Locksmith Author Unmasked?

[CC Rider <alaskacc@yahoo.com>]

Full article here (Robert X. Cringely):
http://www.cringely.com/2011/01/verizons-iphone-story-isnt-so-black-and-white/

Steve Wozniak invented the Apple ][ disk drive with its Integrated Woz
Machine (IWM) controller, which was revolutionary for its time. And
unlike competing disk drives (these were floppies, by the way — hard
drives and optical drives had yet to make it to PCs) the Apple drives
had copy protection built-in. That is until Woz decided to defeat his
own design by inventing the first nibble copier so he could copy his
VisiCalc disks.

Competing floppies of the time used hard sectors determined by little
holes punched in the disk. Copying those floppies was easy because it
was simple to see where the sectors were. But the IWM ignored hard
sectors completely, using its own sectoring scheme that could be
varied by a command embedded on the disk and read by the IWM firmware.
This copy protection was finally defeated by the nibble copier, which
also ignored sectors and simply made perfect copies of an entire disk,
one little nibble (half-byte) at a time.

Having invented the nibble copier, which was sold under the name
Locksmith, Woz then went on to defeat it, again undermining his own
design. His motivation in this case was two-fold: 1) to have fun, and;
2) to keep Locksmith disks, themselves, from being copied. He did this
by embedding a sequence on the Locksmith disks that effectively said,
“do not copy this disk.” It helps when you control both the software
and the hardware upon which it runs, eh?

Eventually Woz and Henry Roberts developed a further copy protection
scheme that hid the sector information in a pseudo-random number. That
was about 30 years ago and last we heard Woz was trying to defeat
himself again by using heat from a laundry iron to essentially push
bits from one floppy through to another, again making a perfect copy.

Here is where we return to the present. Andy Hertzfeld, who told me
this story, predicted that Woz would never be able to copy a floppy
using an iron. But Woz has yet to capitulate on this, claiming that —
30 years later — he is still trying.