Historical Aspect

The companion CD contains all of the required utilities for the analysis and copying of protected CDs. Note that bypassing the protection against CD copying is not the same thing as copyright violation! The laws of many countries explicitly allow the creation of backup copies of licensed media. The PHILIPS Corporation, which is one of the inventors of CD technology, strongly opposes any deviations from the standard and insists on that protected discs including anti-copying technology should not use the Compact Disc logo. Legislation in many countries supports this claim. Any disc protected by a non-standard format must be marked with an unequivocal warning that, although the piece of plastic you are purchasing bears a resemblance to a CD, in reality, it is not a proper CD.

Furthermore, to develop CD protection mechanisms, the programmer must have at least a general idea about the working methods and technical tools used by his or her opponents. To master this technical arsenal at a level no lower than that of the opponent is even better. Simply speaking, it allows us to detect and reinforce the most probable targets against hacker attacks, concentrating on them the maximum available intellectual resources. This means that the developer of protection mechanisms must be inspired by the hacker psychology, and start thinking like a hacker. Thus, mastering information-protection technology assumes mastering of cracking technology. If you don t know how protection mechanisms are cracked, what their vulnerabilities are, and have no information about the hacker s arsenal, you won t be able to create a strong protection mechanism that would be both inexpensive and easy to implement.

The SRC directory contains all the source code of the demo examples used in this book.

• ETC ”Demo examples for low-level access to CD-ROM drives

• RS.LIB ”Libraries for low-level working with CD sectors from CloneCD and Ahead Nero and interfaces to them, with examples illustrating their practical use

• RS.SIMPLE ”Elementary examples illustrating the principle of Reed-Solomon codes

• SCSI.ALT ”Source code of the driver allowing execution of the IN/OUT machine commands from the application level

• SCSI.LIB ”Tools and utilities developed by the author for working with protected CDs

Root directory has many small but useful utilities, including the Pinch of File block file copier useful for file-by-file copying of CDs containing files with incorrect lengths and starting sectors.

The  README.TXT file describes the contents of the CD-ROM.

The  DivX511Bundle.exe file shows video about the A-List Publsihing books. To watch this file, install Standard DivX Codec(FREE) available for free download from http://www.divx.com/divx/ .