August 4, 2006
Virus Changes DVD Region!
A friend of my wrote me about a potential virus that will exploit the limited region switching of a DVD:
Well, what with my new computer and DVD burner I naturally had to try some of this stuff out. I successfully copied Sleepy Hollow (yes, I know, a $5 DVD I copied onto $2 dual layer DVD media) to test this out. I also encoded it to a DivX just to try that out, and right now it’s encoding to a very small XviD small enough to fit on a single CD. (Actually DivX and XviD are both MPEG-4 ASP encoding codecs so it’s more accurate to say I am using DivX or XviD to encode to MPEG-4 ASP — this is somewhat confusing and hardly anyone seems to grasp it — including nerds.)Where was I going with that? Oh yeah… So in order to read ANY DVD out there, on Windows you just install a little program called, oddly enough, AnyDVD. It works at the DVD drive system driver level and will make Windows programs all think that protected discs are not protected, or that if the disc is from Europe, that we are actually in the European region…etc. This is actually fairly tricky to do. It’s one of those things actually that when I bought this computer I knew existed — the little hacker-type stuff that is sometimes easier to do on Windows. (The best CD ripping software, that produces perfect copies even from scratched discs, is also for Windows.) In fact, Apple is pretty close to being part of the evil empire in that regard, since Steve Jobs is also in the media production / entertainment sector in apparently his spare time.What all of this is leading me inevitably toward is the nerd havoc I reference in the subject.The key to the nerd havoc is that DVD players are region-specific. A lot of computer DVD drives used to be region-free, however the entertainment industry powers that be got together and decided they didn’t like that. Now DVD drives come set to the region in which they are purchased or the region for which they are intended to be used. However, the one concession the powers made is that the region code can be switched 5 times…no more and no less. (This is part of the RPC-2 standard that came to be in 2000.)Allowing a user to change something exactly 5 times is obviously a terrible idea.What this means is that you can permanently destroy someone else’s hardware, via software. A disgruntled nerd with his newest virus to showcase can actually make your DVD drive stop working. All he has to do is change the region 4 times, and then the fifth time change it to an obscure region. The virus my computer got back in 2000 attempted to wipe out the computer’s BIOS, which does similar permanent damage because a computer without a BIOS will not even start to a DOS prompt. The realization that this was possible prompted BIOS makers to add protection features so that changing BIOS data was a lot harder to do. (I couldn’t do it from Windows. And the virus didn’t get my BIOS…)Now…if a disgruntled nerd did manage to pull this off, it would create a temporary annoyance for people who could no longer play discs in their drives. But over the longer term, it would probably be doing us all a public service. Companies would have to provide workarounds or let users update the drive firmware — which would in effect kill the region feature once and for all. DVD drives ARE different from BIOSes in that technically the firmware can generally be updated. However, in practice such updates usually have to be provided by manufacturers, and they aren’t going to provide updates to let users skirt standards.I guess once again I can file this under “Stuff That Might Have Been Included in My Blog If I Had One”.If I’d wanted the entertainment industry after me. Well, I paid for AnyDVD so I’m sure they will knock down those guys’ doors and come after me eventually anyway. Those guys were chased out of the Netherlands or some place to Antigua but I’m sure the media barons will hunt them down.
