🚀 go-pugleaf

As I understand things from my conversations with the inventor of the
VCR+ (they are down the street from me and make another wonderful
American success story--he's a very young recent Cal Tech graduate of
Chinese extraction who had a brilliant idea and seems to have done
everything right--the next American self-made multi-millionaire),
they provide the program to the stations on very stringent security
terms, to compute the codes. That was my info as of six months
ago--it may have changed--dunno. Back then, I noticed that two
sources of published codes, the L.A. Times and TV guide occasionally
had different codes for the same program, which suggests other
than a central source. (They weren't typos, and both worked.)

I don't know what his motives are on refusing to publish or give out
the algorithm, but if I were he, I'd behave that way in order to
avoid the legal costs and niusance of having to take infringers
to court. if that makes life harder for innocents who simply want
a few codes for personal use, that's unfortunate.

Further, the 900 number (it works by touch tones) MIGHT be a source
of revenue, though my guess is that it's run at a loss. I say that
because it isn't very highly publicized.

By the way, the local PBS station has now gotten on the bandwagon, and
their monthly program guide (KCET) carries the codes.

Finally, there seem to be two sets of codes. One, of up to six digits,
is for the standard start times (on the half-hour) and lengths (multiples
of 30 minutes). A second, of more digits, seems to be for the exception
cases. The first set has now been broken and a convenient pair of
"c" routines is making its way around the world. The second has not
yet been broken, as far as I can tell, but is mostly of interest only to
make sure the recordings of cable movies with odd ending times are
correctly stopped to avoid wasting tape.

Either the primary code is a table look-up in the chip, or it has been
broken by trial and error--the c routines work by table look-up.
Since there aren't as many published canonical instances of the
secondary code, it may be a while before it is broken.

-- 
David Sternlight
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