the first CD recorders and it was huge; this was years before they shrunk them down to a 5.25" drive bay. I learned a lot about CD and CD-R in that time, and I contributed to the CD-R FAQ page in those days. I even was a Plextor beta tester for a couple of years. I've seen most of the colored books (we had copies of the Red, Yellow, Green, Orange, Pink and White books). But I'd never heard of this format.
I think I have a good understanding of how this works: yes you need a disc with a recordable section followed by a non-recordable section with an open session, followed by a recordable session. I can imagine how an encrypted CD can work because as it happens, I'm currently in the middle of a software project that has nothing to do with CD but everything with security.
That hybrid non-recordable / recordable CD is a great idea for a purpose like that. You could of course do the same thing with a plain CD-R: just copy the files from the first session of your special disc into a non-closed session on a CD-R and the program will probably work just as well. Or maybe that driver that hides itself, does some checking to make sure that it can detect if it's actually a hybrid disc (not just a CD-R with one open session).
It's really too bad that the whole implementation is such an afterthought. Store the password in clear text? Nobody at any time thought that was a good idea. And that user interface? Get me a bucket. I agree this was never going to be a popular product even if they did their best to just implement a drag-and-drop interface, but this looks like some intern wrote it in 3 weeks, where the first 2 weeks were spent on replacing all the good things the Windows user interface has to offer, by owner-drawn dialogs. Ugh!
Anyway, excellent video with lots of good info as usual. Thanks for posting!
By the way, one thing you left out but I agree it's not really relevant: Putting multiple sessions on one disc takes STUPID AMOUNTS of space because the lead-out of an open session is crazy long so that a 1992-ish microcontroller and laser pickup can find it and potentially switch the electronics to write mode. Also when you put a multi-session disc in a drive, the drive has to read the start of each session and the end of each session, which can take crazy long and is super annoying. So yeah that was another reason why this was such a bad idea.
9:51 *Philips and their CD's...*
*Fun fact:* The diameter of the dutch dime coin _(10 cent piece)_ was used as the size of the center hole of the CD.
@Cathode Ray Dude... if you are interested... I can get you some a _dime_ coins. Since the early 2000's, we switch to the €-euro. So, the _"dubbeltje"_ is no longer common.
There were actually quite a few "secure" CD-R's. I used to work in contract manufacturing & yeah, no intermediaries were supposed to be able to access the data. Often it was just test data and fixed schematics, but at that time paranoia of leaked data was the rule not the exemption.
Uh I think you meant to type "exception". And I've seen some reeeaaally unsecure shit in "big companies" so I wouldn't say they are _that_ paranoid.
I once had the idea _(way back when)_ to apply a magnetic sticker that would be applied to the center part of a CD, that transparent part that is not used to read the music from.
A special CD player could write last playback-position, playback order, _an-what-not,_ on that part of the CD.
Back than, it sounded like a nice patent to have. Of course _(and obviously)_ it never made it past my drawing board.
Thats a good idea. Or maybe the top half of the CD could be magnetic and the bottom would stay the same. Then the top could be read and written to like a floppy disk while the bottom would be read by a laser. Even if the capacity wasn't very large it could save small amounts of data like save data for games etc.
@@JaredConnell Back in the day, it would have worked. But with the internet it is hardly making a chance to survive.
I was thinking to add custom playlist _(playback order)_ info, last playback position, and stuff like that. But additional goodies like games would have been nice
@@JaredConnellThere actually was a specification for a magneto-optical CD (CD-MO) that never got produced
I used to burn hybrid CD-Rs all the time back in the time when mp3 capable car stereos and portable cd players were around. Some friends had car stereos that could read mp3s from the discs, and some didn't have. So I always had some audio tracks on my mp3 discs to have at least some music available.
That's absolutely brilliant, I never thought of it.
I did this too!
Some here, I did that too.
My buddy had an early CD player that didn't recognize that data tracks were a thing and would attempt to "play" the data. God awful sounds, and very confused teenagers. One of the Bare Naked Ladies CD's had a whole interactive program on the data track for PC that had cool extras, but that one CD player would still try to plays us the song of its people.
@@dustysparks I’m not exactly sure when the cutoff was, but I think every CD player until the mid-90s (maybe even late 90s) was unaware of data discs and played the noise.
You can't actually write 99 sessions on a CD-R, each lead-in will consume some space, and you'll run out of space i think after at most 60 or so sessions.
Verbatim tried something similar on DVDs with software called - Secure Save. I wish someone made a dump of both for archive purposes as it really seems to be fun to explore. I wasn't aware of this until now.
Verbatim also sold Photo Save DVD with software that would scan your PC for jpegs and burn them onto the disc
That sounds interesting !
Even before I saw exploit #2 I was going to say that encryption software is an execrable executable. Files like docx have some contents that can very easily be guessed by the user. Makes it easier to guess an encryption scheme. And then you've got a 12-character maximum for the password (always a sign that they're not doing proper hashing). And then you show that they're even storing *the password itself* in the encrypted data and it's clear they've made some huge mistakes here, but even if they hadn't I can't see these things surviving market ubiquity with their security algorithms intact.
As security people say, if you're not a security expert (so it's the specific thing you do for work) never try to roll your own crypto. I mean it's not like key exchange is a new idea, and it's clear they didn't do anything like that.
Like you've suggested there are ways to do this that generally work (after all any hard drive can be bitlocker'd) and while it security wasn't what it is in the mid-00s, they egregiously missed the mark on this one.
Bitlocker is not trusted outside Microsoft marketing. There are serious alternatives.
3:11 GD-ROM (the format used by the Dreamcast) has a warning track that will play in a standard CD player.
CD Video (not to be confused with Video CD) is a format that contains analog video (it's basically a scaled down LaserDisc).
A long time ago Roland made the VS8F-3 effects expansion boards for some of their mixers and multitrack audio recorders. Different effects plugins were released on cd that could run on the chip. The plugins software would install from data on the cd then other data would be written back to the cd finalizing it with data that keyed the cd to the effects chip.
This reminds me of the backup DVD things. Memorex SimpleSave Photo & Video Back-Up, or EASY BACKUP - DIGITAL PHOTO & VIDEO BACKUP by Clickfree. Are those hybrid too? or just standard DVD-R (w+?) with the first session burned. Anyone know?
That's intriguing, I'll look into them and see if I can find out.
Probably was simply the first session recorded, as that would be cheaper than making a master, until the software was stable and they had volume. Cheaper to make an open session that had the burner software on it, then simply make a wrapper that used something like Nero and a custom interface do the work. Then for mass market use a stamped master that simply took one of the final version disks and used it to make the metal master, warts and all. Screen print the front and it looks pro, even if it is just the same cheap generic no name blank underneath.
I SWEAR I've seen these discs (or knockoffs or rebrands) in one of those do-it-yourself living will kits, along with special paper that prints the word 'copy' across your text when you photocopy it.
The concept you suggested is such a brilliant on that it would have cost a lot to develop it, and that would have translated into a lot of product cost - with no guarantee of success. Until a company had a government contract, they would never dare develop something like that.
You completely underestimate the investment climate before 2008. Companies would sink millions into products in the hope of making billions on the commercial market. The incredible stupid security software on this model feels like a technology demonstration made in the 1990s when proper encryption wasn't allowed to be shipped globally even as a teaser demo.
Tech demonstration is probably the reason expiry could be undone with a quick deletion of a hidden file in order to return to showing the unexpired situation during a product demonstration.
@@johndododoe1411 "proper encryption wasn't allowed to be shipped globally" and now it magically is allowed - presumably because NSA has a means for reversing such encryption.
Brings me back to my time at a big defense corp, sending CDs with encrypted data.
I became the “go to” person when someone else tried to write CDs in multisession, or didn’t close the disk or didn’t double check the data. 🤦🏻♂️
Good times.
Oh I remember that when we just bought random no-name bulks of 50 CD's in a box, how they failed so often. I came across cases where most of the discs didn't burn at all. Some you had to burn at 1-4x speed just to get through without "error burning disc".
Not to mention how sensitve burning was, you literally couldn't walk in your room, you had to tip-toe during the 15-50 minutes it took to burn a disc. And if you dared run some software that LOADED while you BURN a disc, oh boy - you're getting a "buffer underrun or overrun or something" and it fails. RIP disc, here goes another.
I don't miss this era at ALL.
I have these Vietnam flashbacks when trying to burn Blu‑rays.
Underrun. Tape drives do the same thing, but even worse. A lot worse. To the point that tape drives are often paired with a high-speed disk array that has no purpose other than to provide temporary space for the tape drive, so it won't be affected by load on whatever you are backing up from.
If you had good hardware and media errors were rare. Even with cheap media I didn't have many errors tbh
@@JaredConnell Agreed , i could only afford the tech towards the latter part of its run and as long as the write speed was low the cheap media worked.
@@JaredConnell Yeah thats true, later at work we bought a NEC Burner, that one never failed, it was expensive but amazing. In the later years I had 6 Toshiba DVD-burners fail on me, they all died after a short while.
Man I am glad you are making some attempt at preserving this weird stuff. I hope if you, and your people, can dissect this more so it can be explained you post a video update or a written explanation available to the public.
CRD uploads a video about CDRs… tongue twister in the making
I was checking out your back catalog and noticed that you've _significantly_ ramped up your output over the past year, which pleases me greatly. I love that all your videos are longer-form. While I do watch them at 1.5x (sometimes 1.75x), it's just so I have time to watch more of them. CRD, LGR, MJD, TC, and TM (yay initialisms) give me endless, tech-focused enjoyment. I very much appreciate your consistent efforts in producing extended, engaging, and overall stellar content.
As an aside, anyone remember when Nintendo filed for a patent for similar hybrid rewritable storage? Presumably for the exact use cases of games software (dlc and saves) that were mentioned for these discs? And nothing came of it? How the changing times have meant that some things haven't changed lmao
You read the definition for a hybrid CD and I wasn't confused by it at all. .-.
The CD data format is weird, but as far as I know you basically got it. You just missed bit stuffing and error correction. Bit stuffing is to prevent long runs of a pit or land so timing isn't lost.
I used to make CDs with the good tracks off a CD + the music videos related to said CD. At first I had to use track 1 for data, but eventually I got a 2x Mitsubishi industrial scsi CD-R which could put the data at the end of the disc instead! 😁
I used to do something similar: I would write an audio CD-R with a second session data track that had the MP3 versions. I don't exactly remember why. Usually I would just play them in my car, on an audio CD player that didn't have MP3 playback capability. I think maybe it was "because I could."
The guys at Verbatim did release something similar quite recently in Japan only, an SSD drive that could be written only once via a proprietary software, and then it could be read elsewhere as it was a CD-ROM drive. It's said that it's meant to keep accounting registers in a digital, unmodifiable form according to Japanese laws...
Anyone computing in the early 2000s produced more than their share of.......
CDR's tilted: "FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8" for some strange reason.
Someone should do a video on that one.
God I love optical media. Thanks for the microscope close ups, I saw the CD-R side and was like what the fuck is that "distortion" in the groove? Then, just as you put up the explanation I realised I was seeing the wobble. That was a fun moment.
It is one of the reasons why I prefer DVD+R vs DVD-R. DVD+R uses a higher frequency bi-phase wobble which allows much finer addressing of the disc surface.
I mostly use dual layer blu-rays these days, not moved to BD-XL yet. However I still use DVD+RW and DVD+R for many things and have CD-R's around if required, typically that would be for audio.
Back in "the day" when it was an issue, I recall only having a very few number of coasters. I was very careful to make sure my early machine was able to provide a decent data rate to the drive, having defragged my HDD and creating the ISO before burning. Now it is just dependent on the media being ok. As I only use Verbatim media I rarely have an issue.
"You gotta be smarter than the things you're trying to collect."
My favorite teacher ever had "The 40% rule" which states that you should be at least 40% smarter than the object you're trying to use.
I stand by it to this day, though I do enjoy driving so I might cheat occasionally.
what does it mean to be smarted than an object?
There were Sega Saturn dev disks that used a similar concept, except it was the outer rings that were prepressed.
After hearing this, I wonder if a new session would have allowed developers to test new versions of the software up to the point that the disk became full.
10:06 with the 1992 CD-R, I wonder if this was how Kodak Photo CDs were done since they were all 1-offs. It mentions a layer of gold and I remember those discs being gold. Those could be read with the Macintoshes of the era. The timing is also right since I remember it being 92/93. I would love to see how they did that with the technology of the time.
Kodak sold blank CD-Rs with the same archive quality gold dye. Photo CD was big enough that systems like Macintosh would include built in support for the multi-resolution file format. Film development companies all over the world would buy genuine Kodak equipment to offer properly licensed Photo CD as an option for customers sending in their KodaChrome film rolls for development. This later devolved to the lower resolution PictureCD option, which was an ordinary disc with JPEG files in lower resolution.
13:58 if you're using proprietary software for encryption, 1) you've been ripped off, and 2) your files are almost certainly not safe. proprietary software can't be independently audited for exploits, bugs, and backdoors. GPG, LUKS, and other open-source encryption tools are free of charge, completely transparent, and are widely used by security experts everywhere
I think the overall point still stands however; you're going to use software you're already familiar with and trust, or at least heard good things about, rather than just whatever came for free with the CD-R you bought.
XP had multisession writing support in the later versions. I remember using it before.
Yup I loved the concept, sadly I don't think I have a use for them. And now the only reminants is that weird message:"You have files waiting to be burnt to disc"
The driver the disc software installed is likely a filter driver, specifically an "upper filter" that would interface between the standard CD-ROM driver and Windows. You can see these in Device Manager by opening the device properties and looking at the filters listed in the Details tab. Filter drivers were also used by a lot of multimedia software back in the day and problems with them were a common reason your optical drive might suddenly stop appearing in Windows.
You are correct on this count. On Windows 2000/XP, a filter driver is installed, and they use a utility from their burning package to add the filters. However, there's apparently no corresponding function for removing filters, so there's no driver uninstall function, which is quite odd.
This encryption makes me look like a genius writing encrypted zip files into CD-Rs back in the day.
Yeah, the 1980s basic ZIP encryption is better than this, still showing the file names and having deliberately weak strength. In fact until the video showed the boring implementation, I expected it to be a trivial wrapper around a ZIP program. In the mid 200x's I was already doing OTP encrypted CD-Rs.
30:58 WHAT?! I shocked. This is... em... school student level error. Primary school student. I don't think it was done on purpose
So Ricoh set up a whole hybrid CD-R manufacturing and mastering line, only to fumble at the goal line with the software implementation? Why? Is there some hidden hybrid CD-R startup that Ricoh bought and drove into the ground? Why make this, then make it suck?
Ricoh was a prominent player in the optical disc market as it was emerging. They probably didn't have to set up a whole manufacturing line, just develop the tweaks necessary to mix pressed and recordable media on the same disc. And that, I agree with CRD, is a really cool innovation that could've been an industrial triumph for them.
It looks like they tried to either make it in house, or outsourced to the cheapest company.
From what I've read about Ricoh, this is pretty normal for them.
My favorite parts was that in its hay day, you could buy different color cd's. Not just the label, but the actual plastic. Then you could put your color coded CD's beside your color coded floppies.I miss you Memorex. And RIP AOL coaster, wherever you are.
Have you ever come across the double density CD-Rs? The only one Ive seen I found at a thrift store. I hope to find the drive to go with it one day.
No, but I have sketchy CD-Rs which are listed at 800+MB. 🤔🤔🤔 They use every bit of the disc not absolutely needed to make the CD work. Almost 100% could write 840, and I used them to burn compressed audio Dreamcast games.
@@hicknopunk this disk says it is 1.2gb. I assume it’s similar to a dual layer dvd but cd with a regular cd laser. It lives in my collection of odd format media.
@@mmmlinux they sound cool
@@mmmlinux Yeah those Sony DD CD-Rs. I remember them. They actually are single layer but have tighter tracks and shorter pit length, with more aggressive error correction. I guess they were basically just pushing near-infrared lasers as far as they could go.
I once had a DVD burner malfunction and burn a spot on a disc. I mean, the motor wasn't working properly, so the disc would stop spinning but the laser was focused on the one spot for a while and literally burnt through the dye and reflective layers, leaving a black spot on the disc. I'm wondering if something like that could be used to destroy the previously written session, or even specific files in a session.
congrats on 100k!!!
Another banger of a video, this channel is so interesting and the videos are very well put together. Congratulations on 100K!! Definitely well deserved, I'm sure that number will get a lot bigger very quickly!
using the wall as a blue screen is the greatest idea
You understood it *perfectly*. Pit and groove are solid mirrors on different depths. Depth of pit relative to land is picked so that the edge between them causes the laser beam to diminish due to destructive interference (half the beam reflects of a groove, half the beam reflects of a pit half a wavelength deeper).
These must have been a pretty big failure. I was pretty into finding and trying different brands or weird CDR/CDRW's back when they were popular and I don't remember seeing these at all. If I had known about them or found then I probably would have been duped by them and live out my spy movie fantasies at school.
Congrats on the 100k dude! Videos are awesome, keep them coming 👍🏻
I'm honestly surprised that its not just using off the shelf Zip encryption as the method of creating the Archives in the Session folders. Truly a bizarre half attempt at the product.
Although Zip existed and had encryption many years before these EncryptEase discs did, Zip conversely also only became a "standard" format several years after these discs existed. And even at that point this standard excluded the encryption aspect of the format.
@@AltCutTV ZIP archives were the de-facto standard on Windows long before these discs came out!
There were also Blue Book CDs aka CD Extra which are a hybrid of sorts. Audio tracks, then a mode 2 data track on the end in a separate session. In most cases audio players will ignore the data track, possibly something to do with how the sessions are structured.
A common use case was CD singles with the title track, a couple of B-sides or remixes, and the music video in the data track.
A have a few of them from way back.
Some of them may be Aqua.
...one of them may be Barbie Girl.
...a much more common use of the standard was MIL-CD, which gained enormous popularity amongst Dreamcast users, for some reason * cough *
i imagine some engineer was very grumbly about the session tabs thing a decade and a half ago
i hope they stumble on this video and feel vindicated about everything they complained to management about during design meetings
I wonder if there are hidden credits somewhere in the executable so we could find the people who worked on it.
I am always amazed at the production quality and interesting topics of your videos.
Your channel is so underrated!
on games, that tech would have been used for DRM to burn the serial of the first console it was put in to lock to it, a workaround would be that some games might have run anyway if there was an error reading that portion of the disk, so people would place pieces of tape on specific areas of their games 🤣
In 2005, locking a disc to a console would have been a non-starter. Even in the early 2010s, the prospect of locking a disc to your account on the Xbox One was so toxic it ruined Microsoft's brand reputation, and it hasn't fully recovered a decade later.
@@SuperSmashDolls Yup, but you know they would have tried it.Though as the poster mentioned, it might be defeated with a sharpie. Instead Microsoft tried to go with the DIVX-style (the disc scheme, not the unrelated codec) system of locking to a console.
At least nobody tried those self-destructing oxidizing discs for games.
What a fascinating little piece of weird technology. I was excited to hear you describe the way that it would work, and disappointed like you when it was more or less useless.
As a fun aside, when I was in the army security was largely broken into 2 categories. Physical Security, the security of the location and the items contained inside. Information Security, the ways we guard the information that is contained in the location or items. These two had a symbiotic relationship and together they made things work. So, while the Info Sec team made sure that everything was labeled correctly and the passwords were strong enough, the Phys Sec team was making sure people who visited the location only went to the places they were allowed to go.
Thanks again for the great video!
I'm curious why it needs to install a driver; initially I assumed the driver was needed because it wrote using some sort of proprietary format that made that was unreadable without the software, but as it turned out it's just some weak-ass encryption on what is essentially a standard CD-R I can't for the life of me work out what it needs it for. Given that you couldn't find the driver afterwards, maybe it doesn't actually install anything and the reboot is some sort of placebo to make it seem like it's more advanced than it is?
The whole thing feels a bit like Ricoh were in a "we can make hybrid disks, but what do we *do* with them" situation and this is all they could come up with. A dumb idea poorly executed!
Yeah, the driver part is definitely interesting. I did notice that when you run the software, the contents of the disc disappear in Explorer, and that made me wonder if the driver is getting involved there, but I don't know what possible benefit that would have.
@@CathodeRayDude I guess doing that makes it appear more secure to the poor sap who's using the software - look, your super secret files are hidden! - but beyond that I can't see any benefit, and given that they show up in the software without a password and anyone without the software running can also see them it's a bit of a stretch, but in fairness I have seen *much* worse security in my time so I guess it's fractionally better than nothing. (Although also worse than nothing; if you believe your data is secure you may be less careful with it.)
@@elbiggus same as the anti-clock-change mechanism - it's just to stop people who try the most easy "hacks".
@@CathodeRayDude It would be interesting to see a disassembly of the "driver".
I hate that Optical Discs are gone as they made 1TB Optical Discs in 2014, The cost is so cheap and great for backups. Why does no one care for 1TB Optical Discs? They do make 3.3TB Optical Discs read only but they cost 150$
1:45 - comment before I watch the rest of the video. The data on the CD very well could be encrypted. It would require depending on the era perhaps a terminate and stay resident program, or any number of different software programs to correctly decrypt the data contained on the disc. It could definitely be set up to be able to be read by a standard Windows File system and require the overlay if you will think of something like double-disc from the old dos days. Now I'm going to watch more than the first minute and 45 seconds of this video and since I know my boy is well-researched and always informative, I'm waiting to see what I'm missing!
I’d like to mentioned that, technically. The recordable optical discs “grooves” does contain some data.
It’s in the form of “wobble” and this wobbling grooves (in the CD-R and DVD+ variants) contains the Absolute Time In Pregroove or ATIP data, it allows the CD burner to recognize how much the discs space is left and also allow positioning of the laser head. (DVD+ called it Address in Pregroove or ADIP)
DVD- variants still uses Wobble too but as far as I know, it uses Land Pre Pit system (LPP) instead.
DVD-RAM has physical sectors encoded during the production so it doesn’t use wobbling groove encoding system.
Oh yeah, I mentioned it very obliquely, haha. I was using "data" to mean "payload"
@@CathodeRayDude Ah I see, it's still an awesome video!
I actually never come across these hybrid optical media myself, it'd be a very interesting concept indeed to have a user-accessible space in a commercial software CD. Although I'd imagine it'd be painfully slow, even if its a Re-Writable discs.
CD-Rs are super popular still in the defense industry since things move slowly and they want to make sure CDs can’t be rewritten after being password protected, virus scanned, and then labeled.
Neat! The good ol days of burning all your media to disk before formatting was a blast. I still have most of them but notice they are starting to Rot away.
Back when I still bought CDR's.... I would always go for discs from Taiyo Yuden ....they just worked so much better. And after burn-free/burn-proof drives came out, the number of coasters basically dropped to zero. (unless the pc crashed/rebooted while burning).
There was another dead-by-arrival optical disk product. A kind of copy-protected disk "format", but those disks required application, stored on the disk, to be autorun to enforce protection.
Suppressing autorun, for example, by holding Shift key in Windows, does defeat the "protection", because, "protected" data was actualy stored on the disk usual way, without any additional protection.
i just want to say your videos have been useful in me getting a very high score on the nocti video production test thank you
I wasn't one of those that stood and pointed at the screen, however as the video went on, I had the realization that I was familiar with the tech already just not on a technical level.
Nice to see an explanation on it, finally explains those "but how does it do that when physically it can't" SOFTWARE!
Congratz on the 100K subs man!!
Please don't ever stop making this kind of content.
Great work!!
His videos are on another level.
The most surprising part of this video is that you got CDBurnerXP to work properly. It fails every single burn I've tried across multiple systems & drives, where Nero and Roxio worked flawlessly. I've only ever had luck using it as an ISO creation tool.
That's so strange. I've burned many hundreds of discs with it, and when I worked in used computers, we sold thousands of machines preloaded with it and nobody ever complained.
I never really had issues with it either. It was vanilla as it gets, inefficient, and I never suffered using it for long (before installing something better), but it never actually let me down.
@@CathodeRayDude It definitely worked for me in the past, or else I wouldn't have kept trying it on so many systems. I have memories of it being my go-to disc burning software when the "XP" moniker was current. But the last time I tried it, about a year ago, it failed every burn within seconds of starting.
Do you know anywhere I could download a dump of the encryption tool that is on the disk? Or have you dumped it somewhere? I almost found one on an archive of their website but sadly the internet archive didn't capture it.
Also, did anyone ever figure out how exactly the encryption works?
HA! In 1998, my final project in college was a hybrid CD-ROM. I made a dual-platform (Mac and Windows) interactive disc which you navigated through video interviews, photos, audio, and gear from a band my brother was in. Then the audio partition had the songs you could play from any audio CD player. I recently busted out my Clamshell iBook G3 and fired up MacOS 9 to relive those glory days. Good times indeed. Thanks for this look into another hybrid disc format.
Please be aware. You could easilie been sued for this Masterlock section. I could barely hold my balance and not fall over to break my arm multiple times while continue laughing. It made your point VERY clear.
But it looks like you have already a good link to a lawyer who can get you out of jail - one way or another. :D
Very nice video!!!
I have always wondered if it was possible to have a "writable" or "rewritable" portions of discs. This could have been a great way to store update data on physical media meaning that it will never be redundant when the game servers turn off.
But then there won't be enough free space for that (unless they could use dual layers or double sided)
Isn't that how DVD copyright protection works? There is a section of a movie DVD that contains keys required to play it and this area is not writable on DVD-R or DVD+R, so when you do a 1-to-1 copy of a DVD, you do in fact copy all the data exactly but you cannot copy that one area, which means your copy misses those keys and thus your copy is not playable. There are master DVD-R/+R where this area is writable and you need a special burner to burn those, yet this stuff is incredible expensive and IIRC uses some DRM protection to still stop you from just copying commercial DVDs.
The problem with the imagined scenario is that drivers have to target specific computer hardware. i.e. the CD-R drive itself, which would obviously differ between computers. Also that level of control is even lower than driver level; the software would have to flash the firmware of the CD drive, something obviously not viable for a commercial product intended to be used in any PC.
Everything described could be done with standard ATAPI/SATA/SCSI CD-R drives, with the possible exception that the standard protocol might lack a command to force overwrite part of the old data (specifically wherever the decryption key is stored under password encryption).
@@johndododoe1411 Maybe we are thinking of different parts of the video, I was referring to 16:30. After doing a little research, I found the CD layout is actually at the filesystem level. Yes, you could install a driver to work between the OS and ISO9660 file systems, but it would be a pretty risky thing to do. It also wouldn't be very effective, because you could just take an image (ISO) of the drive and get everything.
I'm not sure where you are coming from in terms of overwriting data. Actually overwriting it is impossible on a CD-R.
I think I had one of these. There was an AOL CD that came in a DVD style box labeled something like "special CD re-write disc, pass files to a friend" and it had something like 300MB of usable storage on it. Just like the discs in the video, it had a visible differentiation between the stamped and burnable areas of the disc.
I can't find an example on Google image search of what the disc looked like. Probably worth a decent bit as a collectable by now. Figures I'd have likely trashed it or given it away in a move.
My very first cd burn failed- due to an earthquake shaking my PC.
How does the system handle folders? Any reasonably sized project would likely have files in one (or more) folders.
This is one area where USB drives have an advantage. They have their own hardware (likely some sort of microcontroller) that can be used to encrypt the disk at the file system (or even partition) level. CDs don't have any hardware themselves, so while it's feasible to encrypt the filesystem, support would need to be offered at the OS level or within the drive's firmware. Had security been as much a concern then as as it now, it's likely that the drive and disk manufacturers would have got together to determine some sort of standard for supporting encryption in the firmware.
A USB drive doesn't have that limitation. You aren't going to use another manufacturer's USB drive with your drive's firmware. Their drive will come with it's own firmware, which can optionally support encryption. I have a Samsung external SSD that supports encryption at the filesystem level. If you opt to use the drive's built in fingerprint reader, you don't need to install any software on your machine. If you opt not to, the drive includes a small utility that you can use to manage the drive, and enter the password for encryption, which does need to be installed.
There were encrypted USB sticks that operated just like what you were saying it should have worked like. I believe they were made by SanDisk. I remember using them for medical/financial documents many years ago.
When you first plugged it in, it would show up as a 50MB volume or so that was not writable, and that small volume contained the encryption software and a small manual/how to PDF. When you ran the encryption software and entered the password it would decrypt a previously invisible volume on the drive which was the remaining capacity. I think the ones I used were 1 or 2GB. If Ricoh could have figured that out with CDs that would have been really cool.
It actually makes more sense, because USB drive is actually whole microcontroller which can do a lot of things besides just saving and reading a data.
I actually have a different set of recordable hybrid disks, that I got when I was pretty young at a gift shop. It was just about the same shape as a CD business card (but with round edges, rather than squared off ones on the long end of the rectangle). I know I still have them somewhere, and they also have a program that is mastered onto the disk already. If I can find a picture, I will post a reply
In my senior year of college, I participated in a group software project to make a backup application. I got put in charge of encryption, and even without thinking about it much topped this application by encrypting the filenames. You couldn't even tell how many files were in the backup without the key. That was in 2003, so while commercial encryption tools were awful, the concept of hiding metadata was not.
Congrats on reaching 100K!
Can you imagine having a Live CD of your favorite distro and being able to burn data to the same disk? WOW
You can do it with puppy linux
This product was for no one really. In the late 80s we had to produce a list of company information in CSV for discovery. I encrypted the data by using RAR and a password that encrypted the data with the password as well as splitting the file into 1.02 megabyte files so that they would fit on floppy discs for sending. Floppies were still the way, and it was discovery so we were under no obligation to make it super super easy. However, I did want to protect the data, as well as make it easy to deliver. Yeah, you’d think I had sent NSA encrypted state secrets. Their attorneys had a tech company working for them and not only could they not figure out what to do with the RAR files, nor could they figure out how to put in the password I had given them to open the compressed RAR archive. This was one of largest attorneys on west coast, and a 400/hr tech company at the time. Think about that in today’s dollars. They were clueless. Dumb. People were not ready for this type of stuff back then and it showed.
The only DualDisc I ever personally encountered was the DVD release of 'Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2,' which also had the CD soundtrack on the flipside.
...which apparently was not officially a DualDisc but a generic implementation of the concept.
As someone who worked on CD-i (green book) for more than six years, all this terminology is still very familiar.