Slashdot Mirror
FairPlay v2 Reversed, Playfair Back Online
An anonymous reader writes "Two weeks ago Apple released iTunes 4.5. The minor changes Apple made to their Music Sharing Protocol (daap) were reverse engineered after just one day. According to a post in the Doom9 forums FairPlay version 2 has also been reverse engineered. playfair has
already been patched with the new code and is back online with FSF India providing legal support. How will Apple respond?"
Can playfair be protected under the GNU GPL and be illegal in the US (under the DMCA) at the same time?
Evolution or ID?
I've read on several other Mac news sites (Macintouch, MacMinute, MacSlash) that FiarPLay is now called hymn (for hear your music anywhere). Why didn't Slashdot note this, or has there been a fork in the project?
BLING BLING. Meet the architecture that's changing everything.
Personally, I think Apple should hire the person(s) that keeps reverse engineering it. Then they get a knowledgeable staff member, and don't have to worry about a new version being cracked... At least for a little while. :)
Someone violating the GPL is using other people's work without giving them credit or compensation. It's copyright infringement.
Someone decrypting FairPlay'd songs has a whole host of reasons to do so, including using those songs in a fair use manner. You have to *buy* the songs before you can decrypt them.
Example: Say you want to convert the M4P's into MP3's for compatibility with your portable player. iTunes won't let you do that, without the tired hack of burning and reripping an audio CD. But if you FairPlay, you can decrypt the songs into M4A's and then iTunes will convert them to MP3's for you just fine. No (sane) laws have been broken, and it's perfectly ethical to do this. You're not giving away the music, you're just converting it to another format for compatibility with other devices. That's fair use, as I see it.
And frankly, getting iTunes store music, decrypting it, and sharing it isn't going to happen. Nearly everything you can get at the iTunes Music Store is *already* out there on the P2P networks. It's not like this creates more copyright infringement.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Imagine that every book you bought came in a different crypto script and you needed real, microsoft or apple glasses to read each different type of book - effectively a corporate tax on reading. Would you accept this? Would you call a person who circumvented this device a "criminal" with double standards?
No.
It has been proven time and again that there ARE economic models to make money that don't include vendor-lock-in. In fact not only is vendor lock-in anti communistic, it is anti competition and that makes it anti-capitalist.
Fuck DRM, fuck every sniveling executive whose job relies on just being a middle man who takes his little "tax" off everything that real people produce. These people are worthless to a communist society, and they are usless to a capitalist society. They are the dead weight every way you measure it and as far as I am concerned I am not going to let them slowly seal up cultural production across the globe into their little cabals.
Why would ANY society want that to happen? The ONLY society I can imagine that happening in, is one that is run by the self-same people who stand to make a profit off it. And that worries me, because I think there are deals being cut between big media and government for kick-backs. And we need to crush that type of non-citizen corporate lobbying. Why does a corporation have a right to lobby, or even meet with elected representatives? Only citizens should be allowed to meet with government, and only AFTER an elected rep has meet hundreds of citizens for hundreds of hours should he be ALLOWED (we own them remember) to talk policy with a PAID lobby employee of a company.
It doesn't seem all that wrong until you *really* think about what is going on. We need radical democracy to smash all these cretins off the face of the political landscape and start anew; with old-school right wing libertarians and old-school liberal humanists fighting it out for the CITIZENS. There is always corruption, but back in the early days of each democracy of the world there were people *who could not be bought*, I don't think any modern democracy can make that claim anymore. And it makes me sick.
You want to show some support for Hymn? One way is to buy some iTunes songs, to show that increasing freedom of music only leads to more sales! If everyone from /. went and bought a song or two, that would show a nice jump.
I plan to buy a CD or two this week to show that just because I can free up my music doesn't mean I'm going to stop buying or shipping my music out to everyone on the planet.
You can also fill out a form to let Apple know you'd like Hymn to stay around and it will increase you purchases there.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley