/dev/null productions

All right, I need to vent, and this web site is closest. This is a rant; you have been warned.

My PS3 has joined the thousands of others that have perished under mysterious circumstances. What circumstances? Well, the system hardlocked to the point where no amount of holding the power button would shut the thing down. Turned the thing off, then back on. . . and lo and behold, it suddenly won’t read a disc. I don’t even get an error message; it’s like the drive isn’t even there. Supposedly a bug in the firmware is the culprit; there’s a lawsuit out in California that I’ll be watching pretty carefully for the next few months, I think.

So, anyway, I was going through and backing up my data this evening in preparation of parting with the PS3 (and $150) to send it to the service facility for repair. Naturally, the PS3 backup utility failed, so I had to resort to copying my save game data over to an external hard drive by hand. I reached my file for Demon’s Souls (a game I’ve put a ridiculous number of hours into, considering the short time I’ve had it), went to copy it. . . and discovered that the save game file was copy protected. No way to back it up.

I can understand (but strongly disagree with) putting DRM on music, movies, and games. My question, though, is why the hell would anybody feel some kind of burning desire to copy protect a save file? “Hey, you can use those bytes to reconstruct part of our intellectual property! We can’t let you do that!”

Yeah, this entire situation is pathetic.

Jim.Opinion.FROM_SOFTWARE = Jim.Opinion.SONY = INT_MIN;

Ever since picking up my laptop, I have had a concern about having my stories on such a portable machine. I bought myself a Bauer-like man-purse, so this laptop basically goes everywhere I do. It’s convenient with the lappy being so light, but it IS a laptop. It’s not hard to take, mount the drive on an external system, and voila… all my stuff is in the open.

I’ve been keeping an eye out for a solution, and I think I found one after some Googlin’.

Some details:
• OS: Debian-based distribution
• Kernel:2.6.28-15-generic
• Encryption used: AES
• Prerequisite Packages:
  • loop-aes-utils

  Create an Encrypted Filesystem
  The first thing to do is create a loopable filesystem that can be mounted by the kernel. Find some place on your filesystem that’s nice and out of the way… or that’s plainly obvious, since we are using encryption. I threw mine in my Documents folder. Nice and hidden where absolutely everyone will find it. But meh.

  Create the filesystem image with the following command:
  dd if=/dev/urandom of=imageName.img bs=1M count=100


  According to the article, using /dev/urandom makes the file a bit more indistinguishable from other used filesystem sectors, but /dev/zero works fine as well.

  Next, assign the filesystem image to a loopback device:

  sudo losetup -e aes /dev/loop0 /path/to/imageName.img

  If the kernel complains about invalid arguments, make sure that your encryption libraries are installed (IE: AES, Twofish, etc) and that the modules are loaded. If not, run the following command:

  sudo modprobe aes

  Keep in mind that for AES, you’ll need a password of 20 characters.

  Now that the image is associated with a loopback device, create the filesystem:

  sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/loop0

  Mount the Filesystem
  Now that you’ve created your filesystem image, it needs to be properly mounted in order to be used. You can do this by passing the encryption argument to the mount command:

  mount -o loop,encryption=aes /path/to/imageName.img /path/to/mount

  Using this Filesystem
  My filesystem will hold some rather sensitive data… my work. Mostly I’ll toss my stories in there. We’ll see what else I plug in. A nice feature will be to tie the mounting process in with the system log-in. We’ll see if that works out.

  I did throw a nice li’l launcher on my taskbar with a lock icon. Makes it feel all nice and special.

  RESOURCE: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6481