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?
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.
“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.
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_ . . .
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
@@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
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.
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.
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. 💚👍
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
3:04 While that particular thing failed, there were TONS of DVDs that had a 4:3 version of the movie on one side of the disc and the Widescreen version on the other. So, that's what you're probably remembering.
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.
8:40 - what yoy talking about is called Mount Rainer and UDF. its pinnacle of optical disk tech allowing you PC to access optical disk like its raw block device (little more complicated then that). You can then format it and put files with drag and drop. Its really cool thing, but i think it came way too late in optical drive timeline. Its like DVD-RAM (another cool thing) writing and readin capability appeared i almost every DVD-RW drive at time they was activelly phased out from most PC.
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.
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.
10:40 I don't know how I did it and have not been able to replicate it again, but long ago I managed to check every single burned session on a CD with Windows 98 SE. I just had to right click on the CD driver with the disc loaded and it had a tab that allowed me to see how many sessions the disc had and to select from which I wanted to read (they were all timestamped). I don't know if that was something made available by the burning software or if I had accidentally enabled a hidden function.
Interesting, I will give that a go in a VM, then in a real machine in case the VM does something strange. But this was very likely a feature of a driver added by burning software or other software.
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.
Kodak used to offer CDs with their own image editing tool (which was non-removable) and space for your own images. The tool would auto-run, then you'd add your own images and burn the disc, bring it to a local photo store and they'd print the images for you. Do you know if that was the same technology as this disc?
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.
The "saved game" idea has merit. Back in 1994, when I was a teenager, I envisioned a games console that used Sony's MiniDisc so you could save your games to the game disc. At the time, I was unaware of Sony's PlayStation's memory cards and I figured 165MB* was big enough for most games that didn't use FMV because nobody's making games that would fill a CD-ROM. (*This is what my friend and I estimated a minidisc would hold as we knew the music on one took about one fifth of the data of a regular CD - obviously we didn't have the exact figures for either format).
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.
The fact that the password is stored in the disk has another possible reason: NSA requirements. I mean, I seriously doubt that the maker would have this big of a backdoor just to calm a furious client, because the bad press of having a security product that can be easily defeated is surely a way worse scenario. Also, having the password stored in the disk is not laziness nor incompetence, is blatant negligence. Way too many things have to go wrong to excuse this as an accident. And the NSA is already known to pressure security software developers to add flaws or backdoors, or to hide and impede publishing of known security vulnerabilities...
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.
Encryption that lets you see filenames/metadata is not unheard of, that's how Zip archive encryption works. Is it super-secure? Of course not, as you mentioned, but you can always GPG encrypt the complete archive if you really care. As with anything there are multiple ways of accomplishing something and it all depends on your use case and desired level of protection. You could: 1) Encrypt just the files but not the metadata. (Zip, this hybrid CD, SafeNet ProtectFile, etc) 2) Encrypt files, the filenames, but not size and timestamps (Fuse) 3) Encrypt everything in an archive but not the archive headers (can't think of an example) 4) Encrypt the entire archive (GPG encrypt a zip/tar file or similar) 5) Encrypt a section of a filesystem like just directory (some Linux home directories) 6) Encrypt a whole filesystem or partition (LUKs, TrueCrypt, Bitlocker, ZFS, VeraCrypt, etc) but not the partition table or CD session start/end. 7) Encrypt the entire disk including partition table or session table (hardware-based disk encryption, theoretically special CD burning software could do this) 8) Some other method I forgot about or don't know about. And that's just for data storage which doesn't even touch on data transfer encryption which comes with different levels as well (entire session, like SSH/SSL/TLS/VPN, or just the files' contents). Which method you choose depends on sensitivity of the data and your needs and workflow. Not encrypting filenames is not the most secure but it might make sense for some folks who don't need something more. I'd be more worried about what ciphers this software is using as I would default to assuming it's crap that could be cracked easily.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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...
It's amazing how many finished products are so poorly designed compared to what you, as an amateur consumer, _imagine_ they do when you grab them in a store and read the advertised function on the wrapper. I guess the kindest remark I can give such products is; _they're genuinely inspiring._
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.
"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.
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!
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."
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.
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.
Would it even be possible to work around the table of contents exploit without going non-standard? I think a non-finalized multisession disk only has the last written TOC read (without special software) and that only allows you to read information from previous sessions that are referenced in it. I would think this means that the only time the TOC that was pressed into the disk is read first is before it has any user data written.
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"
I recently bought a new (to me) car. The Nav disc can supposedly only be used one car then it becomes 'locked' to that vehicle. I was wondering how that could work and maybe this is it... A file gets written to the RW portion and if the file exists then the disc is used. In this kind of space the disc makes sense but wouldn't be much use in the consumer space.
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.
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.)
It kind of reminds me of Kodak Picture CD, not to be confused with a Photo CD (which was a similar concept but used a specialized format). Back in the day, I worked in a 1 hr photo lab and one of the services we offered was burning images to CD (this was when film was still a thing, though for not much longer). The Picture CD consisted of a standard CD with some basic editing software pre-loaded, and we would burn a new session using JPG versions of images sent over from the minilab machine (essentially a photo developing machine with a PC and a film scanner bolted on). I'm not sure if they were pressed from the factory like this or if they just had an industrial duplicator burning them one-by-one
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.
I always wondered why they couldn't have made discs with a small rewritable area for games consoles, so you could actually save your game progress on the disc like with battery-backed cartridges. All disc-based games consoles used either internal flash memory or a memory card to save games instead - I suppose it was cheaper?
I only had positive experiences with Fry's. I used to get the Chicago Tribune on Fridays just to get the ad, back when they did that. I dont know about their blank CDs/DVDs thou. Prob varies from store to store, thou; service-wise I mean. My "local" Frys was the one in Downers Grove, IL (Chicago Suburbs). I loved going there then right down the way to the Cheeseburger In Paradise for something to eat afterward - Not a Jimmy Buffet fan, just wanted to go somewhere different, it was surprisingly good and had decent prices. Id like to go to Micro Center. I havent been there yet, actually had never heard of it til a few months ago.
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 not sure how it's done now, but before the last 5ish years the place I work would send people with gold masters to various regions to have discs made; seems like the exact use case for proper encryption on optical media.
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.
Mixed mode cds have different tracks types in one session and in the yellow book. Multi session in terms of data cds are almost always required to be mode 2 and more like the file descriptions have links to prior sessions, but it is up the burning software to figure out what has remained and changed. I think there are some drives out there that get confused with anything beyond a blue or redbook single session, and it is asking a lot to make free areas on discs, and it would complicate things, and if burning failed. One time I was burning a DVD-RW or something and the burner did something weird where you could see this wider pattern on the disc and it went right off the edge and the disc was never readable again. Not sure if I totally understand but this whole thing almost sounds like you are just zipping/unzipping a file with a password and there is this whole wrapper around included burning software that is probably very limited in abilities.
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
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.
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!
Pre groove on CDR contains subcode data written via analog wobbling of the track position.. decoded through the tracking servo. Allows finding the right groove when seeking a blank disk..
Our first mass storage media optical disk in office was a mageneto-optical disc drive by Ricoh. God it was slow and it was massively cumbersome with its own cartridge, etc. but, it did promise multiple re-writes akin to more of an optical hard drive than a cdr that had to be mastered. In other words, it actually wrote to the disc in random chunks the same way a hard drive can do random access writes and reads.
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 limit of 20 sessions probably is not such a big deal. I remember that when I burned multi-session CDs that there was an average "waste" of administrative data of around 15MB per session. Keeping that in mind, you have only around 30MB storage left per session. Using less on average probably rarely makes sense, even in 2005.
If you know what the file type is, you know what the header for the file should look like which limits your search space for valid keys. You can decrypt only the first few bytes of each file and throw away any key that didn’t produce a valid header, then retry only those working keys on the full files.
3:09 I have seen that some music CDs having a data portion to get extra content on their computer. Aerosmith 9 lives and I believe the first Gorillaz album has this.
![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.
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?
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!
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.
“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.
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_ . . .
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.
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 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.
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 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
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
One could say that the version you dreamed of was an EncrypTease
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 !
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
22:10 - encrypted zip files "can" also show the filenames without having the password. but i believe this is an option you can opt-in to.
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.
3:04 While that particular thing failed, there were TONS of DVDs that had a 4:3 version of the movie on one side of the disc and the Widescreen version on the other. So, that's what you're probably remembering.
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.
8:40 - what yoy talking about is called Mount Rainer and UDF. its pinnacle of optical disk tech allowing you PC to access optical disk like its raw block device (little more complicated then that). You can then format it and put files with drag and drop. Its really cool thing, but i think it came way too late in optical drive timeline. Its like DVD-RAM (another cool thing) writing and readin capability appeared i almost every DVD-RW drive at time they was activelly phased out from most PC.
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.
I'm curious....What's this LGBT E420 VHS Cassette about right behind you in the shelf??? @36:13
Mockup sleeve that I made!
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.
10:40 I don't know how I did it and have not been able to replicate it again, but long ago I managed to check every single burned session on a CD with Windows 98 SE. I just had to right click on the CD driver with the disc loaded and it had a tab that allowed me to see how many sessions the disc had and to select from which I wanted to read (they were all timestamped). I don't know if that was something made available by the burning software or if I had accidentally enabled a hidden function.
Interesting, I will give that a go in a VM, then in a real machine in case the VM does something strange.
But this was very likely a feature of a driver added by burning software or other software.
@@dlarge6502 It may have been.
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.
Kodak used to offer CDs with their own image editing tool (which was non-removable) and space for your own images. The tool would auto-run, then you'd add your own images and burn the disc, bring it to a local photo store and they'd print the images for you.
Do you know if that was the same technology as this disc?
Oh that sounds so cool.
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.
The "saved game" idea has merit. Back in 1994, when I was a teenager, I envisioned a games console that used Sony's MiniDisc so you could save your games to the game disc. At the time, I was unaware of Sony's PlayStation's memory cards and I figured 165MB* was big enough for most games that didn't use FMV because nobody's making games that would fill a CD-ROM. (*This is what my friend and I estimated a minidisc would hold as we knew the music on one took about one fifth of the data of a regular CD - obviously we didn't have the exact figures for either format).
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.
The fact that the password is stored in the disk has another possible reason: NSA requirements.
I mean, I seriously doubt that the maker would have this big of a backdoor just to calm a furious client, because the bad press of having a security product that can be easily defeated is surely a way worse scenario.
Also, having the password stored in the disk is not laziness nor incompetence, is blatant negligence. Way too many things have to go wrong to excuse this as an accident.
And the NSA is already known to pressure security software developers to add flaws or backdoors, or to hide and impede publishing of known security vulnerabilities...
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.
Encryption that lets you see filenames/metadata is not unheard of, that's how Zip archive encryption works. Is it super-secure? Of course not, as you mentioned, but you can always GPG encrypt the complete archive if you really care.
As with anything there are multiple ways of accomplishing something and it all depends on your use case and desired level of protection. You could:
1) Encrypt just the files but not the metadata. (Zip, this hybrid CD, SafeNet ProtectFile, etc)
2) Encrypt files, the filenames, but not size and timestamps (Fuse)
3) Encrypt everything in an archive but not the archive headers (can't think of an example)
4) Encrypt the entire archive (GPG encrypt a zip/tar file or similar)
5) Encrypt a section of a filesystem like just directory (some Linux home directories)
6) Encrypt a whole filesystem or partition (LUKs, TrueCrypt, Bitlocker, ZFS, VeraCrypt, etc) but not the partition table or CD session start/end.
7) Encrypt the entire disk including partition table or session table (hardware-based disk encryption, theoretically special CD burning software could do this)
8) Some other method I forgot about or don't know about.
And that's just for data storage which doesn't even touch on data transfer encryption which comes with different levels as well (entire session, like SSH/SSL/TLS/VPN, or just the files' contents).
Which method you choose depends on sensitivity of the data and your needs and workflow. Not encrypting filenames is not the most secure but it might make sense for some folks who don't need something more. I'd be more worried about what ciphers this software is using as I would default to assuming it's crap that could be cracked easily.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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...
It's amazing how many finished products are so poorly designed compared to what you, as an amateur consumer, _imagine_ they do when you grab them in a store and read the advertised function on the wrapper.
I guess the kindest remark I can give such products is; _they're genuinely inspiring._
CRD uploads a video about CDRs… tongue twister in the making
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.
"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?
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!
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."
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.
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.
Would it even be possible to work around the table of contents exploit without going non-standard? I think a non-finalized multisession disk only has the last written TOC read (without special software) and that only allows you to read information from previous sessions that are referenced in it. I would think this means that the only time the TOC that was pressed into the disk is read first is before it has any user data written.
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"
I recently bought a new (to me) car. The Nav disc can supposedly only be used one car then it becomes 'locked' to that vehicle. I was wondering how that could work and maybe this is it... A file gets written to the RW portion and if the file exists then the disc is used. In this kind of space the disc makes sense but wouldn't be much use in the consumer space.
congrats on 100k!!!
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.
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".
It kind of reminds me of Kodak Picture CD, not to be confused with a Photo CD (which was a similar concept but used a specialized format). Back in the day, I worked in a 1 hr photo lab and one of the services we offered was burning images to CD (this was when film was still a thing, though for not much longer). The Picture CD consisted of a standard CD with some basic editing software pre-loaded, and we would burn a new session using JPG versions of images sent over from the minilab machine (essentially a photo developing machine with a PC and a film scanner bolted on). I'm not sure if they were pressed from the factory like this or if they just had an industrial duplicator burning them one-by-one
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!
I always wondered why they couldn't have made discs with a small rewritable area for games consoles, so you could actually save your game progress on the disc like with battery-backed cartridges. All disc-based games consoles used either internal flash memory or a memory card to save games instead - I suppose it was cheaper?
using the wall as a blue screen is the greatest idea
I only had positive experiences with Fry's. I used to get the Chicago Tribune on Fridays just to get the ad, back when they did that. I dont know about their blank CDs/DVDs thou. Prob varies from store to store, thou; service-wise I mean. My "local" Frys was the one in Downers Grove, IL (Chicago Suburbs). I loved going there then right down the way to the Cheeseburger In Paradise for something to eat afterward - Not a Jimmy Buffet fan, just wanted to go somewhere different, it was surprisingly good and had decent prices. Id like to go to Micro Center. I havent been there yet, actually had never heard of it til a few months ago.
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 not sure how it's done now, but before the last 5ish years the place I work would send people with gold masters to various regions to have discs made; seems like the exact use case for proper encryption on optical media.
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.
Mixed mode cds have different tracks types in one session and in the yellow book. Multi session in terms of data cds are almost always required to be mode 2 and more like the file descriptions have links to prior sessions, but it is up the burning software to figure out what has remained and changed. I think there are some drives out there that get confused with anything beyond a blue or redbook single session, and it is asking a lot to make free areas on discs, and it would complicate things, and if burning failed. One time I was burning a DVD-RW or something and the burner did something weird where you could see this wider pattern on the disc and it went right off the edge and the disc was never readable again. Not sure if I totally understand but this whole thing almost sounds like you are just zipping/unzipping a file with a password and there is this whole wrapper around included burning software that is probably very limited in abilities.
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.
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.
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!
Pre groove on CDR contains subcode data written via analog wobbling of the track position.. decoded through the tracking servo. Allows finding the right groove when seeking a blank disk..
Our first mass storage media optical disk in office was a mageneto-optical disc drive by Ricoh. God it was slow and it was massively cumbersome with its own cartridge, etc. but, it did promise multiple re-writes akin to more of an optical hard drive than a cdr that had to be mastered. In other words, it actually wrote to the disc in random chunks the same way a hard drive can do random access writes and reads.
DataPlay also included a pre-mastered session, stamped into the plastic, followed by a writable area on the same surface.
You could have chosen any 10-character password, including “cathoderay”, and you chose “horsebooks”… I love it
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.
Congrats on the 100k dude! Videos are awesome, keep them coming 👍🏻
The limit of 20 sessions probably is not such a big deal. I remember that when I burned multi-session CDs that there was an average "waste" of administrative data of around 15MB per session. Keeping that in mind, you have only around 30MB storage left per session. Using less on average probably rarely makes sense, even in 2005.
By any chance did you upload the software to the Web archive? It would be cool to try reversing the crypto, though I would imagine it's just RC4...
If you know what the file type is, you know what the header for the file should look like which limits your search space for valid keys. You can decrypt only the first few bytes of each file and throw away any key that didn’t produce a valid header, then retry only those working keys on the full files.
3:09 I have seen that some music CDs having a data portion to get extra content on their computer. Aerosmith 9 lives and I believe the first Gorillaz album has this.
What is that session aanalyzer program you used? It might come in handy to me. I have some old multisession discs which are a bit of a headache.