MP3.com's Beam-It

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday January 18, 2000 @02:45AM from the what-does-this-mean dept.

Mutok pointed us to MP3.com's new Beat It program. It is of course windows only which means I've never tested it, and functionally it works almost exactly like a collection of Perl scripts Nate and I hacked out a year ago to serve our personal collection of MP3s. Basically, the software checks if you have a CD, and it tracks your collection. Then you use the software to track playlists and play your MP3s. There are a lot of interesting legal problems here, and the potential for abuse is high. But dangit if this isn't the future of music, I'm gonna be cranky. Now can I please have a Linux port?

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BeamIT Packets Unencrypted by Noke · 2000-01-17 21:58 · Score: 5

I did some Packet Snffing of the BeamIT client-to-MP3.com last night and determined that the CD info sent to MP3.com is not encrypted, making it quite easy to proxy-spoof mp3.com into thinking you own CDs that you do not.

The data on the CD sent seems to go a track-at-a-time and isn't the conventional format that you send CD data to CDDB. Instead, it seems to focus on the sector start and end positions for each track and some additional information.

Nontheless, I suspect that unless MP3.com reworks their protocol to use encryption, it will jsut be a matter of time before someone fully reverse-engineers the protocoll and "Beams" hundreds of CD's that they do not own. I wonder what the recording industry will think of that?