11 ms·

VCR Virus Fake VHS Copy-Protection Warning Label (2016)

71 points by gregmac 4y ago

svnpenn 4y ago
Something is wrong with that site, the entire page is a link for some reason.
- hilbert42 4y ago
  It's OK here and doesn't appear to be a link, do you see this URL in your browser? https://whyimnotanartist.net/2016/03/08/vcr-virus-fake-vhs-copy-protection-warning-label/ https://whyimnotanartist.net/2016/03/08/vcr-virus-fake-vhs-c...
fortran77 4y ago
> Real VHS copy protection, like Macrovision, relied on signal interference that the playback device wouldn’t even detect, distorting the signal received by the recording device. This isn't quite true and in fact Macrovision caused a great deal of issues for legitimate users--not all TV sets were able to track the not-quite-standard signal-- and there was some question of legality. (Can companies advertise their product VHS or NTSC if they didn't quite meet those standards, etc.)
- dylan604 4y ago
  Macrovision worked by tricking the AGC (automatic gain control). The part of the signal that was affected was in the vertical blanking so it was not normally visible to viewers. The AGC was typically a feature of the recorder so that if a signal was perceived to be too hot/bright, it would clamp the signal causing the recorded image to become darker. Sort of like auto-exposure on cameras. The resulting recorded image would ramp back and forth from too dark to normal which would hopefully cause the person doing the recording to not want to keep the recording or to continue doing these types of recordings. Macrovision was easy to defeat with the right equipment, but Macrovision worked because pretty much no consumer would go to the expense of buying that equipment. Another example of keeping honest people honest.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - fortran77 4y ago
    It's a little tricker than that. A good explanation is here: > What Macrovision does is to introduce false synchronization pulses followed by false back porches at a very high voltage level (~15% over white level). The VHS VCR looks at the signal and thinks that it is fed with an extremely high-amplitude signal and adjusts the gain control to minimum --> the real picture gets very dim (see pictures 4 and 5). See: http://cd.textfiles.com/group42/HACK/TV/MACROV.HTM http://cd.textfiles.com/group42/HACK/TV/MACROV.HTM
    - dylan604 4y ago
      I really don't see how you're saying anything different than what I said, but okay
- hilbert42 4y ago
  "Can companies advertise their product VHS or NTSC if they didn't quite meet those standards, etc." All television standards are incredibly strict (once I worked in a prototype laboratory at RCA, there we designed professional television equipment, later I worked in a TV station with the responsibility for ensuring that TV standards were maintained to comply with government regulations/broadcast specifications - i.e.: in keeping with the standards). It's somewhat of a miracle that cheap domestic VCRs work at all. The only reason they do is that it is easier for TV set manufacturers to build flywheel syncs that allow horizontal and vertical oscillators to be pulled to frequency than it is (as it was back then) to phase lock them to known precise frequencies (say for PAL: 50 and 15,625Hz). TV stations always broadcast extremely stable frequencies but even so getting a domestic TV to sync with them could be difficult. By the 1980s TV station standards were even tighter as by then they were locked to atomic standards (this made network syncing much easier). Mechanical VCRs had inordinate difficulty in maintaining good TV standards, that is their horizontal and vertical sync blocks looked like something the cat dragged in. It's only the excellent sense of early designers who designed the television standards - and that's all of them, NTSC, SECAM and PAL - that they included equalizing pulses in the synchronizing signals. These equalizing pulses were integrated by TV circuitry, mainly resistors and capacitors, to produce pulses that were easy to lock on to. If it were not for this cleaver farsighted thinking then cheap domestic VCRs would not have been possible. There's an excellent drawing of a vertical field block at the very bottom of this link: https://www.brainkart.com/article/Vertical-Sync-Details_12027/ https://www.brainkart.com/article/Vertical-Sync-Details_1202... It shows how the equalization pulses, which are transmitted by TV stations (as required by the standards) allow TV sets to generate pulses that are easy for TV set oscillators to lock onto and thus sync with incoming TV images. A VCR records a TV signal complete with its sync pulses and upon playback the by now very 'dirty' sync pulses that also vary in frequency due to mechanical playback drift can still be separated by the TV set's sync separator and fed to the line and vertical oscillators which then lock onto the signal. That these pulses vary from the clean ones broadcast by the TV doesn't matter much as the system was designed to be sufficiently robust to cope with bad incoming signals (even though VCRs weren't on the minds of the standards people at the time standards were set). Essentially, domestic VCRs exhibit quite remarkable technology and its only through the dogged persistence of Japanese TV manufacturers in the early 1970s and '80s that we got VCRs at all. In that sense it's very hard to criticize VCR and TV set manufactures when the standards were built with only electrons in mind! That is, TV standards designers knew that electrons could respond very quickly but they never envisaged that mechanical parts would also need to move hellishly quickly (the risetime of a domestic TV signal about 90ns and TV sync pulses are measured in microseconds).
hyakosm 4y ago
It reminds me the warning on the back of my child schoolbooks: "Danger, le photocopillage tue le livre" ("Warning! copying kill the book" but with a pun between "photocopy" and "pillage"). It had a logo with a book hit by a flash. I was scared when a teacher put a book in the copier because I thought it would burn the book or something like this.
mdb31 4y ago
Reminds me of the "danger, radiation!" warning sign a local laundry put on its doors. Probably pretty effective in dissuading intruders. But, they got shut down earlier this year with a "seized by the authorities" action typically reserved for drugs/arms dealers. So, as with this copy protection label, I guess the effectiveness greatly depends on your target audience... (Side-quest: would it have been possible to mount some kind of side-channel attack against VCRs? Over-driving the video/audio signals to blow up the CRT/speakers would be an obvious one, but would this also be possibly ONLY on copies and/or copier equipment?)
dm319 4y ago
Interesting historical trivia! BTW is that website using the ubuntu font?
- danamit 4y ago
  Yes it is using Ubuntu font...
ghoomketu 4y ago
Maybe this works for elder people but this would've had the exact opposite effect on teens i guess. I remember back in the day when we got our first 386, the person who installed it, told me specifically that I should never press the delete key or enter the CMOS.. no matter what. This was pre-internet so his word was it. He even made up a horror story about a guy locking his PC 'forever' due a lost password (maybe he didn't want to do unneeded maintenance due to a kid exploring the CMOS settings). Guess the first thing I did as soon as he left the house :D
hilbert42 4y ago
Better education hence better understanding of technology would ultimately stop this nonsense.
- userbinator 4y ago
  The problem is that those in power don't want most people to have a better understanding of technology.
- kube-system 4y ago
  The teacher who put this tape in a VCR back in the day probably graduated school before home VHS was even a settled standard. What sort of education could she have had that would reassure her that VCRs don't execute code from tape? And for that matter, the successor to VHS, DVD-Video, does have some code execution features. http://dvd.sourceforge.net/dvdinfo/vmi-sum.html http://dvd.sourceforge.net/dvdinfo/vmi-sum.html
  - hilbert42 4y ago
    "...reassure her that VCRs don't execute code from tape" That's were a good education comes in. A good education gives one an inquiring mind and thus she'd know from computers of that time that programs on tapes require computers and back then VCRs, at best, had dedicated controllers that had no way of running such a program (they could barely play video let alone do anything else). Moreover, a reality check would come into play. How would any and every brand of VCR be able to respond such a program made after VCRs were designed - that feature having never been mentioned in the handbooks or elsewhere? Even then and even if VCRs had the potential to do so, she'd ask herself the obvious question 'if this were true then everyone would be talking about it by now so why haven't I heard about it?' Right, nothing's impossible, pigs may fly but I've yet to see one (the corollary being the gullible are easily fooled).
    - wutbrodo 4y ago
      > That's were a good education comes in. A good education gives one an inquiring mind Education isn't magic, and can't instill an inquiring mind reliably. I went to a (at the time) $35k/yr private school that I consider to provide a fairly fantastic education. I remember being shocked when I discovered that my college roommate (a friend from the same high school) didn't know that you could delete installer files after installing software, taking up several GB of data back in the day when disk space was dear. I had of course wondered the same thing at some pt in my life, and figured it years earlier by running a two-minute experiment in which I risked breaking the install of a game I didn't care that much about. The difference between him and me certainly wasn't our education.
danamit 4y ago
In mid 2000s when my father bought us a PC, we opened paint, I impressed him by drawing my country's flag in paint (cuz I saw a teacher in school do it). Then, it comes the moment to leave the paint program (gonna use the old terminology), and as you know it ask you if you wanna leave without saving: Yes, No, Cancel? and it does with a warning sign. My father and me were so sussed out with that warning sign, so we did not click yes, I didn't have much of an idea what the message was about because it was in a language I did not understand. I kept clicking no and cancel repeatedly. The store where my father bought the PC told him to not turn the PC using the turn off button either, so we kept trying with that message without clicking yes. In the end we just unplugged it. That was my first interaction with a PC, and it was a bit scary.
- sdflhasjd 4y ago
  I recall some programs used to crash on Windows 95 and earlier with a big red "ILLEGAL OPERATION" error. As a child, I was frightened to death. I didn't tell anyone otherwise the authorities would whisk me away.
  - bitwize 4y ago
    This is probably what led to today's glut of vague "Oops, there was a problem :(" error messages. The next round will probably have an Alegria person slouching in despair, shrugging, etc.
- ipython 4y ago
  It’s hard to remember back now but when I was probably about 8 or 9 years old my first family computer, a Commodore 64, had this program where it would “simulate” all sorts of catastrophic errors. Formatting disks, exploding, etc. As a child I was totally convinced and man that was scary. Funny to think back how silly that was now.
  - LocalH 4y ago
    That almost sounds like the "Sillycrisis" portion of a thing called "Silly 64", by "Silly Software". I can find almost no information about this program other than the actual program itself. Pretty sure the whole thing was written in BASIC.
kmeisthax 4y ago
So... do these tapes have Macrovision on them? I always thought this was just a weird way to brag that you had it. I imagine the wild video artifacts that Macrovision causes would look like your VCR was getting utterly destroyed by the tape.
- m348e912 4y ago
  What is Macrovision? Here's a good overview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VqsU1VK3mU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VqsU1VK3mU
  - proggy 4y ago
    Technology Connections is a true gem of a channel.
- fortran77 4y ago
  My guess is if they paid for Macrovision, they would have proudly used the Macrovision logo. They were trying to get off cheap!
iso1210 4y ago
"In the real world, if a company knowingly created tapes that damaged playback equipment, lawsuits would go through the roof" Shortly after this, Sony deliberatly created and distributed a virus (some code that installed itself on a computer and hid itself from the owner) on millions of CDs (the code which breached copyright law too to rub salt in the wound) From what I can tell there was very little comeback for the people who did this other thna a "don't do it again"
- walrus01 4y ago
  I'm familiar with the history of that but I also 75% blame microsoft for having a windows default setting to execute as the current user, any .exe binary that's specified in the autorun.inf file in the root of a CD or DVD-ROM, when inserted into the computer (in the windows 98SE/millennium/2000 era). same issue that was still biting the US military in the ass 6, 7, 8 years later they learned that any usb flash drive inserted into a computer would autorun the binaries on it, and they resorted to putting hot glue into the USB ports of desktop PCs as a stopgap measure.

71 points by gregmac 4y ago

svnpenn 4y ago

Something is wrong with that site, the entire page is a link for some reason.

hilbert42 4y ago
It's OK here and doesn't appear to be a link, do you see this URL in your browser? https://whyimnotanartist.net/2016/03/08/vcr-virus-fake-vhs-copy-protection-warning-label/ https://whyimnotanartist.net/2016/03/08/vcr-virus-fake-vhs-c...

fortran77 4y ago

> Real VHS copy protection, like Macrovision, relied on signal interference that the playback device wouldn’t even detect, distorting the signal received by the recording device. This isn't quite true and in fact Macrovision caused a great deal of issues for legitimate users--not all TV sets were able to track the not-quite-standard signal-- and there was some question of legality. (Can companies advertise their product VHS or NTSC if they didn't quite meet those standards, etc.)

dylan604 4y ago
Macrovision worked by tricking the AGC (automatic gain control). The part of the signal that was affected was in the vertical blanking so it was not normally visible to viewers. The AGC was typically a feature of the recorder so that if a signal was perceived to be too hot/bright, it would clamp the signal causing the recorded image to become darker. Sort of like auto-exposure on cameras. The resulting recorded image would ramp back and forth from too dark to normal which would hopefully cause the person doing the recording to not want to keep the recording or to continue doing these types of recordings. Macrovision was easy to defeat with the right equipment, but Macrovision worked because pretty much no consumer would go to the expense of buying that equipment. Another example of keeping honest people honest.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- fortran77 4y ago
  It's a little tricker than that. A good explanation is here: > What Macrovision does is to introduce false synchronization pulses followed by false back porches at a very high voltage level (~15% over white level). The VHS VCR looks at the signal and thinks that it is fed with an extremely high-amplitude signal and adjusts the gain control to minimum --> the real picture gets very dim (see pictures 4 and 5). See: http://cd.textfiles.com/group42/HACK/TV/MACROV.HTM http://cd.textfiles.com/group42/HACK/TV/MACROV.HTM
  - dylan604 4y ago
    I really don't see how you're saying anything different than what I said, but okay
hilbert42 4y ago
"Can companies advertise their product VHS or NTSC if they didn't quite meet those standards, etc." All television standards are incredibly strict (once I worked in a prototype laboratory at RCA, there we designed professional television equipment, later I worked in a TV station with the responsibility for ensuring that TV standards were maintained to comply with government regulations/broadcast specifications - i.e.: in keeping with the standards). It's somewhat of a miracle that cheap domestic VCRs work at all. The only reason they do is that it is easier for TV set manufacturers to build flywheel syncs that allow horizontal and vertical oscillators to be pulled to frequency than it is (as it was back then) to phase lock them to known precise frequencies (say for PAL: 50 and 15,625Hz). TV stations always broadcast extremely stable frequencies but even so getting a domestic TV to sync with them could be difficult. By the 1980s TV station standards were even tighter as by then they were locked to atomic standards (this made network syncing much easier). Mechanical VCRs had inordinate difficulty in maintaining good TV standards, that is their horizontal and vertical sync blocks looked like something the cat dragged in. It's only the excellent sense of early designers who designed the television standards - and that's all of them, NTSC, SECAM and PAL - that they included equalizing pulses in the synchronizing signals. These equalizing pulses were integrated by TV circuitry, mainly resistors and capacitors, to produce pulses that were easy to lock on to. If it were not for this cleaver farsighted thinking then cheap domestic VCRs would not have been possible. There's an excellent drawing of a vertical field block at the very bottom of this link: https://www.brainkart.com/article/Vertical-Sync-Details_12027/ https://www.brainkart.com/article/Vertical-Sync-Details_1202... It shows how the equalization pulses, which are transmitted by TV stations (as required by the standards) allow TV sets to generate pulses that are easy for TV set oscillators to lock onto and thus sync with incoming TV images. A VCR records a TV signal complete with its sync pulses and upon playback the by now very 'dirty' sync pulses that also vary in frequency due to mechanical playback drift can still be separated by the TV set's sync separator and fed to the line and vertical oscillators which then lock onto the signal. That these pulses vary from the clean ones broadcast by the TV doesn't matter much as the system was designed to be sufficiently robust to cope with bad incoming signals (even though VCRs weren't on the minds of the standards people at the time standards were set). Essentially, domestic VCRs exhibit quite remarkable technology and its only through the dogged persistence of Japanese TV manufacturers in the early 1970s and '80s that we got VCRs at all. In that sense it's very hard to criticize VCR and TV set manufactures when the standards were built with only electrons in mind! That is, TV standards designers knew that electrons could respond very quickly but they never envisaged that mechanical parts would also need to move hellishly quickly (the risetime of a domestic TV signal about 90ns and TV sync pulses are measured in microseconds).

hyakosm 4y ago

It reminds me the warning on the back of my child schoolbooks: "Danger, le photocopillage tue le livre" ("Warning! copying kill the book" but with a pun between "photocopy" and "pillage"). It had a logo with a book hit by a flash. I was scared when a teacher put a book in the copier because I thought it would burn the book or something like this.

mdb31 4y ago

Reminds me of the "danger, radiation!" warning sign a local laundry put on its doors. Probably pretty effective in dissuading intruders. But, they got shut down earlier this year with a "seized by the authorities" action typically reserved for drugs/arms dealers. So, as with this copy protection label, I guess the effectiveness greatly depends on your target audience... (Side-quest: would it have been possible to mount some kind of side-channel attack against VCRs? Over-driving the video/audio signals to blow up the CRT/speakers would be an obvious one, but would this also be possibly ONLY on copies and/or copier equipment?)

dm319 4y ago

Interesting historical trivia! BTW is that website using the ubuntu font?

danamit 4y ago
Yes it is using Ubuntu font...

ghoomketu 4y ago

Maybe this works for elder people but this would've had the exact opposite effect on teens i guess. I remember back in the day when we got our first 386, the person who installed it, told me specifically that I should never press the delete key or enter the CMOS.. no matter what. This was pre-internet so his word was it. He even made up a horror story about a guy locking his PC 'forever' due a lost password (maybe he didn't want to do unneeded maintenance due to a kid exploring the CMOS settings). Guess the first thing I did as soon as he left the house :D

hilbert42 4y ago

Better education hence better understanding of technology would ultimately stop this nonsense.

userbinator 4y ago
The problem is that those in power don't want most people to have a better understanding of technology.
kube-system 4y ago
The teacher who put this tape in a VCR back in the day probably graduated school before home VHS was even a settled standard. What sort of education could she have had that would reassure her that VCRs don't execute code from tape? And for that matter, the successor to VHS, DVD-Video, does have some code execution features. http://dvd.sourceforge.net/dvdinfo/vmi-sum.html http://dvd.sourceforge.net/dvdinfo/vmi-sum.html
- hilbert42 4y ago
  "...reassure her that VCRs don't execute code from tape" That's were a good education comes in. A good education gives one an inquiring mind and thus she'd know from computers of that time that programs on tapes require computers and back then VCRs, at best, had dedicated controllers that had no way of running such a program (they could barely play video let alone do anything else). Moreover, a reality check would come into play. How would any and every brand of VCR be able to respond such a program made after VCRs were designed - that feature having never been mentioned in the handbooks or elsewhere? Even then and even if VCRs had the potential to do so, she'd ask herself the obvious question 'if this were true then everyone would be talking about it by now so why haven't I heard about it?' Right, nothing's impossible, pigs may fly but I've yet to see one (the corollary being the gullible are easily fooled).
  - wutbrodo 4y ago
    > That's were a good education comes in. A good education gives one an inquiring mind Education isn't magic, and can't instill an inquiring mind reliably. I went to a (at the time) $35k/yr private school that I consider to provide a fairly fantastic education. I remember being shocked when I discovered that my college roommate (a friend from the same high school) didn't know that you could delete installer files after installing software, taking up several GB of data back in the day when disk space was dear. I had of course wondered the same thing at some pt in my life, and figured it years earlier by running a two-minute experiment in which I risked breaking the install of a game I didn't care that much about. The difference between him and me certainly wasn't our education.

danamit 4y ago

In mid 2000s when my father bought us a PC, we opened paint, I impressed him by drawing my country's flag in paint (cuz I saw a teacher in school do it). Then, it comes the moment to leave the paint program (gonna use the old terminology), and as you know it ask you if you wanna leave without saving: Yes, No, Cancel? and it does with a warning sign. My father and me were so sussed out with that warning sign, so we did not click yes, I didn't have much of an idea what the message was about because it was in a language I did not understand. I kept clicking no and cancel repeatedly. The store where my father bought the PC told him to not turn the PC using the turn off button either, so we kept trying with that message without clicking yes. In the end we just unplugged it. That was my first interaction with a PC, and it was a bit scary.

sdflhasjd 4y ago
I recall some programs used to crash on Windows 95 and earlier with a big red "ILLEGAL OPERATION" error. As a child, I was frightened to death. I didn't tell anyone otherwise the authorities would whisk me away.
- bitwize 4y ago
  This is probably what led to today's glut of vague "Oops, there was a problem :(" error messages. The next round will probably have an Alegria person slouching in despair, shrugging, etc.
ipython 4y ago
It’s hard to remember back now but when I was probably about 8 or 9 years old my first family computer, a Commodore 64, had this program where it would “simulate” all sorts of catastrophic errors. Formatting disks, exploding, etc. As a child I was totally convinced and man that was scary. Funny to think back how silly that was now.
- LocalH 4y ago
  That almost sounds like the "Sillycrisis" portion of a thing called "Silly 64", by "Silly Software". I can find almost no information about this program other than the actual program itself. Pretty sure the whole thing was written in BASIC.

kmeisthax 4y ago

So... do these tapes have Macrovision on them? I always thought this was just a weird way to brag that you had it. I imagine the wild video artifacts that Macrovision causes would look like your VCR was getting utterly destroyed by the tape.

m348e912 4y ago
What is Macrovision? Here's a good overview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VqsU1VK3mU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VqsU1VK3mU
- proggy 4y ago
  Technology Connections is a true gem of a channel.
fortran77 4y ago
My guess is if they paid for Macrovision, they would have proudly used the Macrovision logo. They were trying to get off cheap!

iso1210 4y ago

"In the real world, if a company knowingly created tapes that damaged playback equipment, lawsuits would go through the roof" Shortly after this, Sony deliberatly created and distributed a virus (some code that installed itself on a computer and hid itself from the owner) on millions of CDs (the code which breached copyright law too to rub salt in the wound) From what I can tell there was very little comeback for the people who did this other thna a "don't do it again"

walrus01 4y ago
I'm familiar with the history of that but I also 75% blame microsoft for having a windows default setting to execute as the current user, any .exe binary that's specified in the autorun.inf file in the root of a CD or DVD-ROM, when inserted into the computer (in the windows 98SE/millennium/2000 era). same issue that was still biting the US military in the ass 6, 7, 8 years later they learned that any usb flash drive inserted into a computer would autorun the binaries on it, and they resorted to putting hot glue into the USB ports of desktop PCs as a stopgap measure.