semanticvoid

Ever wondered how the ubiquitous webcam came into existence. Well, it all started in the Trojan Room at the University of Cambridge way back in 1991. There were a couple of guys working in the room on ATM networks and all they had for refreshment was a coffee filter machine placed outside in the corridor. And then there were a couple of other guys, members of the coffee club, who worked in different parts of the building. These guys had to navigate several flights of stairs to get to the coffee pot only to find it emptied by the all-night hackers of the Trojan Room. This is why the XCoffee was born.

Paul Jardetzky and Quentin Stafford-Fraser setup up a video frame-grabber and hacked up a client-server program that would display an icon-sized image of the coffee pot, which refreshed at the rate of about three times every minute. This helped them to decide when the time was right to get a cup of coffee.

This image above is that of the actual coffee pot. The coffee machine was finally switched off at 0954 UTC on Wednesday 22nd August 2001.

It sometimes makes me wonder how small ideas/needs revolutionize the world.

Being an Iron Maiden fan I bought their ‘Dance of Death’ album only to realize that it won’t play on Linux. Flipping the cd over I saw this:

Computer disk drives are more intelligent than the normal audio disk drives and can detect irregularities in the data thus making the disk unreadable. Copy Control aims to exploit this by putting errorenous tracks onto the disk and hence curb piracy.

As you can see Linux is not listed in the compatible systems. Does that mean I’ll have to look out for cds compatible with my OS before I buy them? Or else will I have to succumb to Windows?

Not this time. Paranoia comes to the rescue. Even though after mounting the cd you’ll have trouble finding the audio files on it (this is due to the multisession layer – another approach to curb piracy by hiding the audio files), Paranoia will crack the Copy Control.

[anand@semanticvoid /]$ cdparanoia -B

Thats all needed to break the damn Copy Control.