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Нифига не понял из текста новости… Причем тут диспетчер задач и БОБ? Зачем нужно было помечать диски?
большой BLOB-объект
Похоже на результат работы GPT-3
И зачем он зашифровал его с помощью нескольких различных инструментов и методов шифрования, включая пару закрытых/открытых ключей?
Боже, эта статья порождает столько вопросов…
Боже, эта статья порождает столько вопросов…
БОБ злорадно смеется...
Для тех, кто, как и я, ничего не понял, краткое содержание, почёрпнутое из оригинала (https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/25/xp_bob/). Для того, чтобы отличить OEM версии Windows от ретейловых, на диск записывали 30Мб хлама, от которого считался хэш и сверялся с образцом, чтобы проверить, какой ключ должен вводить пользователь при активации — OEM или ритейл. Этим хламом был образ установщика Боба, зашифрованный паролем, сгенерированным произвольными ударами по клавиатуре. Оригинал тоже так себе написан, пришлось некоторые места перечитывать.
Из сопроводительного текста к видео:
TLDR: Microsoft Bob was used to see the pseudorandom encrypted digital ballast used to fill some of the unused space on the CDs for copy protection purposes. Credit due to Microsoft employee Raymond Chen for discussing this publicly on his blog and in a Scott Hanselman podcast as far back as 2007!
The ballast described was necessary to the technical solution already chosen, so a different origin (random data, the compressed works of Shakespeare, or whatever) would not have been any smaller or different.
А этот "бывший инженер" из заголовка, хоть сам понял, что сделал? И сколько надо выпить, чтобы разобраться в его действиях и написать данную новость?
Вытащил английские субтитры, так проще понять
Why is this important? Because we used her math to protect the product in way such that your activation key only works with the type of CD it was intended for — retail, OEM, and so on. For that protection to be at all secure, there had to be some big differences between the retail and OEM CDs. And they had to be mathematically different in a noncompressible way.
That's because I didn't want a crack for activation showing up on the Usenet forums thirty minutes after release. In those pre-2K Internet days, hosting or posting a large binary was so prohibitively complicated or expensive that all I had to do was to ensure the CDs were different by many megabytes of information and that would solve 95% of those piracy cases.
We decided to fill up some of the spare room on the CDs with digital ballast that was encrypted and signed and specific to the CD version. We could confirm the ballast's signature and thereby confirm that you had the right disc. But what should it be made up out of? Tempting though it might be, I couldn't just zip up a copy of my driver's license photo. Photos are not very random to start with, and there are about a dozen other reasons why that's just a bad idea.
So, I needed some big digital blobs that I knew could not be compressed any further. Where to find data that I knew we had a license to and that I trusted to be as precompressed as possible that I could then highly encrypt? I knew from my MS-DOS days that the floppy images we shipped for products were as good as it gets, and for obvious reasons — floppies cost money. They were super compressed, as compressed as we mathematically knew how to do. So, I'd start with some floppy images. That's when I decided to do something that would make me smile. Something that only I knew about: I decided to secretly start with Microsoft Bob.
In those days we as a company had three big servers, products1 and products2 and boneyard. Between them the image of pretty much every product we had ever made was up on there.
I grabbed the compressed floppy images for Microsoft Bob and concatenated them into a single large Bob blob. I then encrypted the blob of Bob with several passes of different encryption tools and techniques, including a huge private/public keypair generated by a long sequence of random mouse movements, and so on.
I did a few other procedures that I felt were important to the process, and out came a giant multi-megabyte blob that I could effectively treat as a root of trust on the CD. If you had the OEM blob, you could use an OEM license key. If you had a retail blob, you had to use a retail key.
Though he learned of the story after the fact, as uber-developer and general super-genius Raymond Chen has aptly said of this issue, in some ways Microsoft Bob was more useful to us dead than alive. I don't know how many copies of Microsoft Bob were originally sold; if you ask Google, the answer is 58,000 copies. But in encrypted digital form, the spirit of Bob has gone on to live in the form of a half a billion Windows XP installations.
That's because I didn't want a crack for activation showing up on the Usenet forums thirty minutes after release. In those pre-2K Internet days, hosting or posting a large binary was so prohibitively complicated or expensive that all I had to do was to ensure the CDs were different by many megabytes of information and that would solve 95% of those piracy cases.
We decided to fill up some of the spare room on the CDs with digital ballast that was encrypted and signed and specific to the CD version. We could confirm the ballast's signature and thereby confirm that you had the right disc. But what should it be made up out of? Tempting though it might be, I couldn't just zip up a copy of my driver's license photo. Photos are not very random to start with, and there are about a dozen other reasons why that's just a bad idea.
So, I needed some big digital blobs that I knew could not be compressed any further. Where to find data that I knew we had a license to and that I trusted to be as precompressed as possible that I could then highly encrypt? I knew from my MS-DOS days that the floppy images we shipped for products were as good as it gets, and for obvious reasons — floppies cost money. They were super compressed, as compressed as we mathematically knew how to do. So, I'd start with some floppy images. That's when I decided to do something that would make me smile. Something that only I knew about: I decided to secretly start with Microsoft Bob.
In those days we as a company had three big servers, products1 and products2 and boneyard. Between them the image of pretty much every product we had ever made was up on there.
I grabbed the compressed floppy images for Microsoft Bob and concatenated them into a single large Bob blob. I then encrypted the blob of Bob with several passes of different encryption tools and techniques, including a huge private/public keypair generated by a long sequence of random mouse movements, and so on.
I did a few other procedures that I felt were important to the process, and out came a giant multi-megabyte blob that I could effectively treat as a root of trust on the CD. If you had the OEM blob, you could use an OEM license key. If you had a retail blob, you had to use a retail key.
Though he learned of the story after the fact, as uber-developer and general super-genius Raymond Chen has aptly said of this issue, in some ways Microsoft Bob was more useful to us dead than alive. I don't know how many copies of Microsoft Bob were originally sold; if you ask Google, the answer is 58,000 copies. But in encrypted digital form, the spirit of Bob has gone on to live in the form of a half a billion Windows XP installations.
Короче, парням нужны были любые хорошо сжатые данные. Они взяли с «кладбища проектов» образы дискет с MS Bob (а там уж сжатие было изумительным, ведь чем оно лучше — тем меньше понадобится дискет) и сделали из них громадный зашифрованный блоб, единственной целью которого было занимать место на CD и позволить системе защиты от пиратства проверить аутентичность диска.
Таким образом, если «при жизни» Bob продался в количестве 58 тысяч копий, то «после смерти» он попал ещё и на полмиллиарда установочных дисков XP.
Когда следил за процессом установки win xp, всегда думал, что она там чем-то посторонним занимается. Допускал даже, что там просто добавлены задержки для создания видимости сложнейшего процесса и большого объёма работы. Теперь одно из её тайных занятий стало явным, спасибо инженеру-блогеру.
Если кто не в курсе что такое вообще Microsoft Bob:
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Бывший инженер рассказал о внедрении Microsoft Bob на миллионы установочных компакт-дисков Windows XP