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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/08/19/nasa-estimates-the-size-of-the-hole-spacex-made-in-the-moon/5289425

NASA has used its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to capture more pics of the mess on the moon left by a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage.

As The Register has previously reported, in 2025 private aerospace concerns Firefly and ispace hired a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for their respective Blue Ghost Mission 1 and RESILIENCE moonshots.

RESILIENCE did not live up to its name. Blue Ghost did rather better.

The trajectory used to get the two craft to Luna meant the upper stage of the Falcon 9 was on a collision course with Earth's sole permanent natural satellite. The vehicle met its end in early August, and South Korea's space agency captured a few snaps.

NASA did likewise between August 11 and 12, and on Tuesday shared some of them.

You're looking at four of those images, each taken from a different angle as LRO passed 60 miles (96km) above the lunar surface while travelling at a mile per second (1600 m/s).

Crater boffins who have seen the snaps apparently think they show the Falcon 9 made a hole 60 feet wide and 10 feet deep (18m x 3m).

We're told that the darker area that fans around the crater in the upper-left image is rougher than the surroundings, as this surface material has been altered over a long time by solar wind, galactic cosmic rays, and micrometeorite impacts. The brighter rays and splotch above the crater in the lower-right image is fresher material that was excavated from deeper below the surface.

Another piece of SpaceX hardware, the Starship used in the 13^th test flight, has also turned up in the Australian territory of Christmas Island.

The island is a speck in the Indian Ocean more famous for its annual migration of red crabs (and its role Australian immigration policies)  than its contributions to space exploration. It is, however, usefully close to the location where the Starship hit the water.

As SpaceX explained on X, its recovery team towed the spacecraft to the island to take advantage of the calm waters in its vicinity so engineers can perform extra post-flight analysis. The company hopes to return it to its Texas Starbase for more work.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Rob, the Administrator over at Linux.org has announced:

I set up an IRC server this week. irc.linux.org, port 6697, TLS.

Main channel is #linux.org.

NickServ and ChanServ are both running, so you can lock down your nickname and register your own channels:

/msg NickServ REGISTER
/msg ChanServ REGISTER #yourchannel

Once a channel is registered it stays yours, ops and all, even if you're the only one who ever shows up.

If you haven't touched IRC in fifteen years, nothing has changed,. apt install hexchat or apt install irssi, connect, join, type.

Channels are open for the taking. Distro channels, project channels, whatever you want to run. Grab them before somebody else does.

Original Submission

"mrcoolbp" writes:

It seems like Nvidia's not getting back into the Middle Kingdom anytime soon:

Chinese web giant Baidu yesterday told investors it sees good days ahead for its Kunlunxin chip biz, because local buyers won't have alternatives.

Baidu has previously said it plans to spin out and float Kunlunxin, which makes CUDA-compliant inferencing chips that it uses for its own cloud services and has sold to the likes of Huawei and ZTE, who use them in kit they sell to Chinese telcos.

Speaking on the company's Q2 earnings call, Dou Shen, executive veep of Baidu's AI Cloud Group, said Baidu is working to list Kunlunxin and will have concrete info to share soon.

"From a business perspective, we remain very confident in Kunlunxin's long-term growth and commercial potential for a few reasons," he said. One of those reasons is that demand for inferencing continues to rise, and Baidu thinks that trend will continue for the long term.

His second reason was that China's domestic market has "significant growth potential" because supply of AI chips is "likely to remain constrained for some time."

"Against this backdrop, customers are increasingly seeking high performance, reliable, and cost-efficient domestic AI chips."

Those remarks are notable in the context of the US government's policy to allow Nvidia to resume sales of its products into China, and Beijing's response of giving itself a veto over any purchases by local companies.

After Washington banned Nvidia from selling its products in China, the company said that decision cost it $10.5 billion in six months. In its most recent results announcement the GPU giant said it had not won any revenue in China after the USA's policy reversal, and is "uncertain whether any imports will be allowed into the country."

And now Baidu is saying Chinese buyers are looking to local chips due to supply challenges.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

After only two years in business, too:

Firm Test-Fires 3D-Printed, Fully Cryogenic Reusable Rocket Engine — Indian Startup Leverages SLM Printing To Create Its First Working Prototype

As a broad description, SLM printers work by depositing a layer of microscopic metal powder on a base, and then firing a laser that melts the powder into solid at specific places. The base then drops down a fraction of a millimeter, a new layer of powder is deposited, and the process repeats. All told, this results in layers around just 0.05 to 0.06 mm thick, made of metals and alloys that traditional consumer 3D printers can't quite handle. Here's an illustrative video of the process.

Additionally, the burn is stronger than the commonly used Kerolox, while leaving behind almost no residue, lowering maintenance time and improving reusability turnaround. Drawbacks include lower fuel density (thus the need for larger tank sizes), trickier storage due to the low temperature, and potential hazards for handling.

Othisis has reportedly signed MoUs (memorandum of understanding) to carry payloads into space, even though it's only been formally in business for two years. The company is the brainchild of Syed Affan, the creator of the Rocketry India Discord server, who founded the company while pursuing his undergraduate degree.

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Anonymous Coward writes:

It's like Windows Recall, but without all the creepy screenshots. (But it's still kind of creepy.):

ChatGPT's desktop app on macOS has a new feature called Computer History that turns your actions into training data, learning how you work, suggesting automations, and even picking up tasks you left half done. It uses your activity to build a timeline that ChatGPT and Codex can reference when you make a request.

The feature is opt in, rather than opt out, and you can exclude certain apps and websites from Computer History, and you can delete entries if you want finer-grained control. Ari Weinstein, Product and Engineering manager at OpenAI, said on X that Computer History will automatically ignore content in incognito or private browser tabs.

In a quick demo video, Dominik Kundel, a member of the Developer Experiences team at OpenAI, shows the app looking up the last document he edited, checking if it was shared with people via Slack, and delivering a recap of how he spent his morning.

The feature is definitely reminiscent of Windows Recall, but where Microsoft's controversial AI feature relied heavily on screenshots, OpenAI says Computer History doesn't capture images, videos, or audio, instead relying on "events."

https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/14/openai-ditches-recall-style-screenshot-surveillance-for-friendly-keylogging/5287618
https://thenextweb.com/news/openai-chatgpt-computer-history-mac-keystrokes

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

The CMP 170HX has quickly gone from crypto trash to AI treasure:

Nvidia Crypto Mining GPUs Hacked To Restore Locked-Away VRAM — Software Mod Unlocks 64GB Of VRAM On $250 CMP 170HX

Nvidia's approach is somewhat reminiscent of the old AMD Phenom II and Athlon II days, where some models shipped with disabled cores that could sometimes be unlocked through BIOS tweaks. Similarly, the CMP 170HX 8GB and 10GB models can potentially be unlocked to access their full memory capacity of 64GB and 80GB, respectively, though only 40GB is confirmed to be working from user feedback. As detailed in "A Canary in the Crypto Mine: Defeating Stack Protection in a GPU Secure Coprocessor," Jon Pry's research paper provides the technical blueprint for bypassing Nvidia’s Falcon security microprocessor, which tools like CMP Unlocked are based on.

One of the most remarkable aspects of this exploit is that it is entirely software-based and requires no physical modifications to the CMP 170HX. It sounds like a joke, but you are literally downloading more memory for your graphics card. It’s important to note, however, that the amount of memory you can successfully unlock and maintain stability will vary. The issue is that there is no way to know whether the locked-away memory is fully functional because Nvidia did so for product segmentation, or whether the chipmaker deactivated it due to physical defects. It's a similar situation to another repurposed crypto device, AMD's BC-250, that we recently tested.

Beyond unlocking the hidden memory, the software exploit can also restore processing power to the CMP 170HX’s Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), which increases its computational performance. Another notable benefit is the upgrade to a faster PCIe interface speed. The CMP 170HX can now operate at PCIe 2.0 x4 speeds, a significant upgrade from its original restriction to PCIe 1.0 x4. There is still untapped performance, though. Nvidia implemented hard restrictions on the CMP 170HX’s connectivity by limiting the accelerator to just four PCIe lanes and physically omitting 12 capacitors from the PCB. If you solder the missing capacitors to the PCB, it could unlock full PCIe x16 bandwidth and enable the accelerator's maximum throughput, though we haven't seen that in action.

The CMP 170HX launched with a hefty price tag of $4,300 at the height of the cryptocurrency mining boom. Nowadays, they used to sell for around $250 on eBay. However, when word of the exploit got out, they immediately jumped to over $1,000, a 4X increase in market value. Nvidia’s A100, offered in 40GB and 80GB PCIe variants, starts at around $3,500 and $11,500, respectively. The CMP 170HX is attractive for AI users because it costs a fraction of the A100 but can offer the same memory capacity, though the silicon lottery is not always generous. Regardless, Nvidia’s Ampere architecture is now two generations old. Even with added memory capacity, it cannot match the raw computational performance or efficiency of Hopper or Blackwell.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

They're so full of errors that Congressional lawyers are spending a lot of time trying to fix them:

The House Office of Legislative Counsel is swamped with AI-generated bills that are riddled with wrong terms, incorrect citations and other mistakes, according to Politico. More and more representatives' offices are using publicly available general AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude to write their legislative proposals. Politico's sources said lawyers at the US House Office of Legislative Counsel (OLC) are spending more time to review and rewrite them than they would have if they had written the bills from scratch.

The sources explained that AI tools tend to miss nuances and tiny crucial details, which could have a huge effect on how a law is interpreted and enacted. Wade Ballou, who headed the office for almost 10 years until 2024, said AI can't determine whether a pot of money should be a "tax credit, tax deduction, tax exclusion or a grant," for instance. Sometimes, its classification of "state" only includes the 50 states, which would exclude DC and tribal nations from federal programs. A lawyer who worked with the office also told Politico that AI would incorrectly cite previous statutes in drafts.

AI-generated proposals are also creating a different kind of problem: Congressional staffers reportedly aren't as deeply familiar with what their bills are about and hope to accomplish anymore. Because they use AI to draft their proposals, they're not forced to "learn the issue as deeply."

In order to keep up with the increasing workload brought about by AI-drafted bills, the OLC is, well... exploring the use of AI to "improve efficiencies." A working group within the office has developed an AI tool called "Comparative Print Suite" that can help staffers visualize how a proposal will change current laws. Unlike general AI tools, it returns an error if it can't figure out where changes in the proposal should be made, preventing hallucinations from making it into draft bills.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

The custom build from Microsoft's Chinese joint venture was scheduled to retire in February 2027:

China Reportedly Orders State Agencies To Uninstall Its Government-Only Edition Of Windows 10 — Beijing Accelerates Planned Retirement Over Data Security Concerns

The affected software is the government edition developed by C&M Information Technologies (CMIT), a joint venture set up in 2016 between Microsoft and state-owned China Electronics Technology Group, with the Chinese side holding the majority stake. The build is based on Windows 10 Enterprise but strips out OneDrive and other consumer-facing components, disables certain native functions, keeps updates and activation inside China, and lets government users substitute Chinese encryption algorithms for Microsoft's standard cryptography. China Customs and Shanghai's Commission of Economy and Informatization were among the first pilot customers when the edition launched in 2017.

Beijing banned Windows 8 from government procurement in 2014, ordered a three-year replacement of foreign PCs in government offices starting in 2019, and in 2022 told central agencies and state firms to scrap foreign-branded computers entirely. The domestic stack built to absorb that demand now includes Kylin V10, UnionTech's UOS, and Huawei's HarmonyOS 5 laptops, and it reaches down to the silicon in systems like Huawei's Qingyun desktops running the homegrown Kirin 9000X.

StatCounter's traffic data shows how little of that campaign has reached the consumer market. Windows accounted for 87.64% of Chinese desktop web traffic in July 2026, and Windows 10 alone still made up 43.56% of Chinese Windows usage, compared with 50.01% for Windows 11, ten months after mainstream support ended. Roughly two in five Chinese desktops are currently running an unsupported Microsoft OS, the gap that CMIT's edition was meant to close for government users.

It's not clear what the scope of the new directive is, with Bloomberg's reporting covering “some” state-linked entities. CMIT didn't respond to the outlet's request for comment.

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Atlassian, a software company, is planning on building a new tower in Sydney called Atlassian Central at a cost of $1.4 billion and standing tall at 180 metres. With Australia in the grip of a WFH age of enlightenment this construction is truly an outlier.

Co-founder and CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said the primary objective was to "self-fund further investment in AI and enterprise sales" while strengthening the company's financial profile.

[...] Asked about the tower's occupancy and purpose after laying off hundreds of employees, the company gave news.com.au a fascinating insight into how working in the tower will play out day-to-day.

Gina Creegan, Atlassian's head of workplace, said the tower has been designed for the "future of work from day one".

"The timber habitats bring that vision to life, connecting spaces that are purpose-built for how we work," she said.

"Instead of traditional desk rows, workspaces are designed around distinct modes of work: deep focus, collaboration, social connection and recharge."

It is understood that each of these states of work will have its own dedicated floors inside the building — with focus rooms, sprint rooms, small meeting rooms and customer and event spaces across dedicated floors.

They're also designed to feel like vertical neighbourhoods, with park floors, terraces and natural materials designed to give space to reset between different modes of work.

The idea is that workers will move between these sections of the building throughout the day rather than sitting at one assigned desk.

Under the company's "Team Anywhere" policy, it's understood there will be no attendance quotas or a mandated number of office days, so the building will not be built for a fixed attendance target or desk per employee ratios.

Original Submission

One of the great hopes for BEV development has been solid-state / Lithium-metal batteries. No goo in the electrolyte, ~double the energy density of Li-ion batteries and faster charging to finally end the BEV range discussion. Looks like this is still in the future. MotorTrend has a summary of current development activity at a variety of battery and car companies. Here's a sampling, many more at the link: https://www.motortrend.com/features/solid-state-batteries-future-cars

... perhaps the industry's biggest shift during the past two years is that the race has become less "solid-state versus liquid-electrolyte lithium-ion" and more "semi-solid first, all-solid later." This effectively delays resolution of the toughest challenges—like how to keep a solid electrolyte/separator in sufficiently intimate contact with the electrodes to work properly (which often requires high pressure). Today, semi-solid architectures are already bringing significant benefits to vehicles, while pure ceramic/sulfide lithium-metal batteries (which claim the wildest range/recharging stats) remain years away. Here's a roundup of the leaders:

Battery-swapping Chinese automaker Nio produced 150-kWh WELION semi-solid-state packs boasting 260-Wh/kg energy density in 2024. The idea was for owners to rent these packs for long trips, but low demand halted production after a few hundred were produced.

China's SAIC teamed with battery supplier QingTao Energy to produce a semi-solid-state pack for IM Motors' L6 Lightyear Max. Its 130-kWh pack is rated for 621 miles of (CLTC) range, recharging 249 miles' worth in 12 minutes at 400 kW.

Toyota is working with Idemitsu Kosan to develop an all-solid-state cell using an undisclosed high-energy cathode, a sulfide solid electrolyte, and an undisclosed (likely lithium) anode. A pilot electrolyte plant is under construction, and the supply chain is being built.
[...]
Samsung SDI is working with BMW and others on a reportedly oxide-based all-solid-state anodeless/lithium-metal design with a high-nickel cathode. A pilot production line is running, with production gearing up for an announced target of 2027 mass production.

VW Group's PowerCo has teamed with QuantumScape to develop a novel cell design using a pure copper current collector that plates lithium metal during its first charging cycle, a solid ceramic separator that prevents dendrite growth from the anode, and a liquid catholyte that maintains contact with the cathode particles under roughly 50 psi of stack pressure. It's been demonstrated in a Ducati motorcycle, and manufacturing license agreements are signed.
[...]

I'm sticking with my older ICE cars for now. As well as quick fill-ups, they are also pre-touch screen and much of the other recent slop (IMO) that has been added to basic transportation.
There are hints that some car companies are coming to their senses and going back to actual knobs and buttons, after realizing that a touch screen is not the right user interface for a moving vehicle. If that continues, I might be in the market for a new car again (the last new car I bought was in 1992).

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Destroying books to train AI models is 'all' the Vegas warehouse does:

An operation exposed by an AirTag

Employees who spoke to 404 Media said they spend their time at the facility cutting the spines off of books and feeding them into a scanner. VGT3 is reportedly part of another, larger facility in Las Vegas called LAS8. Its purpose, according to the employees who spoke to 404 media, is solely to cut the spines off books and scan them. "All we do is scan books," one employee told the outlet.

Often, these large orders contain a scattershot of different books. An independent bookseller in Ireland, for example, received an order for 5,000 books that they suspected was for training AI. “Some was high-quality non-fiction, like A History of Connemara, and the next thing might be The Eddie Hobbs Guide to your SSIA,” Tomás Kenny of Kennys Bookshop said at the time. 404 Media says that employees at VGT3 are required to scan the ISBN (barcode) of each book, lending credibility to the theory that AI companies are working through a list of every book that has ever been published.

Or, at least, every book with an ISBN. A bookseller told 404 Media that these large orders "never" include rare books that don't have an ISBN.

Earlier this year, court filings revealed Anthropic's 'Project Panama,' which kicked off in 2024. Documents as part of those filings make the project's purpose clear: "Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world," said an internal planning document. A judge ruled that Anthropic was allowed to use books to train its AI models. However, it was fined $1.5 billion for keeping 7 million pirated books in a central library. In a 2025 lawsuit against Meta, it was revealed that it had pirated nearly 82TB of books.

Scanning books en masse is nothing new. In 2005, Google spearheaded Google Books by scanning out-of-copyright titles from an on-campus library using specialized scanners. The books were then returned. Presumably, Google made use of some type of V-shaped scanner, which lays a book out naturally so as not to disturb the spine and binding.

In the case of VGT3, 404 reports that employees cut off the spine of the book before scanning, presumably to feed the pages flat into an industrial scanner. The insatiable hunger for data in frontier AI models seems to be moving at a faster pace than Google's early book digitization efforts.

It's hard to say why a facility like VGT3 operates in this way, though it likely comes down to cost. As major companies like Meta and Anthropic have been caught with a library of pirated books, they now need to buy them. And when purchasing thousands of books at a time, it's probably much cheaper to get secondhand copies from marketplaces like Biblio than it is to spend full price on digital versions of those books (if digital versions exist in the first place).

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Secret parameter allowed hackers to steal passwords when a target clicked on a link:

It's not every day that attackers can force a frontier AI model to cough up user passwords and other sensitive data without user confirmation. That's exactly what researchers recently did to Microsoft 365 Copilot Enterprise. Even more unusual is the source they tapped to discover the critical vulnerability that made their exploit possible. Rather than employing reverse engineering or other traditional vulnerability-hunting methods, they asked Copilot. The LLM assistant readily complied.

Researchers at security firm Varonis knew they wanted to create an exploit that would exfiltrate user data when a user did nothing more than click on a link. Like most AI assistants today, Copilot steadfastly refused and made clear that sensitive prompts like that require explicit user consent in the form of a gesture, such as pressing a return key or other key. In response, the researchers peppered Copilot with questions about the guardrails that required user confirmation before the assistant can execute powerful commands.

The dialog was like a game of 20 questions. Each answer provided a new clue that divulged information about the complex safety mechanism. Why was auto-execution impossible, they asked. What URL structures and deep links were involved? What happens when a page is loaded with input already in the prompt field? Each answer provided a deeper view into the guardrail and its limits. Eventually, Copilot provided a stunning Microsoft trade secret—an undocumented prompt parameter that completely bypassed the requirement for user consent.

"At the beginning, Copilot kept refusing, but every refusal revealed technical details about its internal architecture," Varonis Senior Researcher Lior Adar said in an interview. "Copilot eventually disclosed undocumented parameters. I took those parameters and used them for prompts for running automatically."

The parameter was the string ?autorun=1. When accompanied by the separate, well-known parameter ?q=, the researchers' prompt silently fired the moment the target clicked on the malicious URL. Microsoft silently mitigated the vulnerability in February, three months after Varonis reported it, by no longer allowing ?q= to inject text into the chatbot input. The user instead had to click and type manually, a requirement that prevented third-party browser integrations from using the parameter as intended. Microsoft introduced more comprehensive fixes on Tuesday.

Like most AI assistants, Copilot can receive prompts that are embedded into a URL. The base part of the URL can allow the LLM to open, say, Gmail. Parameters and text to the right in the URL can then instruct the assistant to summarize inbox contents or begin drafting a new message. As noted already, the commands aren't supposed to execute without user approval.

With the Copilot revelation of the undocumented parameter, the researchers now had a simple means to circumvent the protection and inject a prompt directly into Copilot. The format of the URL looked like this:

https://copilot.microsoft.com/?q=&autorun=1

canopic jug writes:

Developer Bradley Taunt has written up an overview Raphael Sadowski's recent changes to OpenBSD's HTTP daemon aka httpd(8):

Running relayd alongside httpd on your OpenBSD web servers is no longer necessary for injecting HTTP security headers. Thanks to the incredible work by rsadowski@ we now have the ability to set our security headers directly inside httpd. Pretty awesome, right?

See also the manual page for the configuration file httpd.conf(5).

Raphael himself wrote about his work related to the ongoing evolution of relayd(8) and httpd(8) a few weeks ago:

That mirror inspired me to create my own. I wanted to make it easier for new and young contributors. I also wanted to reach the community beyond the OpenBSD mailing lists. Also, I work on a git mirror of the CVS tree. (CVS and I will never be friends. I started my career with SVN, which was painful enough. No more version control pain.)

Development happens primarily on the Gothub instance. The other locations are kept in sync: [...]

The OpenBSD project has continued to emphasize portability, standardization, correctness, proactive security, and integrated cryptography for over 30 years. Several important projects seen outside OpenBSD, such as OpenSSH, also stem from the project.

Previously:
(2026) 'Please Do Not Vibe F--- Up This Software': Broken Backups Spark AI Coding Row in Rsync Project
(2023) Detailed Notes on Working With OpenBSD on a ThinkPad X270
(2023) Privilege Drop, Privilege Separation, and Restricted-Service Operating Mode in OpenBSD
(2022) Fuzzing Ping(8) ... and Finding a 24 Year Old Bug
(2021) Recent and Not So Recent Changes in OpenBSD That Make Life Better
(2020) The OpenBSD Project's 25th Anniversary
(2018) OpenBSD on a Laptop
(2018) OpenBSD Chief De Raadt Says No Easy Fix For New Intel CPU Bug
(2014) OpenBSD Developers Fork OpenSSL, Create LibreSSL

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/08/18/tim-king-amigados-royalty-dies-aged-70/5289101

According to an AmigaNews report, King's family said he passed at the end of July. King was a superb programmer – although he accomplished rather more than that.

His most widely experienced work was a key component of the original Commodore Amiga's operating system. His port of Cambridge University's TRIPOS OS to the Motorola 68000 CPU became AmigaDOS. His rapid work getting it running on prototype Amiga hardware helped Commodore launch the machine in 1985 after its in-house OS project failed to deliver. As he put it himself: "As a result I have the distinction of having written software used by over 2 million users."

TRIPOS is not well known today, although its Wikipedia article provides a useful overview. King did not create TRIPOS: it was written by Cambridge boffin Dr Martin Richards. TRIPOS was written in the BCPL programming language, which Richards also created. The first recorded "hello, world" example was written in BCPL, which was also used to develop software for the Xerox Alto. Today, however, it is mostly known as the immediate ancestor of the C programming language. This page of scans from Australian Personal Computer magazine gives a good description of TRIPOS.

While a researcher at the University of Bath, King ported TRIPOS from the DEC PDP-11 to the new Motorola 68000 CPU. His next job was at Bristol-based 68000 development tools specialist MetaComCo. For that company, he adapted his new 68K version of TRIPOS to the SAGE IV machines that MetaComCo used.

Meanwhile, Commodore was developing the Amiga in the US, but its in-house operating system for the new hardware, known as CAOS, was badly behind schedule. Commodore went looking for outside help, and it approached MetaComCo, as this Nosher.net potted history documents.

owl writes:

https://fabiensanglard.net/quake_shareware_cd/index.html

In the mid-90s the coolest thing to buy for a PC, besides the incredibly expensive Intel Pentium, was a CD-ROM drive. With their capacity of 640 MiB (three times the storage of PC HDD at the time), CDs allowed enthusiasts to step into a world of multimedia, made of high-resolution 640x480 256 colors palette-indexed photos[1], VOC soundtracks, and play with Video For Windows butter-smooth 12 fps 240x179 videos[2][3] lasting up to several seconds.

...

By June 1996, after three years of hard work, id Software had completed their next title, Quake. As for their previous title, they were going to release both a shareware version and a full version of their game. Since it used a mere 22 MiB of storage, people at id Software had the idea of leveraging the remaining capacity of a CD-ROM. Why not include encrypted versions of the full id catalogue of games? Not only this would cut out the middlemen, it would give instant access to gamers with a simple phone call and a credit card.

The concept was implemented. The CD was announced[4] on July 3, 1996 and released on August 30th[5]. The hacker group GNOMON released Quakecrk.zip only 39 days later[6]. The archive contained QCRACK.EXE, a tool allowing to decrypt every single game on the CD-ROM.

Original Submission