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Microsoft Preps 'Janus' Music Copy-Prevention Scheme
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft is expected to unveil copy-protection software this summer that will for the first time give portable digital music players access to rented tunes from all-you-can-eat subscription services -- a development that some industry executives believe will shake up the online music business." Janus is the Roman god of doorways, gates, passages, preventing people from copying music, etc.
Pay for time limited, rental media? Has Circuit City's DIVX fiasco taught them nothing?
If there were a demand for such an item I can see them working on it but the media companies try these silly schemes that have no consumer interest. Naturally they'll end up somehow blaming P2P for this system's inevitable failure.
Trolling is a art,
Lest we forget, Janus is also two-faced.
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
Has Apple iTunes been hacked yet? As in giving people un-encrypted, un-watermarked AAC files?
Can you "disable it" by holding the shift key while inserting the cd?
A two-faced god that claims to stand between the primitive and civilization, but is in fact just a product of the primitive superstition of a decrepit culture.
Perfect.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
and the bettings good that the cracking program will be called Hugh allowing one to Hugh .....
oh come on, the article says, "Janus would add a hacker-resistant clock to portable music players for files encoded in Microsoft's proprietary Windows Media Audio format." We all know that when Microsoft makes something hacker-resistant there's just no way to crack it.
Making stupid comments so you don't have to.
I read the article this morning, and sent to some friends. I have multiple problems with it.
..."
1) I don't want to "rent" my music. I want to buy.
2) I don't want my music in crappy WMA format.
3) The tinfoil hat wearer in me sees this as a way for the music/software industries to indoctrinate the next generation of consumers with the idea that you don't "own" anything.
As the sidebar in the article says "If fans of iPod-like devices can be convinced to drop the idea of owning song files, they could shift to paying a subscription fee for ongoing access
Pass.
www.robot-invasion.com smart-assed political news, humor, and commentary
Before MP3s were Satan, I had a stereo system (hi-fi for us old folks) that could easily "rip" CDs, records, or tapes to cheap portable media (blank tapes). It didn't seem to be an issue then...
I would actually be very interested in an all-you-can-eat music subscription, provided it gave me files in the MP3 format. I have an MP3 player in my house, office, car, and person, but I don't have a Janus player anywhere!
Stop spending all your money trying to stop me from sharing stuff, just sell me stuff I want.
:wq
This would be about as bright robbing a bank naked, in broad daylight, and using your own car as the getaway vehicle.
Think about the kind of people who are reading this right now...
Now picture them naked.
Ok, now think about what kind of sick, twisted, perverse people are actually going to take a good look at those kind of naked people and ask yourself, "Do any of those sick, twisted or perverse people work at my bank".
If the answer is no, then this might actually be a feasible plan...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
There are 10 kinds of people in the world > > Those who understand binary and those who don't
I'm surprised no one is mentioned that 100% uncrackable DRM: refusal to release.
If more record companies would simply *NOT RELEASE* music, there would be nothing to crack. In fact, I'd urge record companies to examine this carefully. Take Janet Jackson, for example. If they *refused to release* 'Damita Jo' -- or, better yet, refused to record it -- there would be nothing to crack, nothing to leak, and no filesharing problem.
The fact that record companies have recorded Damita Jo and actually released it indicates (to me, at least) that the record companies are as complicit in the problem as anyone else.
My two cents.