Security Essentials for Fansub Teams

This is not a blog I wanted to write. Fansubbing is a volunteer activity, and I would like to believe that my fellow volunteers are trustworthy. However, there have been a number of attacks on fansub teams' archives and servers - not a huge number, but more than just one or two. These attacks have all been inside jobs. A disgruntled fansubber uses his or her credentials or a leaked password to get into a file repository and then proceeds to delete everything in sight, for the "lulz." The damage is severe, immediate, and often irreperable. For example, several years ago the Frostii archive was wiped by a smart-ass (who even boasted about it), and many of the scripts have never been recovered. Another major attack occurred just recently, impacting multiple groups.

Therefore, I reluctantly conclude that fansubbing, like any Internet-accessible project these days, must be run on a "zero trust" model. Today, fansub team repositories are typically wide open. For example, if an FTP server is used, everyone on the team uses the same login and password and has full read-write-delete access to everything. If DropBox is used, anyone on the shared folders can read or delete anything. (DropBox logs all actions, though, and allows the DropBox owner to undo spurious or unintended deletes.) Instead, a team's shared data repositories have to be treated like critical business data and protected from both outside and inside attacks. This is going to increase the administrative burden on the repository keepers, just as it does in the business world. The result will be that less fansubbing gets done, but I don't see an alternative.

So here are some tips for better security in fansubbing.

• Backup, backup, backup. As in business, there's no better palliative for a data disaster than having multiple copies. Ideally, the repository provider should have a backup service. If that's not feasible, fansub teams should designate multiple team members to keep local copies of scripts, work raws, and if need be, ISOs or BDMVs. This can run to terabytes of data, so splitting the work among multiple people helps. It's also possible to backup to public clouds like Amazon Web Services, usually at fairly low cost.
• Avoid common credentials. DropBox already requires individual logins. An FTP should have individual logins for each team member. In the worst case, this will identify (after the fact, alas) who misbehaved.
• Use access controls. Individual FTP users should have write/delete access only where needed. Archives should be read-only except for the FTP administrator. DropBox doesn't have access controls, but at least the DropBox owner can undo a mass delete.
• Consider using a source management system for scripts. Source control systems, like GitHub, allow illegitimate changes (including deletes) to be rolled back. They also support individual rather than common credentials.
• Keep your repository server up to date. Even though Linux is less subject to attack than Windows, it's just as vulnerable, as recent security issues such as ShellShock and BASHed demonstrate.

In short, as Herod said to the Emperor in the I, Claudius TV show, "Trust no one, my friend. No one." This has now become necessary, even among "friends."
 

In the Queue at Orphan Fansubs

Time for an update:

• D4 Princess. This utterly forgettable short (8 minutes per episode) series has been abandoned several times, and the existing subs are not very accurate. The Orphan version will include a checked translation of the first six episodes, and new translations of the others. It will use tipota's excellent encodes. Status: Previews translated; all episodes translation-checked, edited, typeset, and into QC.
• Lunn Flies into the Wind. The third Lion Book. Checked translation, ARR encode. Status: at TLC.
• Tokimeki Tonight. A joint project with Saitei to finish the last eight episodes of this series. All episodes are translated. Status: 27-28 at QC; 29-31 at TLC; 32-34 at editing.

I'm still looking for raws for Hidamari no Ki, and I wouldn't mind getting my hands on BDMVs for the Cosprayers trilogy. Meanwhile, DVDs for Gosenzosama Banbanzai have surfaced, and we're looking at redoing the Ureshii-Frostii version on modern encodes.

[Updated 12-Dec-2014]

Kunoichi Bakumatsu Kitan

Kunoichi Bakumatsu Kitan (The Bakumatsu Ninja Mystery, but known in North America as The Last Kunoichi) is a 2003-2004 hentai anime. It was licensed by Adult Source Media, but only the first episode (of two) was released. The second episode has never been subtitled in English, until now.

Kunoichi Bakumatsu Kitan takes places during the late Bakumatsu, after the opening of Japan in the 1850s. The forces of the Tokugawa shogunate and its military bureaucracy, the bakafu, are struggling against a rising tide of revolt, triggered by the shogunate’s weak response to foreign intervention. To quell rebellion, they have formed an elite samurai police force, known as the Shinsengumi. On the other side are an assortment of rebels, including Imperial nationalists who want to expel the foreigners (known as the Ishin Shinshi), idealists, republicans, and others. It was a period of intrigue, bloodshed, assassinations, and the occasional pitched battle. It culminated in the defeat of the Shogunate and the restoration of Imperial power (the Meiji restoration).

The first volume of Kunoichi deals with events leading up to the Ikedeya incident, at which units of the Shinsengumi broke up a meeting of nationalists, killing several of them and driving others to suicide. The second volume deals with the assassination of Sakamoto Ryouma, which was never solved. Into these real events Kunoichi inserts a fictional female ninja team made up of Ayame, Kikyou, and Kaede. The series was meant to continue, but it breaks off abruptly at the end of the second volume.

Historical characters 

Masuya Yuasa Kiemon (aka Furutaka Shuntaro) was a samurai from Oumi. He was captured and brutally tortured by the Shinsengumi and revealed the location of the Ishin Shinshi meeting at Ikedaya.

Hijikata Toshizou was the Vice-Commander of the Shinsengumi.

Okita Souji was Captain of the First Unit of the Shinsengumi.

Yoshida Toshimaro of Choushu – Ayame’s lover in the anime – committed suicide in the aftermath of the Ikedaya incident.

Okada Izou was an assassin.

Shimado Sakon, regent in the Koujo clan, was killed during the Bakumatsu.

Sakamoto Ryouma – Kikyou’s lover in the anime – was a nationalist and an idealist. He hoped for a Japan without feudal distinctions. He was assassinated by unknown assailants.

Miyabe Tezou, a nationalist and an alleged ringleader of a plot to burn Kyoto, was killed in the Ikedaya incident.

Mochizuki Kameyata, a nationalist, committed suicide in the aftermath of the Ikedaya incident.

Yamanauchi Youda was daimyo of Tosa.

Goto Shoujirou was a nationalist in Tosa. He survived the Bakumatsu to become a prominent politician in post-restoration Japan.

Kondo Isami was the other Vice-Commander of the Shingengumi and the leader of the raid on Ikedaya.

Ito Kashitaro was a staff officer in the Shinsengumi.

Harada Sanosuke was Captain of the Tenth Unit of the Shinsengumi.

Yamazaki Susumu was an officer and spy in the Shinsengumi. 

Fictional characters 

Ayame, Kaede, Kikyou – female ninjas

Shirokuma Cafe, An Overview (and DMCA Magnet)

(Update, 2017). I've had to rewrite this innocuous article twice because some automated robot is sending DCMA notices about it to Google. I have no clue what attracted the robot's notice, but I'm removing the Japanese title, any mention of where it was streamed, and so on, even though this is basically a review of the series. Baka!

Shirokuma Cafe (Polar Bear Cafe) was one of the bright spots in anime for a full year (April 2012 to March 2013) and also one of the more neglected series of the time. It was streamed in English, but no fansub group picked it up. Fansubbers now hold the series in great affection, but at the time it aired, they were put off by its "family anime" status and by the formidable number of puns in the dialog, which seemed beyond localization. As a result, the streaming version remains the only subtitled version, and as usual, it has no song translations and primitive typesetting.

Why is Shirokuma Cafe so good? First of all, it has great characters. The four leads (Polar Bear, Panda, Penguin, and the human waitress Sasako) are all well-characterized, idiosyncratic, and endearing. Polar Bear is a calm and level-headed café master who can troll with the best. Panda is the classic self-absorbed teenager.  Penguin is an endlessly talkative bore.  Sasako is sweet but a bit dim. They are supplemented by an entire menagerie of animal and human sidekicks who have recurring roles and are all voiced by brilliant seiryuu: Llama, Grizzly, Tortoise, Wolf, Tiger, Sloth, Panda Mama and Sister Mei Mei, Mr. Full-Time Panda, Handa the zookeeper (who has a crush on Sasako), the seven female  penguins inadvertently courted by Penguin, Mr. Tree Kangaroo the master coffee roaster and his red squirrel assistants, and on and on.

Second, the humor and the stories are all character-driven. The characters bounce off each other in endless combinations. While there are themes (Panda’s desire to find a job with no work; Penguin’s disastrous quest for a mate), there is no plot to speak of. If I have a sneaking fondness for the episodes set at Grizzly’s Bar (known, of course, as Bar Grizzly) and its carnivorous habitués, those are just some of the many fine sketches that the show offers.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to do a Blu-Ray version of Shirokuma Cafe. Ruell has done a decent set of encodes for that. However, there are still formidable obstacles. To me, the problem is not the puns – I thought streaming version handled them the right way, with no attempt at localization – but the scale of the project. All fifty episodes need to be retimed and then typeset.  There are three OPs and twelve EDs to be translated, as well as a special. That’s as many episodes as Orphan has done in the last three years.

So in truth, this blog entry is a recruiting ad. If you loved Shirokuma Cafe as much as I did, would like to see a subtitled Blu-Ray version, and can help with the key work items (particularly retiming the episodes), drop me a note or contact me on IRC. Polar Bear, Penguin, Panda and the whole menagerie need your help.  You’ll get a chance to revisit one of the best anime comedies of the past few years, do a good deed, and brush up your coffee-making skills too.

Adachi Mitsuru Overload

I've been working on Adachi Mitsuru series for a long time, seemingly forever. Hiatari Ryoukou started up more than two-and-a-half years ago; Miyuki, more than 18 months ago. Frankly, I didn't expect them to take all that long, based on Yawara, but for "reasons," the projects have stalled out repeatedly. Working on them in parallel has introduced a sense of perpetual deja vu, because one Adachi series looks very much like another, and nowhere is this more true than Hiatari Ryoukou and Miyuki.

Both shows are slice-of-life comedies, at the center of which is a love triangle. In Hiatari Ryoukou, the heroine, Kishimoto Kasumi, is torn between her long-term boyfriend, Muraki Katsuhiko, now a college student, and a boy who lives at her boarding house and attends her high school, Takasugi Yuusaku. In Miyuki, the hero, Wakamatsu Masoto, is torn between his high-school crush, Kashima Miyuki, and his newly returned step-sister, Wakamatsu Miyuki, to whom he is conveniently not related by blood. The character designs are interchangeable, with Yuusaku a dead ringer for Masoto, and Kasumi a dead ringer for Wakamatsu Miyuki. (That's a big spoiler for who will end up with whom, by the way.) Both shows feature some amount of high-school baseball, Hiatari Ryoukou fairly seriously, Miyuki just as incidental color. In both shows, the comic sidekick (Mikimoto Shin in Hiatari, Muraki Yoshio in Miyuki) is played by the same seiryuu, Shiozata Kaneto. Hiatari even makes a cameo appearance on a TV screen in episode 30 of Miyuki. See why I'm confused? By the way, so is the mangaka: in a recent interview, Adachi was unable to tell his own heroes apart.

One difference is that Hiatari Ryoukou is actually a complete version of the manga (when the movie is thrown in), but Miyuki stops about two-thirds of the way through. (The manga is completely scanlated, if you want to find out how it all ends.) Perhaps the 1983 audience wouldn't support five cours of Adachi Mitsuri, but after the smashing success of Touch in 1985, there was enough interest to see Hiatari Ryoukou through until the end. Besides, the characters in Hiatari are indistinguishable visually from the characters in Touch, so perhaps the audience thought they were watching the same show. Adachi would revisit the themes of baseball and a love triangle in Slow Step and H2, before moving on to other patterns.

I'd like to move on as well; I've had enough of Adachi for a while. (No, I'm not going to marathon Touch any time soon.) For one thing, Yawara! is out on BluRay, an event which cries out for a pristine new version. If I have to spend close to three years on a series, I'd rather spend it with Yawara-chan and Jigoro, Sayaka and Shinnosuke, Jody, Fujiko, Matsuda and the rest than a cast of characters neither I nor the author can tell apart. I'm sure both Hiatari and Miyuki are enjoyable in their own way, but long acquaintance has stamped out all the fun for me.

Horus (BluRay)

After expounding at some length on why I'd never give credit to more than two groups in a file name, how do I explain [tubesoda&neo1024-tipota-Orphan] Taiyou no Ouji -Horus no Daibouken-? All I can say in my defense is that every rule has exceptions, and this needs to be one.

First, though, the movie. Horus no Daibouken (The Great Adventures of Horus, Prince of the Sun, 1968) is one of the early great anime movies from Japan. Directed by the legendary Takahata Isao, it took more than three years to complete and launched the career of Miyazaki Hayao, among others. The project ran so late and so far over budget that the production studio, Toei, allowed it to play in theaters for only ten days and demoted Takahata from directing. He left Toei, as did Miyazaki. After some years working on World Masterpiece Theater adaptations, Takahata joined Ghibli, where he directed the classic Grave of the Fireflies, as well as Only Yesterday, Pom Poko, and My Neighbors the Yamadas. His latest film, Kaguya Hime no Monogatari, has not been subtitled in English.

Horus no Daibouken is an "all-ages" adventure tale set in Scandinavia. The young hero, Horus (anglicized as Hols in some translations), leaves his adopted home and returns to the village of his people to confront the evil demon Grunwald, who is determined to wipe the population from the face of the earth. Horus encounters people good and bad, as well as an enigmatic young girl named Hilda, (spoilers ahead) who despite her beautiful singing is a lot more dangerous than she appears. After thrilling adventures, Horus redeems Hilda, unites the village population to face danger head on, and leads the good guys to victory.

Horus is very much a film of its time. The hero is plucky, brave, and one dimensional. He has a comic animal sidekick. The villain is a black-and-white baddie (literally). There are lots of adorably cute children and lots of songs. Even so, it's terrific. The plot moves along briskly, the action sequences are very well animated, and the musical interludes (like the fish harvest and the wedding celebration) burst with energy. Hilda's songs are beautiful, sad, and more than a touch ambiguous. The ultimate message ("united we stand") is inoffensive and not thrown in the audience's face, but it resonated with the young Japanese of the era. Miyazaki is often called "the Walt Disney of Japan," but that's more about his towering stature in the animation scene than about his style. Horus no Daibouken feels like a classic Disney film, and it leaves you smiling the same way. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Now, back to the file naming. The DVD version of Horus no Daibouken was encoded and subtitled with great care by neo1024 and tubesoda. (Information on the DVD edition, along with a lot of background about the film itself, can be found in the BakaBT torrent.) The subtitles from that version have been used here. tipota encoded the newly-released BluRay. That encode is used here. Orphan retimed the subtitles completely, restyled them, retypeset them (particularly the trailer), and did additional QC. So how can any of these groups be omitted? tubesoda&neo1024's subtitles needed very little work. A few missing lines have been added, and the grammar tweaked here and there, but no more than 30 lines have been modified. tipota's encode is unchanged. On the Orphan side, convexity filled in the few missing lines, I retimed the script, Eternal_Blizzard and I did the typsetting, and CP and Saji provided additional QC. So [tubesoda&neo1024-tipota-Orphan] it is. Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. Or would you prefer [mashup]?

Enjoy Horus no Daibouken in this beautiful BluRay edition!

Maroko, or, Gosenzosama Banbanzai the Movie

Gosenzosama Banbanzai was a six episode OVA that started in Ureshii and finished in Frostii, after Froth-Bite and Ureshii merged. It's a deadpan send-up of the "family dramas" of the 1980s, highly stylized and very dry. The show consists of long set-piece scenes, filled with meandering dialogues, posturing soliloquies, asides to the audience, and pointless songs, punctuated (occasionally) by a great punchline. The intricate long lines, rarely broken by pauses, made editing this show one of the most challenging and difficult tasks of my early fansubbing days. I'm still very fond of it, although I can't watch it end to end. It's simply too bizarre.

As was often the case for OVAs and TV series, Gosenzosama was condensed and released as a movie, Maroko, now brought to you by Orphan Fansubs. Every line of dialog is from the original OVAs; only the additional signs required translation. I've tried to make as few changes as possible. The dialog font is larger, with better margins, and that required condensing or splitting a few lines. The original timing was off in a few places and has been corrected. The QC team turned up a number of mistakes that were missed in the original episodes. If you've seen Gosenzosama, there's not much point in watching Maroko, although the movie raw, encoded directly from a DVD reissue, looks much better than the DivX5 raws that were available to Ureshii and Frostii.

On the other hand, if you only watch Maroko, you're going to miss some of the very best bits in Gosenzosama. In particular, every episode of the OVAs begins with a long disquisition on a bird species and how its habits (sort of) relate to the human behavior in the episode. These standalone vignettes are hilarious and set the tone for the episode. There's no time for them in a 90 minute movie, but they're a serious loss.

This project has been gestating for a long time, primarily because of issues with available sources. The most common Internet source is from a LaserDisc and is corrupted in at least five places. An existing encode of the DVD proved to be bit-starved and improperly de-interlaced. Ultimately, a colleague bought a used DVD in Japan, which allowed a proper 10-bit H.264 encode to be made. I'd like to thank convexity, for supplying any missing signs and translation; Eternal_Blizzard for retiming and encoding; CP and Eternal_Blizzard for sitting through the whole thing and QCing; and Skr for obtaining the DVD source.

Gosenzosama Banbanzai and Maroko are lesser known works from the fertile mind of Oshii Mamoru, one of the lions of Japanese anime. The 1980s and 1990s were a period of great experimental creativity for him, starting with Dallos in 1983 and Angel's Egg in 1985 and culminating in the ground-breaking Ghost in the Shell in 1995. He remains an active force in Japanese popular culture, creating anime, live-action movies, and radio dramas; The Sky Crawlers (2008) is his most recent full-length anime work.

If anyone has ISOs of the recent Gosenzosama Banbanzai reissue on DVD, perhaps Orphan could redo the original OVAs. On the other hand, considering the content, maybe not. Meanwhile, enjoy Maroko.