Monday Releases Cause Crashes

The two big releases yesterday, Apple's Security Update and the DRM-canceling PlayFair, are causing problems. The Security Update appears to break cvs over pserver under some conditions (hangs for a long time, then quits with a malloc error), and ryanw writes, "according to the SF.net forum for playfair, the 'iTMS DRM stripping tool' destroys your purchased songs: the resulting files crash iTunes, the iPod, and QuickTime." Those who follow the rules -- wait a few days to install Apple's updates, and make backups of your iTMS files -- will be unaffected.

Comments

PlayFair 0.2

[ZackSchil]

The way PlayFair snags a decryption key doesn't always work, but it tries to decrypt the song anyway. If it finds a bad key and uses it, of course the files are going to come out as garbage! If you swap headers of an m4a file and an m4p file, QuickTime, iTunes and the iPod all crash while reading it also. It does not, as the post suggests, even touch your purchased songs. All decryption is made on a copy. Just more fear mongering.

I have, however, had no trouble decrypting my songs under Mac OS X. They work perfectly.

Re:PlayFair 0.2

[obijywk]

I had trouble with PlayFair at first too (on my Linux machine)... the same thing happened to me - if PlayFair doesn't find a valid key for your song, it goes ahead and creates a messed up file anyway. These files crashed every player I tried them in. After I moved my key into ~/.drms, where PlayFair could find it, the decrypted files came out fine.

I guess PlayFair needs some improved error checking. But I think it's great... now I can listen to my iTunes songs on my linux machine!

PlayFair Works!!!

[alatesystems]

It really does work. The crashing is caused by it not acquiring the key and decrypting it incorrectly with no error checking. This is what you have to do(the only way I know how, because I don't know how to compile it on windows).

Download it on *nix and do ./configure, make, make install(if you're root).

On windows, download VLC. Run it and open your encrypted m4p file.

Now, in c:\documents and settings\username(whatever you're logged in as)\application data\drms, you have the key file. Copy that key file to your ~/.drms dir(create it) on the *nix box.

Then on the *nix box run ./playfair whatever.m4p new.m4p.

WHAM! It now works. It grabs the key from your ~/.drms and decrypts it to new.m4p. It works! I've tried it. This is great. Now I can actually buy music(Until apple "fixes" this).

If someone could compile this on windows it would cut down this process to 2 steps: 1. Run VLC with the file. 2. Run playfair.exe in.mp4 out.m4p

Thanks,
Chris Benard

It DOESNT mess with your iTunes songs!

[da_dho]

Firstly, this tool never touches the original so unless you deleted the original before testing the new one, you are fine. For Example: /usr/local/bin/playfair Secondly, the tool works fine most of the time. At least the mac version, but likely the pc one too. For me, its spits out 3/4 properly drm'd songs then spits out the rest garabage that crash iTunes/Quicktime. Try it yourself people, all you need is a mac with an ipod hooked up to it or just a windows pc.