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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.
I really need to learn to wait a few days before installing things. I'm so impatient.
Even worse, I check a dozen or so Mac sites several times daily, (yes I need a life) so I probably get every update within 8 hours or so of release, if that.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
I check everyday for updates as a matter of course and installed yesterday's security stuff. Luckily
being in the UK I _still_ can't buy music from iTunes, and I don't have an iPod so no problem really.
Annoying that they don't check these things more carefully.
I did the update and then had spinning-wheel-of-death four times in a row while trying to run an unrelated program installer and simultaneously burn a DVD. Had to do these operations sequentially to get them to work. (why was I doing both: I was simply multi-tasking my monthly maintainence chores.)
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
1. Anyone who is good at reading the install scripts - How do we "remove" playfair? (especially since it doesn't seem to get a good decoding done - the resulting files all crash whatever app tries to play them. Maybe wait a version or two...)
2. Now this might be pretty basic, but does anyone have a favorite unix scripting tutorial so that I can learn how to script things like this to run on multiple files?
Save everything after this (start at #!/bin/bash), and chmod +x it. ./saved-file m4p m4a /usr/local/bin in your path) to get your key.
.$SUFF1` /dev/null
Run with
This finds all m4p files in current dir (copy them first!) and saves the files in no-drm/.
Also, run playfair first (and have
#!/bin/bash
DIR=no-drm
usage () {
echo "Usage: $0 suffix newsuffix [converted-dir]"
exit
}
if [ "$1" == "-h" ] || [ "$1" == "--help" ]; then usage; fi
if [ -n "$1" ] && [ -n "$2" ]; then
SUFF1=$1
SUFF2=$2
else
usage
fi
if [ -n "$3" ]; then
DIR=$3
fi
mkdir -p $DIR
for FILE in *.$SUFF1; do
BASE=`basename "$FILE"
playfair "$FILE" "$DIR/$BASE.$SUFF2" 2>&1 >
done
I installed the security update this morning on my 15" AlPB and I use CVS over pserver at work and have seen no problems.
Just did a commit and an update for the hell of it, works fine...
How come everytime that Apple has an update people report that there have been crashes. I have updated Mac OS X since 10.2.2 when I bought the machine and never once had it...okay I lie it did crash - ONCE! - but that had nothing to do with any update file that I installed. I'm still not sure why it crashed considering it hasn't crashed since the ONE TIME CRASH!
I'm just emphazing that little fact because my Windows Box at work crashed two to three times a week...I mean 2 TO 3 TIMES A WEEK!!
Anyways, the DRM on the iTunes is really relaxed because I've never had a problem with converting the AAC files to MP3's (for those of my friends who don't use AAC files - since none of the MP3 players support them but iPod does.)
Later
Save Pangaea!! Stop Continental Drift!!
Its a little sad that a forum that generally celebrates Apples acheivements has a whole pile of posts on how to correctly configure the tool that will easily destroy them.
I can appreciate it from the technical point of view, but perhaps a post on what this is now going to do to Apples future fortune now that AAC is not secure is more appropriate, especially as Apples growth recently has been on the back of achievements in the audio area.
if you read the forum, then you'd realize it DOES work, you just need to have your key's in the correct place. without the right key, playfair tries to decode the file using any key it finds, which means the wrong key, which means the decoded song breaks...If you run it correctly, it works perfectly.
Uh, pserver is unencrypted, and using it is actually _more_ work than doing it the Right Way (over ssh). There's just no good reason for anyone anywhere to use it.
So, yeah, I'd consider breaking pserver to be a valid security enhancement.