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Felten Follower Examines Crippled Music Disks
D4C5CE writes "Following in the footsteps of his famous professor, in his paper "Evaluating New Copy-Prevention Techniques for Audio CDs" (yes, that's pure PS), which is one of many interesting contributions to the 2002 ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management, Princeton student Alex Halderman takes apart (bit by bit, literally) the "tricks on tracks" employed by the music industry to frustrate fair use."
For those that don't have a Postscript viewer and run Windows, check out RoPS - small, fast and effective.
Windows' "driver signing" is only a way to guarantee that a particular driver is verified and certified by microsoft to be fit for its particular purpose in whatever versions of the OS the author wants to get it signed for. You can still install unsigned drivers, with only a benign warning from the OS that it's "not signed by microsoft".
here is a PDF version for those people stuck on systems with only an acrobat viewer.
It looks like he used a bitmap font, so the conversion looks a little ugly, but it is readable. I'll try to replace it with a better conversion in a half hour or so, as soon as I match the font he used.
Call me a karma-whoring idiot if you like, but I thought I'd stick up a copy of this in a format that's not quite so bitmapped. ph33r my l33t OCRing skillz, etc. :)
Click here for an HTML version.
imagine, buying a SONY minidisc player, that's advertised being easy to use and fast to transfer songs to from your cd's via your pc(and able to play mp3's), and that come's with software to do that.
you buy it at an all purpose entertainment electronics supermarket that sells cd's too, you pick up a record you like that's published by SONY thinking that at least that one should work easily (because you are not very tech savvy and would like the first transfer to go smooth as possible).
you get home after that, excited about your new purchase, software installs easily but the cd copy to player just won't work, completely clueless you call your geek friend who then comes over, and explains he could tell you how to do it but would have to kill you afterwards.
would the average consumer be a LITTLE confused and afterwards disappointed at this?
could the companies PLEASE at least make up their mind about the issues?(sure they might be different depts. of same corp. but still.. and sure this same issue might have been brought up before too.)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Tips for all the people churning out crappy PDFs from LaTeX: here