'Winston Smith' Speaks Out On MS Reader Convertor

David H. Rothman writes "'Winston Smith,' an unemployed American high school dropout self-named after 1984's hero, told my TeleRead.org site why he and buddies turned out Convert Lit to crack the Microsoft Reader e-book format. Winston makes clear he is pro-fair use and anti-piracy. Alas, new DMCAish legal restrictions in the United Kingdom will force the Dan Jackson Software site to shut off the Convert Lit downloading later this month. Just as in the States, free speech and fair use apparently matter less in the UK these days than they used to. According to Dan Jackson, Winston 'is indeed the real author of Convert LIT.' Meanwhile, if you're in a country without DMCAish thuggery and can host Dan at a new location, email him ASAP."

Comments

Heh, later this month...

[DrEldarion]

Stop downloads of it later this month? They may as well just leave it up, because by then there will be about a million different sites available to download it from. Especially now that the Slashdotters know about it, people will host it just to spite Microsoft.

-- Dr. Eldarion --

Where is Alan Cox in all of this?

[bconway]

AC has always badmouthed the US as no longer "the land of the free" and made other off-the-cuff remarks, also saying that he'll be leaving his country if such laws were passed. Yet, suddenly, he's become very quiet. Does he have any plans of following through, or does he just make idle threats? I find it sad someone so prominent in this community would be all talk and no walk.

how do people come up with these laws?

[seriv]

Do people just sit around and go, "Bob, I feel like taking away peoples rights today."
But the real bad guy is companies like microsoft that act on the laws.
-Seriv

Does it matter any more?

[TheSHAD0W]

I wonder if it's worth putting effort into distributing an e-book cracking program when e-books are falling out of style. Amazon is getting out of the business and they may be setting a trend. The lack of a decent micropayment system is sounding the death knell for legitimate electronic distribution of content, protected or not. Meanwhile pirates are busy scanning and distributing their own copies which they don't bother placing content controls on.

I'd better not post my crack for...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

...Palm's PalmReader format then. Took about a day to crack and I have only a tiny bit of experience with cracking (last thing I cracked before that was the version of Lotus 1-2-3 that insisted you had the original floppy - so we're talking mid-eighties or so.) I assume that the engineers who design these security systems know exactly what they are doing: pretending to make something secure so that they can con gullible companies into giving them a paycheck.

it does work

[gooman]

All I can say is this thing helped me out of a jam a little while ago. The program is not polished by any means, but it does work.

Our company had a document (Employee Handbook) converted into MS Reader format. (Don't ask me why.) The original files were lost in a disk crash. (Don't talk to me about backups either.) Now the document needs editing. I could have re-typed it, but I'm lazy. A quick Google and I find this program with a potentionaly offensive name.

Hooray! I get to be lazy and violate the DMCA just to retreive a file owned and created by the company I work for. The incident only reinforced to everyone here the value of pdf files and that MS Reader is beyond worthless.

Re:it does work

[Anonymous Coward]

Now the document needs editing. I could have re-typed it, but I'm lazy.

Or you could have printed it and had Kinkos scan and OCR it. I just had an old 700 page document OCR'd there and put on a CD in XML format for just over $20.

Why are readers crackable?

[Lord Bitman]

Could not a system (relatively) easily be put in place which uses existing cell-phone networks to transmit the data, encrypted, into the e-books, and never store that data outside of encrypted volitile memory, with the only data ever "stored" in the e-book being a single user-id and private key for access to a database of licenses? All keys would of course be one-time use and hideously long- because it's fucking TEXT. It doesnt require a high-speed connection.

I know there is most likely some technical reason, so what is that reason? Why are the makers of these readers complaining, instead of actually creating a secure product (which, btw, does NOT require backups of anything other than the userID and private key, which have no reason to be made unavailable to the user)

Of course, storing data "encrypted" would be pointless, as the key would need to be stored somewhere as well, but if the key is for one-time-use, the ability to take the cover off, hack and solder your way into the memory chip, and sift through until you get what you want.. doesnt seem like a problem to me...

Please, I'm not trying to troll or anything, I'd just like my ignorance to be alleviated.

Why it's being punished more severly

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a sad day when owning a copy of a song on your hard drive, or a copy of a book on your computer, becomes a crime punished to a greater extent than 'other' crimes

Stealing your neighbors TV or mugging a little old lady doesn't affect Rupert Murdoch or the like. Ripping a CD so you can listen to it on your iRiver, computer, as well as your CD player "cheats" them out of another $25.
For which crime do you think they'd like larger sentences?

Rick DeBay

Sealand

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

Is Sealand still an option?

Speakers Corner

[atcurtis]

Due to ancient laws of the land, there is one place in the whole of the UK where you cannot be sued or prosecuted for any spoken word.

That place is Speakers Corner in Hyde Park.

Just gather up the source for DeCSS and any other cracking algorithm and security vulnerability and read it out loud to the 'audience'. You may need to invest in a megaphone or PA system to be heard above all the other people there (which nowadays includes Taliban sympathizers, Pro Saddam activists, IRA/PLO/Islamic Jihad fundraisers, BNP/Neo-Nazi recruiters, Triad/Mafia/Organised Crime reps).

You cannot be prosecuted for saying something there, political or otherwise.

The only problem is trying to get someone to listen.