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iTunes 4.5 Authentication Cracked
fooishbar writes "Yesterday, Apple released iTunes 4.5, which deliberately broke the 4.2 authentication scheme, which had been successfully reverse-engineered. However, crazney has been at it again, and within 24 hours of downloading iTunes 4.5, has broken the new scheme, and added more features to this library along the way. If you want to incorporate iTMS support in your program, give libopendaap a go!" Reader ScottGant submits this story about the Pepsi/iTunes promotion: "News.com has this story about Pepsi's iTunes promotion give-away. The promotion,
which is slated to end this Friday, was to have given away 100 million
tracks through Apple's iTunes
music site. But according to Apple on Wednesday, only about 5 million
free songs have been redeemed."
That's way less than they anticipated. Only 5 million out of 100 knocked me flat. Since iTunes serves a pretty specific market, I guess that says a lot. Especially since the tracks are free. The question on my mind: how many of those 100 million winners actually reached folks? TFA mentioned something about distribution problems.
:P), but I have to wonder.
Also, about the new authentication crack: I am curious how this will impact their deal to offer free weekly songs, I'm assuming it's some sort of deal with the record industry. Today is a fairly uninspiring Avril Lavigne track (but free! I got it anyway!
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
The idea that Apple is "breaking" or "crippling" this part of iTunes is misleading. It wasn't a feature that Apple provided to begin with, and any hacks to break the DRM scheme will be thwarted by Apple eventually.
If you don't like this, you shouldn't use iTunes at all and don't buy their music because this is something they need to sell music online. Last I checked, you can just buy the CD at the store that contains no DRM at all.
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
my main problem with 4.5 is that it no longer allowed sharing with other itunes running boxen on my home network - the one machine i had updated to 4.5 ( my parents imac) couldn't accesss my music on the g5. it seems like a fairly annoying thing that wouldn't be particularly hard to not break for no particular reason. while i personally think theres no reason to break apple's authentication or other security features in itunes (the current permisions are more than enough for me, and i have less than 20 pruchased tracks, and only 2 machines i play em on), its nice to know that work arounds do exist.
Don't worry - its just stigmata. Pass me a napkin and don't you dare tell my mother.
I hope apple didnt invest too much time/money in this new fixed drm. Will these media pimps ever learn?
This isn't about DRM, it is about access to the music store, sharing, etc. outside of the iTunes application.
And despite the poster's assertion, there's no real reason to think the authentication scheme was intended to break compatibility; as most developers know, sometimes you need to make changes for other reasons that force a break in compatibility. If this WERE about DRM, I'd say it was likely, but I see no reason to think this separate change was deliberate. It may have been, but no one's given any reason to think it.
Well there's that.. and I didn't see any of the special bottles until the beginning of April. Wasn't it supposed to start in the middle of february?
But to keep myself on topic.. Apple probably has a standard singup path.. They assume that if you are going to redeem a free song.. that you might buy something later.. But yes.. its lame to require a credit card when you are making a purchase of $0.00..
"It's not like your minds are as open as the source you love..." - Me to the majority of Slashdot.
I wonder what the typical redemption rate is for the Pepsi, Coke and other softdrink give aways. I know for paper coupons the redemption rate is about 2 percent. Granted alot of those coupons go straight into the trash. However, when people print coupons from the web only 20 percent are redeemed. And if someone is going to print them, you would think they would use them.
My point, is the Pepsi-iTunes rate of 5 percent unexpected?
Given the classic assumptions on "mail-in rebates" that only 10% of the people actually bother if the amount is less than $100...5% is actually amazingly high for something that has a very narrow audience given the number of people who by Pepsi (i.e., lots of people that bought winners didn't care about iTunes).
My wife and I would go out of our way to get the Pepsies with the promotion. We won quite a few times.
It wasn't a bad promotion, but many times we had to go out of our way to even find the Pepsies with the offer. They were hard to find.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Well, and another problem I saw was it was bitch to read the caps soemtimes. Another problem was that they only let you enter 10 a day. I guess they don't like my practice of ferreting them out of trash cans (we are a pepsi campus). I plan on getting a Xbox this way as well thanks to DewU. If I fail to get 550 points, I will get a minifridge for my desk.
Gorkman
If a person still needs a account to login to iTMS with this bit of reverse engineered method, the Authentication hasn't been cracked!!!
Authentication cracked means that you cand take an encrypted password and retreive the plain text for and already existing account.
All this guy seems to be able to do is figure out where and how iTunes sends its login information, so he can put it in his own application.
they want a credit card for you to retrieve your free itunes aac, and since this was a promotion geared towards teens, how are they supposed to get thier free music?
.5% went thru with it.
i had a couple caps but i didnt feel like signing up. great promotion there. only
I collected over 150 bottle caps and not one was a winner! I drink about 6 diet pepsi's per day. And my friends at work saved the caps for me. So this is no suprize to me. I don't personally know anyone who won a song.
I don't know why they bother trying to up the security. There is no way to secure media content that is compatible with mass distribution. It's the same problem they had with DVD encryption---you can't cut out the illegitimate users while not cutting out the legitimate users at the same time.
They need to work on their business model, because this piecemeal anti-cracking stuff is a joke.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I have personally won three or four songs, I use a mac and iTunes. I have never redeemed any of them. I always forget and throw the cap away about 5 minutes after the "haha I won".
Woops. Oh well, who cares about one free track anyway? What am I going to do with one free track. I've used the music store twice and it was to purchase full albums that I could't find on IRC to download.
For better or for worse, DRM is a battle that content providers will lose
No they won't.
Don't be surprised when Apple suddenly becomes one of the biggest supporters of "trusted" computing, and introduces a palladium technology of their own. And all the Mac zealots who were busy telling us before why Apple DRM was good, while Microsoft DRM was bad, will come back to tell us why Mac Palladium is good.
I'm not saying the coders here are doing something wrong because they are pushing Apple in that direction: if we self censor ourselves to appease the DRM monglers, then we are where they wants us anyways. Apple picked sides in this battle, and for all the bullshit their fans are feeding us about "nice" DRM, the side they chose leads only one way. Goodbye user controlled computer. Welcome Palladium controlled user.
I've redeemed 24 caps. My "find" rate was on the order of 50%. I still have three left in my "To be used" stack, that I doubt I -will- be able to use before the expiration period.
Why? Because there is not enough music I -LIKE- on iTunes. I don't like 90% of the pablum they tried to force to me, and when I was browsing around, there wasn't anything I wanted that I Didn't Already Have. Nearly a third of my 24 redeems were recommendations from friends, or re-aquisitions of songs I don't have on CD alreay.
Did it change my soda drinking habits? Sort of. Before the promo, I was a diet coke drinker, I swapped to Diet Pepsi while I could find the bottles. Now, I drink Diet Coke again. (Well, Diet Mt Dew, there's another promo on Dew Points...)
As for breaking it? Eeh, I never worried about the first one. I burned to CD all the songs I DL'ed, and listen in the car. My MP3 Player is my PC where I have them legitimately anyway. Perhaps in the future that will change.
End of February? You were lucky -- I was working in Anaheim since January 2004, and we didn't see any yellow iTunes caps until the third week of March, which was right before the promotion ended.
I'm still getting yellow caps now; it's a good thing Apple is still letting me redeem them (at least through tomorrow), because I've already cashed in 7 or 8, and could reap a few more between now and the end of work tomorrow.
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
Where are all the projects setting out to crack DRM'ed WMAs from the competition?
I think your vision of civilization is seriously warped, and your grasp of Japanese history is terribly flawed. While Tokugawa exhibited genius in uniting Japan into a single nation under the Shogunate, the culture that evolved from his social theories trapped Japan, for centuries, into a static class-ridden state that rejected change, both social and technological innovation, and was very much the equivalent of the European Dark Ages.
The elevation of the samurai to a ruling class, and the rigid caste system that they enforced, froze Japan's cultural development and reduced what had been a vital nation into a backward and primitive country that was fragile and all but helpless when it confronted aggressive US and Western neo-colonialism in the mid-1900s.
(It remains to be seen if such model, a culture largely shaped by fear of change and innovation -- and a desperate effort to freeze a economic elite in power by oppressive laws -- will prove irresistible to the RIAA and the US Congress;-)
For the vast majority of Japanese subjects, the experience of the Shogunate -- despite the peace that it brought to their nation -- must have been excruciating terrible. You were what you were born to be, period. Social mobility disappeared. Economic development, technical development, social development, and political development were all but brought to a grinding halt. Even the damn wheel seems to have been forbidden on carriages. Women (even samurai women) were, for the first time, forced into a state of utter dependance on males.
Rule by oppressive soldiers -- soldiers, mind you, in a centuries long interregnum in which there was no war -- made for a sad, damaged, pitiful, feudal society that is only retroactively redeemed in its ruling class poetry and Bushido myths.
By the mid-19th Century, culminating in the Imperial Restoration, the social structure had become so corrupt and self-destructive that -- when it briefly confronted the West -- it collapsed into a fascist monarchist revolution that set the stage for the aggressive Japanese militarism and imperialism that roiled Asia and the world for 50 years, until the WWII surrender placed them in MacArthur's thrall.
Step cautiously when you recommend Tokugawa's social vision. The new millennium already has an overabundance of fearful powerful folk and "leaders" who dream of extending the status quo indefinitely.
_AraratFine. Goodbye American locked-down computer. Welcome Chinese non-TCPA alternative.
Goodbye Internet access, which will require that your computer authenticates itself as correctly TCPA user hostile.
And even if you do find an ISP that will let you online, goodbye web content, since webpages will consist of encrypted content that only TCPA can read.
Goodbye IM access (they are currently breaking third party clients for "security reasons" every other month. With TCPA in place they will do it ones and for all).
Goodbye email access (Bill Gates is talking about using "trusted" mail agents to stop spam).
Goodbye computer gaming (TCPA "trusted" clients to stop cheating).
Goodbye reading Microsoft Office documents.
I personally took advantage of the promotion - all in all got about 50+/- free songs. I don't drink all that much soda, I had a lot of help from friends/coworkers (they all know me as the lone Powerbook guy among the sea of Dell - since it was Apple's promotion, they figured I was the only person who could use the caps ;-) ).
;-)).
I think one thing that hurt the promotion was the lack of variety in sodas that could win. Pepsi, Diet Pepsi. No Caffiene Free Pepsi, Lemon Pepsi, Vanilla Pepsi, etc. No Mtn Dew (I can safely assume that the 5mil would break 10mil from the Slashdot crowd alone), no Dr Pepper, etc. I prefer Pepsi over Coke so when I was interested in a cola, it was going to be Pepsi. But I know a lot of people who generally like Pepsi products, just not Pepsi.
I'm in the DC area, we had the new bottles pretty quick after the promotion started (largely due to the lardy fatsos in Baltimore w/ a caffiene craze I bet
$.02
You say not surprising like it were a bad thing for Apple to have 5 million songs downloaded - if even 1/10th of 1% of those = 5000 people - purchased additional songs it was worth the FREE publicity Apple got.
This promo wasn't a failure by ANY means:
Let's say Pepsi produced 100 million bottles with free song caps. Out of those, 70 million were sold. 50% of the buyers had computers (down to 35 million) and 50% of them had broadband (down to 17.5 million) and 50% of them were interested in digital music (now down to ~9 million).
Apple got over 1/2 of those people to use iTunes, many for the first time. Many of these people, now that they had to download the software are likely to remain apple music customers.
Then you break it down further - those who like the iTunes Store that also drink Pepsi and those that have a portable player that will play them and those that were just generally confused and thought that it was STILL stealing or thought that it was exclusively an Apple Promotion.
I KNOW older people that think ALL downloaded music must be stolen or illegal AND I know people who think iTunes ONLY works on Macs or if it has an Apple Logo and says Apple Computer it must be Apple/Mac ONLY.
I'd say; if we take ALL that into consideration they actually had a 75-90% redemption rate.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
you are only locked into Apple's platform if you choose to remain locked. Apple is giving you the tools you need to pursue fair use to its full extent. You can burn your iTMS music to CDs all you want, DRM restrictions are EASY to get around and LEGAL within fair-use, they are merely there to prevent the mainstream crowd to instantly feed their iTMS music to P2P networks.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
Your comments are very astute if we assume that most people are similar to Slashdot readers. Apple has done a tremendous job of getting iTunes / iPod awareness into the mainstream -- there's a higher non-geek ratio than many people understand. Most iTMS users don't read Slashdot or other tech blogging sites, nor visit Sourceforge regularly. Most iTMS users don't have more than five PCs, or need to burn more than eight copies of a CD, or have a huge desire to dump their collection of iTunes-purchased tracks into their Kazaa share directory.
It just may be so that among your circle of friends, awareness and use of the iTunes crackers approaches 100% -- no debating that. However, among my circle of friends who use iTunes, awareness is practically zero, and when I've mentioned it to them, their responses have been more along the lines of "how retarded," rather than "ooh, just what I've been looking for." Internet or no, there's a whole different strata of users beyond the Slashdot crowd.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
iTunes on Windows is slow
I believe that it was a poor design choice on Apple's part, but iTunes performance degrades quickly in the presence of shoddy video drivers. This may have been your problem. Also, if you disable SoundCheck (or just let it finish running) performance improves dramatically. SoundCheck determines the volumes of your music files and has iTunes compensate for bad rips, etc.
iTunes on Windows is slow
FairPlay is the DRM system used on files from the iTMS. iTunes could care less what you do with any of your files that were acquired elsewhere. It will even let you stream audio across your network with almost zero setup.
Winamp 2.95 is fast, convenient, and smart.
It sure is better than the 3.x version, but it has zero library management functions. It takes no time to search for a song in my library in iTunes. If I want to hear a song, I can begin to type any part of its name or its artist's name or even the album name and the song list updates live with each keystroke. It often takes just one or two characters to bring the song you want into the window. That is the one feature that sets iTunes apart from Winamp for me. I really liked Winamp and Macamp but I hated trying to find a particular song. I had to use filesystem searches, but that's not good enough.
You might want to take a second look at iTunes after you update your video drivers. Since you want it to be light weight, turn off all of the music store and sound enhancement features (turn off SoundCheck!). Then you will have an awesome music library management program. I think that if you have a significant music library that you will appreciate the search feature so much that it will eclipse iTunes other shortcomings.
It would seem that Pepsi did indeed screw up big time with the distribution. It's a shame the caps were only around for about a month, I would have gotten many more free songs if they didn't disappear so fast.