100Mbit will be reserved for the nerds - for it to reach the mainstream, DRM has to go!

Now that Starhub has given us the wonder of 100Mbit/s download, how many takers will there be.

MANY, but not enough.

Without wading through the complications of bypassing traffic shaping (read `choking') targeting bittorrent protocol packets, without widespread education on peer-to-peer download technologies, and without massive download technologies like Bittorrent getting to the mainstream consciousness because of the perceived `illegality' of these services, most of this country can't really use the 100Mbit/s speed.

Online music is not uncommon. Only that the Digital Rights Management makes even the nerds falter. No standard DRM exists today, nor will it foreseeably exist tomorrow. Apple's boss Steve Jobs is lambasting DRM (just last week). We all know how sucky DRM can be, and that at least there's some complication for you to transfer your Itunes music from one PC to another.

The underground is fiercely `torrenting' terabytes of content every day and night. And this underground is so small compared to the total number of internet users.

Let me again call for the abolition of DRM, which is no use to most people anyway - complicating the life of legal users and totally bypassed by those who choose to bypass it, and ignored by those who, not knowing how DRM works and not knowing how to bypass it online, get their stuff from their friends' thumbdrives or portable hard disk drives.

Let's have the MDA make a scheme where all subscribers to internet services pay an additional 10 bucks or so a month, for the RIGHT to download and distribute whatever they want online, and this money goes to a fund to pay the content providers according to their popularity indexed in P2P indices worldwide.

This blogpost seems cryptic simply because the background knowledge required is difficult, and I don't have the mood to babyfy it. But those who read it and understand it, please consider it and write about it yourself. Because, I REALLY WANT the content providers to survive. The torrenters will always be there, in some form or another. It's the content providers I'm worried about.

Adventures with Stahub's Maxonline MOL Ultimate 100Mbit/s FAT GREEN PIPE!

I got my Starhub Maxonline account for 3 months already, which I contracted with them for an entire year with 30Mbit/s down and 1Mbit/s up. I KNEW they were going to increase it to 100Mbit/2Mbit and sure enough, they did.

Only problem was that my existing modem, my old DOCSIS 2 Motorola SBV5120 couldn't give me the 100Mbit/2Mbit. I had to get the DOCSIS 3 Motorola SB6100 modem to achieve that kind of bitrate. But my account was already provisioned for 100mbit, and every day which passed was another day I kicked myself for paying full fare for 1/3 of the performance I was entitled to.

This was a great strategy Starhub had for sucker nerds like me, so I set off to prepare to get the SB6100.

Not an easy task though. The SB6100 did not have VOICE capability, and since I was on Starhub's VOIP Digital Voice service, by itself, the SB6100 can't make it. A quick enquiry told me what I had to do - keep the SBV5120 to use it as VOICE only, and buy a new SB6100 for the Internet bandwidth. Easy enough unless you're a sucker nerd like me - I worried about the signal quality, since keeping the SBV5120 would necessitate another split of the cable, with proportional losses.

This was what I planned:

| (from SCV)
|
|
(splitter1)---------(cable modem)
|
|
(splitter2)----------(VOIP for Digital Voice)
| | | | | |
| | | | | |
(6 way to room outlets for video)

Now I set off to buy a top grade splitter and found the Monster splitter. It cost me S$60. Here it is... a little different from mine, but sufficient to illustrate.



• Ultra low-loss, high-performance video signal splitter for TV & satellite
• 5 MHz - 2 GHz bandwidth is digital ready for splitting DSS & TV signals
• Internal impedance-matched network for accurate 75 ohm load to all outputs
• Precision die-case, 24K gold-plated contacts
• 24K gold-plated contacts ensure high conductive, corrosion-free connections

After doing the change from Regal 2-way splitter to Monster 2-way, this is the result:

Signal strength from the single layer Monster 2-way splitter, increase from 82% to 86% (somebody please tell me, why I split the signal, should half, why still get such high number? Is BS izzit? I don't have meter, so I use my HD set top box to test the signal)

Practical differences:

+Highest DL speed from 30 tries increase from 28Mbit/s to slightly higher than 29 Mbit/s (from utilities.starhub.com)
+Before this, I use 3 way splitter, everytime I press START, I only have a 30% chance of the download proceeding to 100% ... most of the time stuck halfway. After my change to Regal 2 way aplitter, I achieved 100% success, but sometimes need 8 steps of the download bar, sometimes need 6 steps. After change to the Monster, maximum steps is 7 steps, sometimes 6, and very rarely 5 steps. PLEASE NOTE HOWEVER THAT STARHUB INCREASED MY THEORETICAL BANDWIDTH FROM 30MBIT/S TO 32MBIT/S. SO ALL MY RESULTS MAY BE INVALID LIAO.
+Signal quality STAY at 99-100%. No difference between Regal and Monster for Signal Quality. Signal Quality got no difference across all my splits, even the 2nd layer split also SQ is about 99-100%.

Result:
1) Technical wise, not worth S$60. The changes are so marginal.
2) Psychological buff of seeing a nice big gold color splitter, priceless. Achieved.

OK so I went ahead and bought the SB6100, when I got it, I relegated the SBV5120 to a 3rd level split - the phone still worked, so ... fine.

After a very very hard day, where I kick the hell outta myself for stupidity, here are the results for my new SB6100 modem:

speedtest.net figures:


Surprising thing is the incredible upload speed. The Ubicom based router I have detects 3030kbit/s uplink speed, which I thought was wrong, until I saw the speedtest figures. This is the happiest thing, because the downlink speed is something like `too much' at this time, and the great upload speed will help achieve more download speed.

Starhub figures:

Connecting to Server ...
Logging on to Server ...
Starting download
Download Successful !!

Download Stats:

Transfer Time: 9782 milliseconds
Total File Size: 83886080 bytes

Top speed attained: 68.44 Mbps

All these tests done with the normal idiotic overconservative WinXP settings for RWIN with no frame multiplier. I can achieve more speed - up to 83Mbit/s with Starhub util and 37Mbit/s for speedtest, but with these my upload speed cannot be consistent.

As for why I was stupid, I hardcode a lot of numbers into my ubicom router instead of autodetect, so for half a day, I worked with a hardcoded 30Mbit/s down and 1Mbit/s up figures based on my old connection.

Only after I slept a bit then woke up at about now, I thought of it. Sorry starhub for spamming your mailbox and calling you up so many times. I am an utter idiot loh!

After going to www.dslreports.com and optimizing my RWIN and putting a timestamp on all my TCP/IP packets, this is what I got:



Starhub:

Connecting to Server ...
Logging on to Server ...
Starting download
Download Successful !!


Download Stats:

Transfer Time: 8312 milliseconds
Total File Size: 83886080 bytes

Top speed attained: 78.81 Mbps

Real world: It took me like less than 5 seconds to download the 50MB Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0: x86 (KB928416) ... LOL!

This was a successful installation, and it was every bit as I expected. But its effect on me is profound, I find myself thinking of all ways on how to use the connection. It's a real change if downloads don't take any time at all relatively.

Anyway, money well spent!

First HD-DVD Disc Torrent - HD-DVD copy protection broken?

Quite quickly, without supercomputers, unencrypted HD-DVD high definition content has been made available for bit-torrent download.

Reference: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070115-8622.html

Usually, if an AACS device has been compromised, there is a key revocation system which revokes the keys, disallowing further playback.

But this has been rendered irrelevant, as the torrent available for download is unencrypted, free of any copy protection system. So any key revocation system will be unable to stop further playback of the file, in this case, Serenity.

A ripper exists: BackupHDDVD, which uses keys separately available from the internet, to rip the contents of a HD-DVD disc. A key was also passed on to the internet recently, which works
with BackupHDDVD. This is a full recipe for a HD-DVD rip, and this presumably resulted in the unencypted file available via torrent.

Reference: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070107-8564.html

So, my speculations:

1. If all goes well for the content protection camp, the compromised key available on the internet and any connected keys, will be revoked.
2. So future content will not decrypt using the compromised key, but all current content will still be rippable
3. AACS' key revocation system is utterly useless in any other respect, because the ripped content is not protected at all. It is naked HD video.

One more point for my call for a blanket license covering all content. Utterly impossible to protect anything which relies on human integrity, honesty and diligence. :)