Microsoft Reader Format Cracked

Anonymous Coward writes "Pocket PC Addict has a cool story about how some guy named Dan Jackson is distributing an unfortunately named program that will remove the security from Microsoft Reader ebooks. Once the security is removed, it then allows the book to be converted to html, text or any other format."

Comments

Familiar

[djward]

Sounds like Skylarov all over again...

Re:Familiar

[Mac Degger]

Ah, but we live in a truly free county, where pot is legal-ish on the grounds that it's not a harmfull substance. Not all governments have that kind of common sence.
Hell, on grounds of copyright, patent law and the odd belief that we should be able to do what we want with something when we've bought it (unless it happens to kill the neighbour or his cat), I think there's not a country on earth which has laws which enforce what the mayority thinks is right...wlecome to the real world, where justice is only blind to the laws being bought.

Re:Familiar

[Huge Pi Removal]

There is something I do not understand: if a vast majority of the public believes it is OK to copy software or electronic content, how can it be there exist laws to prohibit copying? I mean most of us live in democratic countries, don't we?

If absolutely every law was put to referendum, we'd essentially have mob rule. What "the majority" want and what's actually *good* for us/the country are not always the same thing. If it were, all you'd have to do in the UK is point at someone, shout "paedophile," and it would be legal to string them up from the nearest lamppost.

The problem with the DMCA, etc, etc, is that it tries to solve a problem by brute force. A bit like trying to bomb other countries to get them to do what you want *ahem* :) In the UK, drink-driving laws were doing very little until, over several years of solid campaigning, drink-driving was made totally socially unacceptable, and the problem is now under control. Similarly, the problem with, say, CD copy-protection is that because the RIAA and the record industry as a whole are seen as being rich and nasty, people don't care about copying CDs to give to their friends or share over the internet. Hence, copy-protection is introduced, along with laws to stop you circumventing it, which stops *any* fair use at all.

The problem is not that the majority want it but it's not happening. The problem is that there's nothing in place in corporate America (or most anywhere else) that makes people have a social conscience over screwing the companies (and hence, indirectly, those who depend on the companies' profits) around. Now there's a whole other debate about how we can change that, which I'm not going to get into here because I think 10 other people are going to do it further down...

Re: Familiar

[Antity]

but this software is produced by a foreign national in his own country (UK)

I'm not sure about that. Although he claims to have (re)written parts of the code,

• His page is only about this very program AND
• He writes:

  One of the people I met while MUD'ing suggested that since I live in the UK, I could act as an agent for programmers who wish to remain anonymous but still want to release their software. I thought this would be a good idea and so this website came into existence...

IMHO this program originated in the US, was exported to the UK, changed, and (re)published.

P.S.: Of what .ZIP on the web do you want to make a backup copy today? ;-)

Re:Familiar

[Sciamachy]

Democracy comes from two Greek root words, Demos, the people, and kratein, to rule or be strong. The idea is, the majority decide what goes. Is this actually any different from "mob rule"? Or is "mob rule" an idea put about by those in power who have a vested interest in seeing that the people do not in fact rule?

The Athenian democratic system allowed all citizens to vote on all laws - granted, their cities were smaller then & their definition of a citizen was basically a free, able-bodied male who would fight for the city if it was attacked, but these days we have the technology to enable the much larger numbers of citizens in our cities to all vote. Remember also that the ability to vote doesn't neccessarily mean the voter will vote either - they'll tend to vote only on matters that concern them directly, much as US Senators and UK MPs do now, but at least then we'd have proper democracy - rule of the people by the people, instead of rule/(mis)representation of the people by a privileged minority.

Re:Familiar

[phutureboy]

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb, voting on what to have for lunch.

Re:Familiar

[sql*kitten]

Surely though in this age of education for all, where there are publicly funded schools, cheaply available newspapers and 24 hour news coverage, with freedom of the press & of speech, there's more reason than ever to assume everyone voting has at least adequate means of understanding the issues.

I'm not so sure. Anyone who makes a habit of reading the Guardian has pretty much abandoned any claim they might have had on independent, rational thought - but fortunately, so has anyone who makes a habit of reading the Daily Mail, and the two groups should hopefully cancel each other out. But two equal and opposite groups of idiots don't equal one larger group of sensible decision-makers.

Parliament has bungled so many times, they cannot truly be regarded as experts in rule. What, then, is the value in handing the controls over your life to a group of people who will only ask your opinion on things every few years, and whose interests rarely coincide with yours? Surely that's as unstable as running things yourself directly?

I'm basically a libertarian, with a bit of plutocrat and a bit of timocrat. My basic political belief is in the absolute minimum of government, and that decisions about spending public money should be made by the people who paid the money, not those who receive it. I consider New Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems to be no different from one another - they differ only on the details, all three are about government controlling every aspect of a citizen's life, supported by heavy taxation.

There need to be hard limits on what a government can and cannot regulate, but as we have seen in the US, a Constitution isn't all that it's cracked up to be. The British House of Lords is a good thing, IMHO, because those people plan in terms of their grandchildren, not in terms of the next election. Anyone desiring to become a professional politican has automatically disqualified themselves.

What we really need are a small group of civil servants to administer the country, but with no direct political power, and the political power to rest in the hands of people who are already accomplished in their own professions, and who can only serve one term. Perhaps politicians should be randomly chosen from a pool of people who have taken courses in history, economics, etc. The current system, i.e. "I'm voting the way I've always done" or "I'll vote for that Tony Blair, he's got a nice smile" is fundamentally broken, and will collapse under its own weight if it isn't destroyed by the libertarian-plutocrats beforehand.

Re:Familiar

[jafac]

Yes, I think it's time to put this "democracy" monster to bed.

If there were TRUE Democracy, things would be very different.
For instance: Look what "the people" have chosen in the past several years in the commercial marketplace. These are the kinds of decisions "the rabble" would choose - apply the same thinking to politics, and it yeilds a hideously frightening prospect:

Microsoft Windows, 95% Marketshare.
Titanic - Best movie of all time.
Backstreet Boyz - #1 musical group of the 20th century.
Harry Potter - #1 work of literature of the 20th(21st?) century.
Coke or Pepsi - your choice.
Ford Escort - #1 selling car in America.
GWBush - 88% Approval rating, Oct 2001.

I came to accept this fact long ago. People are frickin idiots. True Democracy would be a very scary world.

The Name

[richie2000]

I guess it won't be long before free software activists and feminists around the world will join in the battle cry: Free clit!

Seriously, Microsoft will go after him, just like Adobe tried with Dmitri.

Re:The Name

[0x0d0a]

It's not Free software. The guy didn't hand out the source (which is a shame, or else Linux folks could be reading eBooks right now).

What's in a name?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heheheh... You have to admit... the names they came up for their programs have a much more memorable, ummm.... ring to them than, say, DeCSS.

(Insert joke about "rolling off the tongue" here)

Obligatory Jay and Silent Bob Quote

[ender81b]

Obligatory quote(s) from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back

Jay: I am the CLIT Commander! I AM THE CLIT CAMANDER!! WHEREVER YOU SEE A CLIT YOULL SEE THIS FACE! I am master of the CLIT!

Willenholly: We don't want to rub the C.L.I.T. the wrong way!
Willenholly: The C.L.I.T. is an offshoot of the L.A.B.I.A.
Reg Hartner: Oh, you mean the Liberate Apes Before Imprisoning Apes movement?

That's great...

[jez9999]

... because I just finished on a program I've been making. Transform Watermark, or "Twat.exe", will allow you to unencode watermarked e-books in addition to this!

Code can be downloaded here

[itsnotme]

You can download the code from his homepage here: http://members.lycos.co.uk/hostintheshell/clit.zip

And obviously his homepage is: http://members.lycos.co.uk/hostintheshell

lit was cracked a long time ago

[Anonymous Coward]

There's been a Windows macro floating around for a long time that converts lit to text. It basically sends window events to the MS Reader program to scroll through the e-book, and more windows events to dump the text to Wordpad. It's just a few dozen lines long and isn't much of a jump in sophistication over taking screen shots. Face it Microsoft, as long as the book content is displayed on the screen where people can see it, there's no way to stop it from getting captured.

Microsoft's response

[Alsee]

Microsoft has promptedly responded to this breach of DRM5 security. That have released their new DRM6 format which contains the DRM5 file with the addition of a "Broadcast Flag" bit. When this bit is set to 1 the DRM5 security may not be copied or extracted. When the bit is set to zero you may freely copy or extract the DRM5 data.

-

source code?

[Ashish Kulkarni]

I doubt that the source code has been made available to "Dan Jackson". Relveant quote from the post original program's author made on the newsgroup:

Please note that right now this is VERY alpha. It's the first release. It also is available only as a binary, for Windows console. I wrote a GUI in ASM, but porting it to WINAPI is a pain in the arse... I won't bang on about it, but it's pathetic that it's easier to code in ASM than C on the Windows platform. The original was written under *NIX --- but I'm not willing to distribute the source just yet, for a variety of reasons.

There WILL be a polished GUI, as well as a source release in the future. I am unable to post here anonymously (and hence using a public library system and some vulnerable machines for this post) so, updates will probably NOT be announced here, unless someone is willing to play proxy for me.

Very Mature

[z_gringo]

from the article:

Other Internet hackers have already captured this code and provided a Windows 9x front-end that illiminates the need to know and understand command-line functions. This addition is called cuntlits.exe and contains nude buttons and offensive language.

I have no problem with nudity or offensive language, but all in proper context. The above paragraph just makes the whole thing sound like a stupid joke.

Re:where to get ebooks?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Online Books Page

Over 10,000 online books free to the public.

Re:Okay, great. But...

[Rogerborg]

Hey, I know a guy that bought - sorry, I mean licensed - a bunch of eBooks. Then he bought a new handheld, and found out that he couldn't transfer the license, so he'd effectively paid for a bunch of scrambled bits. For those who don't know, that's how eBooks work, they're licensed per machine. If you upgrade devices (or your device breaks), you lose the right to read.

Believe me, he won't be buying - sorry, licensing - any more, even with this thing available.

"I have no tolerance for bad journalism!"

[DrSkwid]

LOL

then one would expect that you would read the frucking article and know that the guy says he didn't write it !

"One of the people I met while MUD'ing suggested that since I live in the UK, I could act as an agent for programmers who wish to remain anonymous but still want to release their software. "

Plus no-one's not cracked a program, someone has cracked the file DRM level so that data files can be converted.

It gets better.

"The way the laws are now, it's safer for someone to rape a 5-year-old boy and admit it then to crack a program."

Pure hype. Do you read the Daily Mail by any chance?

Maybe Microsoft released its own crack

[stephanruby]

Companies have been known to release cracks of their own products to foster widespread adoption. The CEO of Macromedia almost admitted doing as much in an interview.

Somehow, I doubt that Microsoft would have done such a thing, but you've got to admit, it's a sound business strategy. It gives a company all the benefits of having an open format, without making the commitment of an open format.

another MS acronym

[sarcast]

MS doesn't seem to have the best QA department when it comes to names. I remember for that the longest time, what is now called "Automatic Updates" used to be called the critical update notification tool. I'll leave it to the reader to figure out the acronym.

Too Late - It's on Freenet!! :)

[Corrado]

According to this Usenet post it's available on freenet with a key of KSK@MSReader_Converter.zip. I knew freenet would come in handy someday. :)

Well, isn't that. . .

[kfg]

exactly what eBook protection is, a stupid joke?

I don't mean technically either, I mean in basic concept.

I don't know about you, but I'm simply not going to participate. If I feel the need of an eBook I'll go to Project Gutenberg. I havn't yet read all of Dumas or Dickens, the worst of which is better than any of the crap being shilled by Oprah. Twain, O Henry, GBS, Thoreau, Kipling, Swift, Sir Richard Burton, Melville, Hume, London, Conrad. . . Jesus, the list goes on for miles, all free for the taking, distributing, printing, even selling if you want.

I think it's somewhat ironic that one of the best uses of public domain eTexts is the ease with which specialty and art binders may now get source material.

So be radical. Screw MS and Adobe. Download the entire PG opus and freely *pass it on to your friends.* Print the son of a bitch and hand it out on the street corners.

Otherwise, if these people have their way, we'll have to start memorizing them and whispering them to our children quietly, in the dark, waiting for the "story police" to come and bust us.

KFG

Re:ports

[joto]

don't forget Klit and WinClit

But remember, unless sufficiently drunk, stay away from gnome-clit.

A Few Corrections RE: Familiar

[jstockdale]

Actually that isn't quite true. Under the Athenian system of government, a lottery was drawn every few years where approximately 5000 of the citizens of Athens were selected to be the governing body. This governing body met regularly (and its members were paid to attend) so that they could pass legislation by popular consent. Although this true democracy does depend on the desire of the majority, its structure of representative governance holds a key difference. Such a system is, however, not what we think of as democracy today, as it is too much a pure implementation.

Additionally, the definitian of an Athenian citizen was not as altruistic as merly being loyal and able to fight for Athens, rather, to be a citizen elegible to take part in the governance of the city-state, one must have both of their parents be Athenian citizens.

The more accurate consideration when examining democracy of today would be to look to Rousseau or Locke, both philosophers of the 17th century. Under Rousseau's model, upon which much of the US system today was based, the body politic is ruled by the desire of the collective body not for individual gain but rather the good of the people as a whole. This is substantially different from mob rule in which each individual acts rashly for their own benifit.

Free Dan Jackson!

[Eric Damron]

Just practicing...

Thanks a million for the link!

[telstar]

Now thousands of geeks can finally say they've come in contact with a clit. Ya gotta figure it's about as close as most will ever get....