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Comment by bt848 | Hacker News Reader

What would you do with a totally open specification?

It's easier to recover corrupted media if you know everything about the underlying format and protocols. As an example, I was able to recover a partition that was partially overwritten by just a few sectors by finding a backup copy of the superblock and writing it into the correct place armed only with hexdump and dd. That would have been impossible without detailed info about ext2/3/4 available.

Also look at the floppy imagers people have made, that operate at the magnetic flux level.

"That would have been impossible without detailed info about ext2/3/4 available."

Try telling that to IKARI+TALENT, Legend, Skid Row, PaRaDoX and all the other cracking groups from Commodore64, Amiga, ATARI ST, PlayStations, Nintendos, groups which competed on who is going to one-file a program or convert a secret disk coding format to a regular filesystem, with all the protections disabled and the programs bug and NTSC+PAL fixed while they were at it...

The point is to be capable of doing this without being some sort of superstar you can name who's dedicated themselves to the craft.

There is no replacement for dedication to the craft.

I mean, there is hella replacement for craft: industrial precision. Like you can write fucking fast code now without having to ASM that shit. And no one is building a revolutionary microprocessor with his hands. That shit is going in the machine.

The machine cannot replace craftsmanship. Soldering transistors and writing small, fast code are two completely unrelated activities.

"Easier". Yes, you could reverse engineer all that information yourself. It just takes ages.

> It just takes ages.

It doesn't have to be slow, sometimes it can be quick, but the precondition is that it takes the most talented engineers in the field to do it...

They competed on both quality and speed, as in who will be the first to 0-day the program which had to work 100%. Whoever got the 100% crack first won, anybody else's crack would get nuked. Them's the rules.

So, either we have gross incompetence across the entire information technology industry in general if it's impossible or slow, or the people disassembling custom filesystems and protections, bug fixing binaries and adding custom speed-loaders in record time are from another planet. Which one is it?

This is like asserting that because Usain Bolt exists nobody needs to drive a car.

I've no idea who Usain Bolt is (or what it is, if it is a thing), so no clue what you are attempting to tell me with that allegory. No rows returned from the database. To me, it looks like

"cats are furry. Your argument is invalid."

Now, is "Hacker News" supposed to be where the information technology elite gathers, or is that a gross misnomer these days?

I don't think it's grossly unfair to assume people know the name of the fastest human being in the world.

It's also fine not to know, but your comment assumes we know who or what, for example, "allegory", "database", "cats" and "misnomer" are. My point is that every discussion assumes some knowledge, and if you lack it you can just look it up, or ask, without making allegories about cats and databases and huffing and puffing about information technology elites.

Is this a site for IT elite or isn't it?

You're deliberately missing the point just to name-drop some scene names?

No, I'm making a point: if "Hacker News" is supposed to be where the information technology elite is, then what kind of "elite" is it if editing a filesystem in situ is considered impossible without the source code? Or is anyone who can turn on a computer these days and boot some kind of an OS program to dabble with the computer a hacker now, so the bar has been dropped to the ground altogether? Are we now all inclusive here too, is that how bad things have gotten? Maybe I'm completely wrong, and hacking has been changed so nowadays it's completely disassociated from being competent?

> It's easier to recover corrupted media if you know everything about the underlying format and protocols.

Sorry, I'm still not sure how knowing the LTO spec would be helpful.

You are basically asking for the "Layer 1" documentation of how the tape head write to the tape media? Given that you can only access the media via a drive, wouldn't it be sufficient to simply know the SCSI commands (T-10 SSC-x) to send? You'd then have to know the file format of the backup software (e.g., tar).

Let's pray we have the drives in 40 years. I think we're already seeing media lost with the Enchanced CD things.

Why? You're not expected to find a tape in the attic 40 years from now and insert it into a drive you just bought at Fry's and restore the data from it.

If you do care about the data on any given medium a few years from now, you copy it then to a current medium. And so on.

This works fine as long new media are cheap, easily available and higher density than the old. As has been the last sixty years. If this progress ever halts or reverses (due to some man-made or natural disaster, including a major economical recession), we're screwed.

Doesn't matter what is expected to happen. Some time in the future someone needs to recover data from some old medium, proprietary format hinders that effort significantly and unnecessarily.

Not to mention the closed format causes reduced competition in making better or cheaper devices, which is another downside.

The parent commentor is probably talking about, in this case, wanting to know what would be required to write their own “external” tape drive firmware/driver, to post-decode an analogue flux reading (ala https://applesaucefdc.com/) of an LTO tape into the same digital data-stream that the drive itself would output. I.e., what would be required to write an “LTO tape drive emulator” to interface with hardware/drivers that expect to be talking to an LTO drive (perhaps in the context of emulating that software itself.)

Read it?

Just noticed your username. Any connection to the TV decoder chip of the same name?

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