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Napster Has Been Cracked
Sabathius writes "Users have found a way to skirt copy protection on Napster Inc's portable music subscription service just days after its high-profile launch, potentially letting them make CDs with hundreds of thousands of songs for free...""
Never saw that one coming.
wasnt this posted yesterday?
...if you can fit "hundreds of thousands" onto one CD.
Seriously, though, who didn't see this coming?
http://xkcd.com/386/
So long as the audio comes out speakers at some point you will always be able to grab the analog signal and re-encode it to whatever format you want... this isn't some breakthrough... It's called recording the analog output...
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Oh No...
Now the name Napster will be tried to illegally copied music... and after all the paid of the good number of that company...
Cruise TT
Oh this has been explained for a while: http://marv.kordix.com/archives/000400.html
All that is happening is that people are grabbing the actual output of the song, and dropping it into a wav file. This will ALWAYS happen with any kind of copy protection. If you let users actually hear (music) or see (movies/tv) the content, there will always be a way to get it. At the absolute worst, people can just set up a tape recorder and grab it from that.
Regardless, the point is that it is STILL ILLEGAL to abuse. Until you can get people to stop breaking the law voluntarily (via fair pricing and good business practices), all media/content companies will have to keep playing this game. What they need to realize is that they are always going to lose.
...to close the barn door
come for the naked robots, stay for the zombies
I thought all music downloaded from the internet was free?
Omnis amans amens
Any protected media could be duped using that method.
Why is this news? Nothing hard about doing this. It's not like they broke the encryption.
Haven't you been able to do this for a while?
Users bypass copy protection on portable Napster
16 February 2005
LOS ANGELES: Users have found a way to skirt copy protection on Napster Inc's portable music subscription service just days after its high-profile launch, potentially letting them make CDs with hundreds of thousands of songs for free.
Such users are already providing instructions to other would-be song burners through technology websites like BoingBoing.
Napster is currently offering a free trial of its new Napster To Go service, which will enable users for a monthly $US15 ($NZ21.21) fee to download as much music as they want and transfer it to a portable device. They can also pay 99 cents for each track they want to burn to a CD.
That "rental" model for digital entertainment, backed by giant software concern Microsoft Corp and others, is getting its most serious mass-market tryout yet with Napster to Go.
But, according to various websites, thwarting the intellectual property protections of the service is as easy as a free software patch.
Engadget.com said by installing the digital music programme Winamp and then adding a secondary programme to Winamp called Output Stacker, users could convert the digitally protected files from one format to another that can then be burned, unencumbered, onto CDs.
"We're not going to advise you to do anything untoward, but apparently if you install Winamp along with the Output Stacker plug-in you can convert those protected WMA files to WAV files and then burn them to CD without paying a penny. Or at least an extra penny," Engadget.com said in an item on its site.
A spokeswoman for Napster said that such endeavours were nothing new and the company was not too concerned.
"The DRM (digital rights management) is intact. Basically, people are just recording off a sound card. This is nothing new and people could do this with any legitimate service if they want to use a sound card," she said.
"This kind of attack has been around for a long time and it's just because of our higher profile that it has sparked such interest," she said.
She said the company had no record of who was doing the illicit recording.
"The bottom line is that people are always going to find a way to get around the system, although we give people a way to enjoy music while respecting artists' rights," she said.
The "new" Napster has positioned itself as the chief competitor to Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes service, which dominates the digital download market.
The original Napster was a free-for-all that let millions of users download and share songs for free - before the music industry forced it into bankruptcy with successful legal challenges.
American Technology Research analyst PJ McNealy said that no matter how protected a music file is, you can capture the output and save it on the hard drive.
"Now, portable subscriptions are a bigger bullseye or goal for people," he said, and added: "Who reads TFA anyway?"
Napster unveiled the portable subscription earlier this month, backed by a $US30 million ad campaign attacking rival Apple's iTunes service and its ubiquitous iPod digital music player.
Until recently, music subscription services have been somewhat restricted in their ability to transfer songs they provide to portable players, while Apple has sold millions of portable iPods by allowing users to buy songs from iTunes and store them on iPods.
But Napster uses a new digital rights management software from Microsoft called Janus to enable the portable transfers.
The jig is up. I was hoping I'd finish my 14-day trial before anyone found out about this. Oh well, I got 8 gigs already, and I can get more today.
I use a program called tunebite that plays the files back and records them to MP3, as well as copying over album/artist metadata from the tags.
Hopefully I can get everything copied before they fix it (if they ever can fix it).
"The DRM (digital rights management) is intact. Basically, people are just recording off a sound card. This is nothing new and people could do this with any legitimate service if they want to use a sound card," she said.
"This kind of attack has been around for a long time and it's just because of our higher profile that it has sparked such interest," she said.
But isn't this the point? All it takes a little software tool and suddenly everyone can do it. You can't just "ignore" attacks - because the attackers certainly wont.
Simon.
This kind of "cracking" is impossible to prevent, if the software runs on a standard PC. And even if that were somehow secured, the analog hole would still exist.
Somehow, this does not come as a big suprise to me. Either from the standpoint of their past and how little regard they most likely have for copyright, or even just from DRM in general. I personally am an iTunes user, but their DRM at least allows you to play your music without a subscription, unlike Napster (or at least that is what it looked like.)
I'm of a mind to give them a piece of my mind, but I seem to have lost my mind.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHO HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEH After all the bitching they did regarding iTunes music store and things of that nature - I am glad that this happened. With any luck, the music industry will lose faith in them and they will completely fold. Even iTunes doesn't have a viable method of removing the copy protection aside from simply burning the songs to CD ... **AFTER** you've bought them
I'm going to sign up for napster now to get my free songs before the get put out of business. This is wonderful news for we iPod owners.
"Growsing about rejected submissions" my behind -- I submitted a better worded snap with more informative links two days ago...
WinAmp has pulled the plug-in in question from their site, it seems...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Yea, I was reading napster was easily hacked by bypassing the serial key entry.
Now, to make my point, this means you can create music files for free. The is not what napster intended. Hopefully they can release a new version to fix this bug.
It involves a plugin for winamp that essentially just allows someone to record it off the card.
"The DRM (digital rights management) is intact. Basically, people are just recording off a sound card. This is nothing new and people could do this with any legitimate service if they want to use a sound card"
In short the attack that everyone has known all along was difficult, if not impossible, to stop.
There truly is nothing to see her. Move along.
Samurai Porn? What took them so long?
someone let the cat out of the bag ;)
Here you have the OTS summary:
LOS ANGELES: Users have found a way to skirt copy protection on Napster Inc's portable music subscription service just days after its high-profile launch, potentially letting them make CDs with hundreds of thousands of songs for free.
Napster is currently offering a free trial of its new Napster To Go service, which will enable users for a monthly $US15 ($NZ21.21) fee to download as much music as they want and transfer it to a portable device.
Engadget.com said by installing the digital music programme Winamp and then adding a secondary programme to Winamp called Output Stacker, users could convert the digitally protected files from one format to another that can then be burned, unencumbered, onto CDs.
The original Napster was a free-for-all that let millions of users download and share songs for free - before the music industry forced it into bankruptcy with successful legal challenges.
Napster unveiled the portable subscription earlier this month, backed by a $US30 million ad campaign attacking rival Apple's iTunes service and its ubiquitous iPod digital music player.
Until recently, music subscription services have been somewhat restricted in their ability to transfer songs they provide to portable players, while Apple has sold millions of portable iPods by allowing users to buy songs from iTunes and store them on iPods.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
1. Launch DRM'd subscription-based music service. Nobody joins it but RIAA backs your model and you get lots of good music.
2. Wait for DRM to be cracked, in, ooh, three or four days.
3. Your subscriptions suddenly rocket
4. PROFIT!
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
Sticking something on the output of the media player that saves a copy of the bits is not a crack.
Does recording off the soundcard really count as hacking? If they could do it without having to play back the files, i.e. in an hour instead of the full two weeks, that would be more of an achievement.
Janus, the god of Beginnings....
http://www.meridiangraphics.net/janus.htm
Or otherwise known as the god of two faces. How appropriate for Microsoft.
Beer Coat: The invisible but warm coat worn when walking home after a booze cruise at 3 in the morning.
Always a bit behind on "breaking news". Didn't this happen about a month ago?
Isn't this just a plugin to WinAmp the grabs the output stream from napsters software going to the sound card and "records" it? As far as I can tell you would still have to manually name/tag the files unless your happy with generic names. Also, a five minute song will take five minutes to capture. OPh and it captures as an uncompressed wav so you would need to convert it to your prefered format.
I think Napster will finally be ok....
Samurai Porn? Better than falling in a pit.
It's not actually been cracked - They can't make real digital 1:1 copies of the songs - What they do is record from the sound card. That's not so bad if you just want to burn them to CD, but if you want to re-encode from WAV to Ogg or MP3, the quality will deteriorate further...
You can do this will *all* DRM media, nothing new here - It's only because it's Napster (woohoooo) that people think it's revolutionary. It isn't.
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
Actually no, it isn't. Hypocritical, cynical, coincidental, more likely. But still I find it amusing that crackers get cracked, pirates get pirated, violators get violated. Can they see how we, musicians, feel now? Or would they rather say: Oh, we got cracked, but that's OK because the information wants to be free? I doubt it. I hope they can feel what I felt when I had to quit playing guitar and start working in accounting because we couldn't sell our albums. The funny thing is that we haven't been playing and recording anything since 1999 but the old songs from the albums that we couldn't sell are still on P2P. The sad thing is that there will be no more songs for us, so I hope you enjoy listening to the old ones. This is the real world folks. You decided that you don't want new music from us and we will respect your choice, working in banks, driving delivery trucks and flipping freaking hamburgers. This is your choice. In capitalism you vote with your wallet.
So what's the point? The main thing of Napster is that you can legally download songs off the internet. Circumventing copyright protection schemes is illegal, at least here in Finland. So why not download the songs illegally in the first place? Of course there's the RIAA-factor but if you don't share, is there a problem as getting caught propably isn't that likely.
I've never heard of anyone actually using Napster.
Do such people really exist?
napster just keeps finding a way to provide free music. lol. talk about irony.
Apparently, users have been sitting in front of their TV with a camcorder...
i think MS is just kicking up a stink because they havent yet got thier media distribution service up (trust me, there thinking about it. napster were probably aware of this 'flaw' but decided that it would actually make the service more appealing. what really gets me into a cold, exited yet scared sweat, is the thought that "Fritz" DRM hardware may actually become a reality...i can sense the revolt already
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/16/napster_to _go_drm/
I see this as a matter of time. Sure - I could route the stuff through Winamp - but is that worth my $15 a month? The reason I'd pay to download music (apart from supporting artists, etc) is to save time. I could download it from Kazaa - but with all the polluted files - I'd just as soon pay my $1 a song or $15 a month or whatever and save myself the effort of sorting through the files.
good administration (remember the "A" in "MBA"?) requires understanding how to meld the ideal (scamming --er-- making lots of money from your suckers --er-- clients/consumers) w/ the real (in this context, the fact that digital anything is infinitely reproducible w/ infinitessimal cost).
when you forget that and start thinking that the "M" stands for "marketing", you lose. your loss may be immediate or it may be drawn out, but in the end that is not where you want to be. sure, a few years in $lopping it up in the trough before it all goes to shit is a worthy aspiration -- if that's what you believe, fine.
if technical people (those more rooted in reality than you) tell you it's not going to fly, do everyone a favor and listen to them. maybe you will stop being such pompous jackasses w/ a little practice.
Hehe
iTunes: $0.99 per song.
Napster: 14 day free trial: All the songs you can download and copy to MP3.
Hrm... =)
Jason Lotito
Napster have already responded on their site (link in top right) and basically said the same thing. They also rightly pointed out (i think, as i've not tried) that this would be a 1:1 copy, so a 60 minute album would take you the same amount of time to copy - which isn't going to be much fun to do lots of.
Apparantly rumour has it that Steve Jobs contacted music executives, pointing them to the site and the Napster CEO countered by pointing out several sites which showed you how to do the same with iTunes files. I'm not sure how true this is.
Interestingly enough, the Winamp plugin required to do this - Output Stacker - was pulled from the winamp site. Which I find a little odd, since there are perfectly legal uses for the plugin - so I don't understand why they're playing censorer (to be safe?)
If anyone knows where to get it from, it would be appreciated since Googles cache shows no homepage and a Google search of the author gives only a set of links to a non-working winamp.com URL.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Golly... you mean it's possible to record the output of the soundcard. Wow... everything's cracked then.. including /. editors for posting this story.
Whatever DRM formatted song => (D/A C) => Sound (Oops!) => (A/D C) => MP3
The obvious solution is to implant all humans at birth with a DAC able to play DRMs directly into your brain. Then the copy protection can be encoded directly in the implanted chips (/sarcasm).
Just
Woot! Hundreds of thousands of songs on a CD. What kind of new laser are we using - it's gotta be better than BluRay, with that kind of performance.
..."we're powerless to stop it".
Don't think it isn't being worked on, just not by Napster. You can read more about Secure Audio Path here. Of course, the next step is a simple loopback-cable to another sound card (your input will be disabled while doing secure playback). The next step is to add a broadcast flag to the signal, only to have people circumvent it. Then they'll go for Secure Digital speakers. Then people will record with a high-fidelity microphone. And some time after they ban A/D converters, we will win (or the digital society we've made will collapse, whichever comes first).
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Unfortunately after DMCA it is illegal to demonstrate that this is not the case.
The music industry should sue Microsoft for misleading them to publish millions of songs in a basically unprotected format.
That he dropped the RIAA an email.
At least with iTunes once you've bought a track, you've paid for it. Who really cares what you do with it after. Everyone is getting their slice of the action.
The subscription model, once "cracked" means you can download as much as you want, remove the DRM and then download some more. All for $15/month (or whatever they're charging). The RIAA misses out on their cut... no doubt making their blood boil
Join the Digital TV discussion @ http://forums.dvbowners.com
Wow, I don't think I've ever fit more than around two hundred songs on a CD.
How will skirting copy protection allow me to make CDs that hold hundreds of thousands?
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
Ok, you can sign up for a 2 week trial.
You can download music continuously for the entire 2 week period and convert directly to wav.
There are 1,209,600 seconds in a 2 week period.
Assuming roughly 4 minutes per track, gives 5040 maximum songs per free account per fortnight.
During that time, you cannot listen to any other music, or play games (sound card needed for most..) or reboot.
Having a faster broadband connection won't help you, because the songs have to be played at normal speed.
How exactly does this add up to hundreds of thousands of songs for free?
Is this the same as the MPAA/RIAA saying because your a wicked filesharer, you uploaded a song thousands of times?
its buncum, and the people who will go to this much trouble would be better recording the radio.
liqbase
Steve Jobs reportedly e-mailed record company executives a link to a blog detailing the hack. He apparently wants to paint Napster as an insecure service, no different from its original form all the while portraying iTunes as secure (PlayFair anyone?)
Ruthless business tactics IMHO, dare I say reminiscent of the Redmond giant. I wish he'd let consumers decide which service is better rather than try to sabatoge Napster with his industry connections and FUD.
(Disclaimer: Heard this as a rumor - I wasn't exactly CCed on Steve's e-mail - but I had no reason to disbelieve the source).
A response from the Napster CTO taken from the homepage of Napster.com:
----
It has come to our attention that there are a number of inaccurate statements posted by various sources on the Internet regarding the security of Napster and Napster To Go. As Napster's CTO, I would like to officially state that neither Napster To Go, Napster, nor Windows Media DRM have been hacked. In the interest of providing the most accurate information to consumers, the following is some background on the subject.
There is a program that allows a user to record the playback of tracks directly from the computer's sound card. This process can be likened to the way people used to record songs from the radio onto cassette tapes, but instead of capturing the music on a tape, the file is converted into a new, unprotected digital format. This program does not break the encryption of the files, which can only be recorded one at a time making the process quite laborious. It would take 10 hours to convert 10 hours of music in this manner. It is important to note that this program is not specific to Napster; files from all legal subscription and pay-per-download services can be copied in this way.
We hope that the information provided above clarifies the matter and puts questions regarding the security of Napster and Napster To Go to rest. Napster's mission is to provide consumers with a legal environment in which they can experience and discover the world's largest collection of digital music. We believe that artists should be compensated for their work and intellectual property rights should be respected. While we acknowledge there are always going to be those who do not share our belief, we remain committed to providing the most enjoyable and flexible digital music experience for those who do.
Anyone who steals music this way is ending up with a much less than perfect copy of the song they want. I would venture to say that this person would never have bought the CD to begin with, and probably would have gotten the song from some other means, this just makes it easier.
It does not however invalidate Napster's Business Model, crappy though it may be.
This is nothing new. This has been going on with "Rhapsody" and "Replay Music" for a long time now.
"Those greedy bastards users listen to our music for free even when they pay us! Outrageous! No more music for them! Shut the factories! Hide the artists. No tune should be left in their vicinity!"
"hope they can feel what I felt when I had to quit playing guitar and start working in accounting because we couldn't sell our albums"
Dude, that doesn't make any sense.
If you were unknown, piracy wouldn't hurt you. Why? Because no one cares enough about you to pirate your music.
If you were known and really famous, piracy wouldn't hurt you. Why? Because you're making so much money that if you lose a few sales, it just means you have to give up a few lines at the party tonight.
If you never made it, its probably because you guys just weren't that good. Not because of Napster or Bearshare.
Every time I find a way to beat the system, Slashdot comes out with "look how people are beating the system! It's easy! N00bs take notice! Foolproof step-by-step instructions!" and then everyone jumps on the bandwagon, the system gets changed, and you ruin it for me. Way to go.
Fuckers.
No, it quite certainly is still illegal to abuse. A subscription to Napster gives you the legal right to use the songs you want for as long as you pay a subscription to Napster. You are not paying for the song; you are paying for the right to RENT the song.
http://www.napster.com/terms.html
Even if it was illegal, dont try to pretend that it still wouldnt be IMMORAL. Does it really matter if your country doesn't have specific laws keeping you from doing this?
Does the artist of the song get paid? No? Well, arent you kind of screwing him/her over? I think the answer is clear.
Is this just me?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Output Stacker plugin has been pulled from the WinAmp site, but you can still get it in their forums.
v FLX6QJ: www.winamp.com/plugins/details.php%3Fid%3D86033+wi namp+output+stacker+plugin&hl=en&client=firefox-a
e adid=3 5627
p ostid=159 3266
The details on the plugin are cached here, this is the PULLED page:
http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:zsalM
This thread lists where it can be found NOW:
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?thr
And this contains the plugin:
http://forums.winamp.com/attachment.php?
Google is a wonderful thing when companies wish to backtrack like that.
The plugin has tons of geniune uses... pulling it, well yeah I understand AOL/Time Warner's motives... but they're kinda dumb.
"The bottom line is that people are always going to find a way to get around the system...
True that. I can hear it, i can copy it. I can see it, i can copy it. It takes one person to copy it, millions can get it. Period.
Sample this!
Nothing was cracked - Nothing to See Here
Before you criticise the craftwork, consider the medium.
You don't expect a pile of burning tires to be stacked neatly, do you? That's about the same as expecting coherence and grammar in a slashdot post.
Someone had to do it.
Why is everyone all excited about this? Its extremely old news, and has been going on since sites started selling DRM'd mp3s. Free trials, and what not too. I thought a site like Slashdot which has millions of 'geeks/nerds' hit it daily, would have known about this, long ago.
This is like a story about Microsoft issueing a patch that doesnt work.
Don't use SHA-1
From the article...
"A spokeswoman for Napster said that such endeavours were nothing new and the company was not too concerned.
'The DRM (digital rights management) is intact. Basically, people are just recording off a sound card. This is nothing new and people could do this with any legitimate service if they want to use a sound card,' she said.
"This kind of attack has been around for a long time and it's just because of our higher profile that it has sparked such interest," she said."
As all Slashdot readers know, truly effective DRM is damn near impossible. It's all cosmetic fluff to convince the copyright holders that their rights are being protected. The people who are willing to pay are given a chance to pay, and the people who want to ride for free are going to continue that practice. The size of the paying vs. non-paying community is determined more by price than by DRM. I think the online music industry is still squandering most of the revenue that might be achieved with lower pricing. Drop the price to $5/month and my music budget increases from $0 to $60 per year. Until that time, I am satisfied with music I bought years ago plus what I hear on the radio.
Notice how some of the biggest players in the DRM industry are the companies with the most feeble security products. In essense, DRM is the final frontier for security technology that is not good enough for any other purpose; a virtual "dumping ground" for code.
Sure enough, the DRM industry is helping the music industry -- just not in the way it appears at first glance. A combination of fantasies are being satisfied at the same time. RIAA is convinced that DRM will eventually stop piracy, the DRM vendors have a continous market for "upgrades" as each layer is cracked, while the continuous circumvention of DRM ensures plenty of interest in online music. Nothing would kill the industry faster than loss of interest. The music industry would have committed commercial suicide by now if they had been given any serious DRM weapons. Fortunately, the can't hurt themselves all that much because all they have are DRM toys.
Napster + Cracked = Crapster ?
Anyone else noticed that Firefox crashes on the link mentioned http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3189925a28,00. html
I don't listen to pop music (only Enigma, Eminem and a few others) - and I don't have the bandwidth to pull it off Napster. But how hard it is to really hook up something like Mp3 Recoder and do this with WMplayer (I record webcasts from clients).
Google is a REALLY dangerous tool against censorship. But that all said, you can't just supress information - Information wants to be free.Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I use one to have music from winamp go to my local PC speakers, and a lyra wireless sound transmitter- poor mans slimserver/squeezebox/sonos
instead of two a lyra-I could have it go to a disk write plugin..
you don't need output stacker to have winamp output to disk, you only needit if you want to listen to the mysuc while you output to disk (at the same time)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
http://www.napster.co.uk/ntg.html £15 per month
http://www.napster.com/ntg.html $15 per month
Why do they even try to put DRM on downloaded music? Everytime they do it, it's cracked. So, they are going through all this trouble for nothing. It doesn't stop the music from being leaked to P2P networks, because even if it was unbreakable, one person could purchase a CD, rip it, and put it on the network. One copy is all you need. If people really wanted to make copies of the music for distribution, they'd be much smarter to just go out and buy a CD. Higher quality, and infinitely easy to copy.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I want to see a CD with 100,000 songs on it. They must be fairly *short* songs....
You can burn your tracks to DRM free CDs, which play in any cd player.
letting them make CDs with hundreds of thousands of songs for free...
Not only have they cracked the copy protection, but they also invented a new super powerful compression algorithm. Or how do they manage to fit hundreds of thousands of songs onto a CD?
Is this really true, or is the compression scheme stable?
Is there a theoretical reason why the re-encoding will throw away more data that the original encoding did, rather than perhaps arriving at exactly the same result, minus the DRM?
Some laws are abusive or just plain wrong, and it's in society's best interest to challenge them. Corporations are pushing to make everything that goes against their interests illegal. The line of what's fair and reasonable has been crossed long ago imho.
Well according to Napster, this is not a crime. Quotting from the article: "The DRM (digital rights management) is intact. Basically, people are just recording off a sound card. This is nothing new and people could do this with any legitimate service if they want to use a sound card".
Yes -- it's just the analog hole, nothing new here...
Yes -- you can do this with iTunes as well...
However, if you strip the DRM off an iTunes song, Apple still gets to keep the $0.99 -- to their accountants they sold one song and they pay the record labels for one song.
Napster's entire business model is predicated on their power to turn off your ability to listen to the music when you quit paying. If you pay $15 for a single month of service and pull down 1,000 songs that you then strip and keep, you're paying them 1.5 CENTS per song. However, they still have to pay the record companies licensing fees on 1,000 songs (I'm sure those fees are less than what iTunes carries, but there's no way it's THAT low.) Napster relies of the fact that users will want to keep paying that 1.5 cents over and over again each month to keep listening to the music. Once that goes away, profit goes away as well (to say nothing of the desire for the labels to let their songs be on Napster once they figure out what's going on.)
It should have been obvious to Napster up front that the analog hole is a real problem for any "all-you-can-eat" content provider. This is why you're not likely to see a subscription-based iTunes anytime soon. Jobs is arrogant, but he's not stupid.
The Horror!
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
But the question arises is whether grabbing analog signals and then converting them into digital format is legal or not?
The thing is always in the hand of the user. With some tools, I can completely re-flash my cell phone. If I'm smart, I can even make the modifications I did stealth from the POV of the cell phone company. This is and will always be true, unless you start making appliances that explode when you open them. Or when you try to make any "illegal operation" with them.
All things are hackable. Ask any bomb-defuser guy in your city's PD. They make a living (and stay alive) hacking things that theoretically would blow up when hacked.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Using this technique I was able to crack my "radio" too.
Have you even read my post? Those old songs still get pirated to this day! As I have written, they are still on P2P today. And I still have hundreds of CDs in my basement that no one would buy. We were starting in the time when the original Napster (the 100% pirate one, remember?) was starting to be popular. And our albums were there! Did we get a penny for those songs from Napster? Hell no! We had to abandon playing altogether. And please don't tell me we could suffer in poverty just to play. My little kid wanted to eat, can you imagine? So that was the end of our dream. Now I always say: fuck dreams. Dreams are only a method for people to take advantage of you. You will get emails from people who liked your music on MP3 but in the end no one will give a damn if you are hungry or homeless or will have to fuck dreams and start thinking about your own family. It's funny that my original post was modded as "troll". I see that the hypocrisy didn't change here. When it is about violating GPL everyone wants heads to roll. When it is about stealing music everyone screams that information wants to be free and no one has the right to violate your privacy by asking you to stop breaking the law. Beautiful logic. I'm sure that this post will get marked as "troll" in no time so the slashdot crowd will not have to suffer with the discomfort of facing their hypocrisy.
Get your Unix fortune now!
"Eminem"
Yeah, he's so street. So hip. So tough.
I hate when people claim he's a whinny middle class white kid who is less talented than Vanilla Ice.
I mean, its true. But I hate when people say it.
thing is that you are transcoding it again, from one lossy audio compression scheme to another. That method is only more convenient, but you're still losing quality.
Your head a splode
They are recording the output, en route to the speakers. This is called the analog hole. (If you can hear it, you can record it.)
There is a strong effort by content companies to close the analog hole. How? By controlling access to analog-to-digital conversion hardware through new laws.
That's right, it may one day be illegal to use a D/A converter any way you want.
Read the top article here.
Do Do Do Do Do the math!
Ok. Hacked Napster=Free Songs on my iPOD.
Napster failed again at building a new image.
Nothin' to see here. I'm going back to iTunes.
CDs with thousands of songs! What a compression algorithm! I want one of those!!!
--
Jim Crigler
-- Jim Crigler In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return. -- Whittaker Chambers
If you don't think it's ethical to crack Napster, you can go to http://www.etree.org/ . Lots of songs for free. Plenty of people do not mind if you listen. Not fussed if you sing along either.
-If you use the "Out-lame" Winamp plugin in the Output Stacker in place of "Out-disk", you can convert straight to MP3. It still encodes no faster than realtime, but this is a great way to conserve space. WAV(Out-disk) is still recommended if you are burning CDs and want to keep as much quality as possible. I can confirm that this all works.
-You can run multiple instances of Winamp at once, each converting its own song. Each instance's playback will not interfere with any of the others, illustrating the fact that this is not simply recording the music off of your soundcard. Doing this, you can get FAR MORE than 252 full 80 minute CDs within 14 days. I can confirm that this works.
You can transcode(MP3) or decode(WAV) X albums in the time it takes for the longest track on the album to elapse. And since you're not limited to only tracks from one album at a time, you can trans/decode as many tracks as instances of Winamp your computer will run limited only by your computer's resources.
Quote from Napster's official statement: "It would take 10 hours to convert 10 hours of music in this manner."
With the updated methods, you can convert 100 hours or 1,000 hours or 10,000 hours of music in 10 hours. The only limit is your computing resources.
--- Eat my sig.
seriously, for most folks, the sound will be plenty good enough. but for audiophiles and perfectionists ....
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Considering the Chinese didn't have very good luck stopping the opium trade with crucifixion, it looks like the RIAA will have to spend big money on Congress now to get some _really_ tough penalties in force.
I have just cracked LP copy protection. I have plugged my record player into the line in button on my sound card, dropped the needle and clicked "record". This is a banner day. Hail to me. I am off to crack my camcorder next.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
how do you it?
I have recently found a program called Virtuosa http://www.virtuosa.com/ it converts from the crappy WMA form the MP3 AND removes DRM and all that copyright stuff. It also converts fairly quickly.
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in mud. Soon, you realize the pig is dirty, and he likes it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Looks like they pulled all of those links.
If anybody with a Creative soundcard would spend the time to figure out how much their card is capable of, they'd know that the driver itself supports this.
All you need to do is set the recording input as "What you Hear" then run any recording program and play back the music.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
Any high profile DRM will be attacked on sight.
Its just the way of the world now.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The word "music" in that last sentence "...to protect their music interests" should be spelled "financial". ;)
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
TuneBite Torrent: http://torrentspy.com/download.asp?id=167288
To get sound from iTunes, AudioHijack is a great tool. It can be used to vastly improve the sound of some audiobooks, especially historic recordings that Audible won't or can't improve before they're released. Old recordings of political speaches or James Joyce's work, for example, can be made into something you can actually understand as opposed to something that is muddled and foggy sounding.
...for-this-story-to-make-slashdot dept.
Wow, who knew you could output to a wav file from Winamp?
Move along, nothing to see here.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
"Users have found a way to skirt copy protection on Napster Inc's portable music subscription service just days after its high-profile launch, potentially letting them make CDs with hundreds of thousands of songs for free..."
I think the real breakthrough here is how they figured out how to get hundreds of thousands of songs on a CD!
640 meg on a CD, the average song maybe 4 meg in MP3 - that gives only 160 songs on a CD for me on average. What is this new technology?!
potentially letting them make CDs with hundreds of thousands of songs for free...
Lets see what this means, it doesn't mean thier music has been comprimised, you can download any song on P2P if you want to break copyright.
The fact is, those people using this service won't care, because they were using this service to support lower cost music and listener flexibility.
Yes DRM sucks, but noone will put up servers to let people who dont want to support the music they download to get free music.
The other issue is, will these guys be tracked down by napster, or will napster loose thier music industry support? why was napster so STUPID to make a crackable system? Is there such a thing as uncrackable music?
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
DRM is a joke, there will always be a way to work around it. At least as long as we are able to interact with the existance of the media. We might need 60^2 monkeys that are able to draw a frame every min. But so be it me and my monkeys will take our flip books of hollywood blockbusters right to the library!
(The true crime is getting a parrot to sound like will smith.. Dam'ed)
Just remove the spaces
d =3 5627
1 59 3266
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadi
and
http://forums.winamp.com/attachment.php?postid=
Napster had to cross its legs tightly to get the record labels to allow it to operate. Now that it's becoming a "free-for-all", all its content up for grabs, won't it just become that much more popular? Without Napster itself contributing to the piracy, as far as its committments to the copyright owners has been fulfilled?
--
make install -not war
You should say "losslessly compressed or uncompressed audio". Not all forms of audio compression are lossy. :)
Yeah, another small victory for humankind!
Everyone with any computer audio recording experience knows that the reported Napster crack is as old as sound card input/output. But the source of the story was Engadget.com, which is basically a heavily pro-Apple electronics product news/review site.
The timing of this not-new-news release, right when Napster's new monthly flat-fee subscription service debuts, was no accident. It was meant to hit Napster on Wall Street, and as of this writing in early trading it's already paltry stock price is down over 2% on the news.
Since I know that the Output Stacker won't be available for long... I have posted it on our website. It is available here for download... http://forums.grtg.org/index.php?showtopic=214 - Slew -
I am interested to know how widespread/main stream the knowledge of this workaround is. If Napster is posting a rebuttal on their homepage, are news sites covering the story too?
If the incidents of this 'abuse' of the Napster user agreement go from dozens to hundreds to thousands, the record labels will expect Napster to put an end to the abuse one way or another.
I would expect step one to be eliminating the 14 day free trial. Step two may be restricting the 'all you can eat' model to a limited number of stracks per month.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
It really gets me how people bitch about "losing quality" when digital music is encoded. I don't care how many times you encode and decode a digital file, it is still better than:
(1) FM radio
(2) AM radio
(3) Vinyl
(4) Tape
(5) Humming
and just about any other form of music reproduction that mankind has used in the last 10,000 years. For any digital file, the odds are good that your SPEAKERS are your biggest impediment to quality.
From a 19th century notebook: This led, pretty much directly, to the invention of the phonograph
Fast-forward to nowadays, and a few realities. The data being transmitted to the sound card are passed as electrical impulses over a bus, and are subject to interception. The format of the data being transmitted to the sound card must be known by anyone who writes software which talks directly to the sound card. {In the case of older cards, such as the venerable SB16, this information is widely known; but there may well be newer cards out there where the drivers are closed-source and proprietary to the manufacturers. At least until the Linux brigade get to work on them}. Most software does not talk directly to the sound card, but rather via a driver. The driver converts the data from some "standard" format {which is specified, if not by the operating system, then at least at some higher level than the hardware; and must be known by anyone who writes software which talks to the driver} to the format used by a particular card. The means by which data are fed to the driver must also be known to anyone who writes software which talks to the driver.
The upshot of all which is, it's trivially easy to capture data meant for the sound card; and there is no place for any kind of security through obscurity, because everyone needs to know at some level how to send data to a sound card. Even if the format of data being sent to the card were kept secret, the format somewhere upstream must be known in order for anyone to be able to get a sound out of the card {and in any case, the format could be discovered anyway, given patience and time}.
If anyone genuinely believes that it is, or ever will be, at all possible to prevent music files from being copied, they are an idiot. Copy protection is mathematically impossible to achieve, and it's about time the music industry got round to dealing with this.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Napster's "To Go": hacked
Tuesday February 15, @09:19AM
Rejected
http://216.138.229.143/Crackster
Personally, I thought that this would've been done much sooner. You know, just to give the RIAA a big middle finger, the person or people who cracked it saying "You can't stop us. No soup for you!" Then again, isn't that what other P2P programs are for? Still, kudos to the person/people that cracked Napster. I'll drink to that.
Billy G has got to realize that he can develop all the DRM he wants and can restrict people from listening to music all he wants as well. But one thing Billy G can't restrict is innovation: something essentially to the true computer nerd. Innovation can bypass anything in life as long as the innovator has a goal and is dedicated to it. Although this DRM --> soundcard wav isn't the best method, someday someone somewhere will innovate further and finally crack Billy's girlfriend Janus.. I mean come on, its not hard to steal a nerd's girlfriend.....
I have spoke to a friend within apple who has told me they are aware of this rumour, it is NOT true, and it is apparently being spread by people like gmajor(look at his several replies acting as if the "email" is a fact) as some sort of FUD campaign (maybe gmajor does the astro???). I have to admit though, he had me at first...we all know between running sucessful companies and coming up with innovative products steve is busy RABIDLY FOLLOWING BLOGS!!! UZ PWNED!
Next stop: iTunes (It'll never happen, but it'll be funny to watch them try...)
Christ almighty, way to make a mountain out a molehill.
...just route your soundcard's line out to the line in jack, creating a loopback, and have fun with your audio recorder program.
As long as any type of music is taking an analog path out to the listener's ear, it will ALWAYS be possible to "crack"
That's not cracking, it's common sense.
Talk about your sensationalist journalism... I was expecting to read some article about a batch processor that strips the DRM from the MP3 files, not requiring decoding and re-encoding again.
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Does the artist of the song get paid? No? Well, arent you kind of screwing him/her over? I think the answer is clear.
You're absolutely right. I've been following this plan for years.
Considering something like 0.1% of artists ever actually make any money from their recording contracts (wish I had a link to the classic Courtney Love article), I haven't purchased a big label CD since the late 90s.
I'll still download, however. The artist gets screwed either way, so why not? Besides, I live in Canada. So not only is it legal, it's no longer immoral either. I'm paying for this right with every blank media purchased.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
would purchase any music at 96kb/s (stream) or 128 (download), unless it was your average cheesy pop. My sis had a few 128's and there is one particular song that we both like (NERD - Almost Over Now, Jason Nevins Mix, which is def _not_ the song I would pick for testing quality), she listened to my 192kb/s and said its not very different, the i put her's on again to listen too and you could actually see the "oh shit that does sound like crap" in her.
Im sure the 128 of Napster is probably equiv to about a 160, but that really still isn't good enough, particularly when you consider that your buying a crippled version (Which is fine if they could guarentee that there will always be mp3 players, portable and computer based) and to keep your going to have to burn/rip which is going to kill all definition that the original song had. If I buy something digitally I expect to be able to keep it,
I'd rather donate $2 per track to the artist and download off a dodgy P2P app than pay any music company $1 and be forced to re-buy it when they decide that its time for a new music tech and for everybody to re-buy thier old music.
macrohearing, dumbass
No, macrohearing would be the auditory analog of macroseeing. The word you're looking for is "macroaudition".
Well, double-dumbass on you!
This hack is like using a camcorder to circumvent macrovisoin by recording your tv's output. doable but not worth it.
128 kbps is bad enough when listening through a half decent stereo can't imagine what this version sound like
I repeat: YES, I will.
If it's on *my* memorystick, I will extract it. If it requires a closed software to play it, I'll install such closed software under a hacked version of QEMU that instead of playing some stream writes it into a file. Digitally.
I guess Akio Morita did not know what he was getting into when he had the CD/DAT idea "let's write everything digitally in the media".
Repeat after me: there is no DRM. It's cryptographically infeasible. One of the pillars of crypto is that the key must travel between Alice and Bob by a secured mean, so that Eve cannot get a hold of it. When Bob is schizo and Eve is the same as Bob, Eve has the key, so Eve has the message. Pristine. Not even quantum crypto can give a real DRM.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
backed by giant software concern Microsoft Corp
:-)
in context:
Napster is currently offering a free trial of its new Napster To Go service, which will enable users for a monthly $US15 ($NZ21.21) fee to download as much music as they want and transfer it to a portable device. They can also pay 99 cents for each track they want to burn to a CD.
That "rental" model for digital entertainment, backed by giant software concern Microsoft Corp and others, is getting its most serious mass-market tryout yet with Napster to Go.
somehow that makes the pill easier to swallow
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
I once heard about Bill Gates wanting to test out his latest mail server, so he sent a mail out saying that he would give everyone that forwarded it on a dollar.
Oh wait, that was bullshit too.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
C'mon. The parent obviously has an agenda. Everything said is vague and unsubstantiated.
The law is there to uphold the beliefs of society.
No. The law should be there to uphold what is right and punish what is wrong, regardless of the beliefs of the society. This is because laws are not derived from society, but from the common Good (which is never to be identified with societal beliefs). If enough people are breaking a law, the people is wrong, not the law.
Majority does not make something right. Tell that to poor girls with their clitoris cut by some majoritarian, but utterly wrong, belief held in some parts of the world.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
The output stacker is a nice program, but it has problems with other winamp plugins sometimes.
I would think it would be easier to use with a seperate recording program.
The 'Purchased Music' list in iTunes has 536 tracks.
There are currently 4736 tracks on my iPod. Every song on my iPod has been paid for either with physical media or iTunes Music Store.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Hundreds of thousands of songs on a single CD?
WOW.......
Wow, that's a lot of songs on a single CD, they've got to be very well compressed. Oooh, baby, lets hear that 0x7A song again. Its got a great beat and easy to dance to!
Actually, if you just know the parameters of the first compression, then decompressing and compressing again with the same parameters and compression algorithm results in the same compressed binary. First you have a sampled wav, compressing that one and decompressing will result in another (distorted) wav. This distored wav will be the "perfect" fourier series match in compressing it again with the same parameters.
So if the algorithm is known, this all ends up with one thing - what is needed, is a tool for figuring out the initial parameters (by trying the first couple of sampled frames for instance), and then using them on the entire file. Then you'll go through wav but not lose any quality whatsoever.
encryption has been cracked before by sensing the changes in current in an IC.
You will always have control (or at least someone will and that's usually enough)
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
make CDs with hundreds of thousands of songs for free
Personally, I wouldn't worry if people were cramming 100,000 songs on a CD. At 7kB/song, that's going to be some pretty crappy quality
Napster is ON CRACK! With all the crap they've put people through. With whoever thought of the idiot idea of th $15 month unlimited music listening fee but when you stop paying the music stops working.
-- DuckWing
Now it really IS cheaper than iTunes. :)
You know, I hate to admit it, but it is exactly this sort of thing that lends some credibility to thugs of the RIAA. For years, users have been saying that all they want is a way to have their music accessible online, and that they would be willing to pay for a download service. Now, as soon as those services come available, those same people are finding and promoting ways to circumvent the security and steal the music! Frankly, this is nothing but bald-faced hypocrisy, and will only encourage further retaliation by the industry. In effect, you're shooting yourself in the foot.
But I'm sure the in the posts that follow you will all prove me wrong by painting yourselves as dedicated hackers who want to "stick it to the man" and are only standing up for your own rights. Right?
Well your friend is wrong - it's now been confirmed by the LA Times.
, 1,4754180.story?coll=la-headlines-business
What is this, some Apple cabal tha I've awakened?
http://www.chartattack.com/damn/2005/02/1603.cfm
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-jobs16feb16
Clearly the biggest difference between this and iTunes is unlimited unpaid music downloads for 14 days. I wonder if a single account can have parallel streams running? With iTunes music execs have at least the peace of mind that at some point someone bought the track at a price. One could download 2 weeks of non stop music- that's a lot of tunes, for free.
Yours truly, AC
Oh, wait, isn't this the same 'media' that brainlessly quotes blogs as 'reliable sources' without actually really waiting for verification from authentic sources.
"Neither Apple nor Napster would comment on the e-mail exchange." is standard nomenclature for "We didn't bother verifying this, but it sounds cool".
This has happened time and time again, and FUDsters like yourself love to point back to circular 'proof'.
Aside from the key point - I fail to see how Jobs' actions were in any way unethical - if a competitor steps up claiming your product is 'stupid' and that they will bury you with something better, it's quite okay to point out 'Whoops!' when their strategy backfires.
This is no different to Jobs' pointing out that Scott Blum's Buy.com raked up a $20,000 download bill on the iTMS (without so much as mentioning their name) while they kept claiming how lame the iTMS is...
When you try to fight Jobs, you better hope you don't screw up - pointing out the obvious is certainly not 'unethical', you goob!
I've been reading about this story for three days on different websites.
This is only true for lossless codecs. This won't work for any lossy codec. You can't go from MP3->WAV->MP3 for example without quality loss. Same with WMA, AAC, and pretty much all the popular lossy codecs. For more information, see this discussion on HydrogenAudio.
Wow! Where can I get this technology that lets you burn hundreds of thousands of songs on CDs? My stupid format only supports 700MBs per disc. That must be a pretty crappy quality encoding.
...to be able to make a CD with hundreds of thousands of songs. My MP3 CDs seem so limited by comparison.
potentially letting them make CDs with hundreds of thousands of songs for free...
I just want to hear more about this amazing new CD burning technology!
Please tell me how you'll be able to extract the information from your memorystick when you just reflashed your phone, erasing the cryptographic key needed to decrypt the content.
:-) ... The private key is locked somewhere in the Microsoft HQ, very securely. Public-key crypto is very different than the normal one-key-crypto schemes that DRM normally uses. But, the public key is easily gettable inside the box (obviously, or otherwise, you would not be able to play any game).
Who said I need to erase each and any crypto key to reflash my phone? It can be copied before I reflash, and it can be in the new image I reflash to the phone, too... nonsense.
We're back to you being able to run software on your phone, while still being able to access the key. To do that, you probably need to circumvent the cryptographic checks that are in place to see if the software you're trying to run/flash is signed with the correct key.
Now you are making a little bit more of sense. But I can hash the old image, too, and send the old signed hash when software on the other side asks for the signed hash of the flash image of the phone...
So, again. Please tell me the private signing key used for signing Xbox games. That we found bugs in the Microsoft implementation (bunnie found a key travelling in cleartext, myself and Franz found out they used TEA for hashing which it's not good for) only means that that implementation wasn't good enough - a new one might be.
Hey, in public-key crypto, all you have to do to issue another private key and then mod your XBox so you check against the new public key. It's easy, a lot of people do it. And it does not make a bit of difference to what I said.
In the end you'll discover that you need to extract 1s and 0s from a physical chip with LOTS of security in place - security which will cost you a shitload (and I really mean it) of money to build equipment to circumvent.
No, silly, the private key is not there to begin with... you are mixing apples and microsofts
If you want to de-DRM some media stuff that -- for instance -- shows only in your XBox, mod it, copy the stuff to the HD, de-DRM it (fooling the DRM to think your XBox is not modded), send it via net to another computer, and voila there you have your supposedly-protected media so you can make it available in FastTrack or wherever.
So, my point stands. There is no DRM. You can enforce DRM, as mrchaotica said, if you have a 1984-like police state. I.e., it's really difficult.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
http://forums.winamp.com/attachment.php?postid=159 3266
Honestly, why is it so hard for people who post to add "<URL:" and ">" to the links they put up?
There's nothing on Napster that can't found elsewhere on the internet without charge. The free choices are usually encoded at a higher bite rates. They're not encumbered with Digital Rights Management and the overall quality is usually better.
Don't waste your time with crippled audio formats. If you really like the stuff, go buy the CD and rip it yourself.
If you are going to pay $15 a month for a subscription, you are probably better off with XM Radio (which is also rippable).
Simple. Run all the secure super-drm enabled stuff you like. Just run it in Windows under Qemu. Then record from /dev/dsp.
Simple.
"We're not going to advise you to do anything untoward, but apparently if you install Winamp along with the Output Stacker plug-in you can convert those protected WMA files to WAV files and then burn them to CD without paying a penny. Or at least an extra penny," Engadget.com said in an item on its site."
Uhh.. idiots, you *DID* advise.
Brooklyn.
I want to go to rock concerts to blow out my ears as soon as I can. There are hearing aids that plug directly into the brain stem. And they have an audio jack so you can pump sound directly into your brain. IP will go the way of slavery eventually.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
Bollywood has a method of preventing their movies from being copies which is virutaly foolproof.
They produce mostly Hindi musicals.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
I'll get a simple cable and connect the sound card output to it's input. Then I'll record the songs. Of course I'll loose some quality if it's an analog output, but is it really that significant? I don't know, I haven't tried...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Mixed copyright law with the EUCD?
Circumventing copyright protection schemes is absolutely NOT illegal in Finland - at least yet.
This is one of the few benefits from paying Teosto huge levies on every media.
Finland has ratified the EUCD directive but not merged it's own regulations to support it so for the time being you can crack, hack and reverse-engineer as much as you like.
Copyright infringement was, is, and will be illegal - the EUCD just makes circumventing any protection illegal too (even if you legally own the software/movie/music/other digital content.). No idea how it would affect Teosto levies, from what I've heard it's one of the main reasons the EUCD isn't merget yet (the original date for merging was 2002/12).
Capitalization is the difference between "Helping your uncle jack off a horse" and "Helping your uncle Jack off a horse"
Do such people really exist?
They do now!
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
I wish he'd let consumers decide which service is better
I just want to point out to you, since you brought it up, that you're talking about steve jobs emailing the record company executives, who are consumers of song distribution services, like itunes and napster. I wish you'd let those consumers decide which service is better. And hey, I'm an independent music producer, not part of any major label.
> It has been my experience that it is much better to lean toward ignoring piracy for the sake of our law abiding customers rather than to hurt everybody to stop the few bad apples. Our customers end up being much happier, and we also get fewer support calls. Win-win.
Not when you have a monopoly on popular products or cartels controlling addictive entertainment. In these circumstances, DRMs are used to control consumers, not stopping "the few bad apples." Have you ever seen a DRM scheme that stopped these "few bad apples?" Every time you propagate DRMs are there to stop "the few bad apples," you're proving their propaganda's success.
These cartels won't settle for anything less than "Win-win" for themselves, not win for them and win for consumers. If only consumers use less harmful entertainment, these cartels would lose their grip quickly.
Installed Napster and after running that it says Invalid country code. We're sorry Napster is not currently available in your country. If you feel you have reached this message in please contact customer support.
/ centricmall.asp/
But there is also conforming message "If you are in the United States Military serving overseas click here" https://thor.aafes.com/ics/default.asp?loc=vendor
There goes my 14 day trial.
Unfortunately, the rich artists become members of the RIAA. Plus, new artists sign their rights away to the RIAA, not someone else.
The funny thing is that i submitted this story 2 days ago and it was rejected.... this guy here describes a how to by using 3 boxes, although i suppose one is enough for this kind of task...
Roses are red, violets are blue, most poems rhyme, but this one doesn't...
The funny thing is that i submitted this story 2 days ago and it was rejected.... this guy here describes a how to by using 3 boxes, although i suppose one is enough for this kind of task... http://blog.kordix.com/marv/archives/000400.html
Roses are red, violets are blue, most poems rhyme, but this one doesn't...
Another Output Stacker mirror.
....belongs to us? :P
That sounds like trebble
See my art -> http://herbevore.deviantart.com
You're full of fallacies and false logics. Maybe you and your mods ate too much of their propaganda.
> Drop the price to $5/month and my music budget increases from $0 to $60 per year.
If you have a cartel on distributing addictive entertainment and your only goal is to make money, would you be stupid to lower your prices? Would you relinquish control of your distribution cartel allowing competitors to join your market, thus increase costs for better quality and lower prices?
> Sure enough, the DRM industry is helping the music industry -- just not in the way it appears at first glance. A combination of fantasies are being satisfied at the same time. RIAA is convinced that DRM will eventually stop piracy, the DRM vendors have a continous market for "upgrades" as each layer is cracked, while the continuous circumvention of DRM ensures plenty of interest in online music.
Do you think the RIAA doesn't know all of their DRM schemes failed in the past? Haven't you heard the entertainment cartels admitting their DRM usage isn't to prevent the determined? If you know their technical DRM failures and their DRM targetting the undetermined, isn't it logical DRM's usage only apply to the paying and clueless consumers? Do you think clueless consumers know how to backup or make copies of their DRM originals? Do you think clueless consumers would rather waste their time learning compared to dropping money for a new format of the same content after every few years? How many consumers, who don't know the difference between IE and the internet, do you think exist to classify them as clueless consumers? Do you think these cartels will want you to keep upgrading to different formats every so often, when they change new DRM schemes? Do you think clueless consumers basically pay for new DRM schemes instead of new contents? Do you think the cartels didn't account costs of DRM schemes into the music that clueless consumers buy? You think clueless consumers buy music online because they have interests in cracking DRM instead of enjoying the music?
Are you still going to buy into their propaganda and products? Is it too difficult to find the answers? If so, by all means, enjoy their propaganda du jour.
"...although we give people a way to enjoy music while respecting artists' rights."
Yeah, by paying money to record companies, who then withhold it from the musicians according to the terms of their contracts. The musicians get no more money when you pay for the service than when you use it illegally.
I wonder sometimes, are these spokespeople pathological liars or do they actually believe their own PR?
People tend to prefer what they are used to. A normal turntable and tone arm adds distortion due to tracking error and also has a higher noise floor than a Cd player. This makes it possible to tell which you are hearing...and since the technically worse solution is what they are used to that is what they prefer. Double blind tests were done way back in back thirties or forties which showed that people preferred music with all the high frequencies removed to the real thing. They were used to the radio performance of the times, so live muic sounded far too bright and edgy.
... but this new guy takes him look like a s00pergenius!
Doesn't matter. Its still an amazing deal to download unlimited music for a month for 10 bucks.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
Personally, I just don't believe in intellectual property period. Physical property is bad enough.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
$10 a month is reasonable. Finally I can easily convert the files to play on my ipod and also stream them through my Tivo. I think many others will agree that this is an acceptable service to pay for when we can now listen to the music we want on the devices we already paid a lot of money for.
This "crack" alone has made me a subscriber. But without it, I am not going to spend my time searching P2P networks or other places to find music. I'll just do something ELSE. Treat this as an unofficial "feature" of the service. I understand that this inhibits tracking for royalty purposes when done, but remember that this is money you're getting that you wouldn't otherwise have. Certainly you can divide the EXTRA money based on the statistics you DO receive.
You know, more than 90% of the world's population are not under the weight of USofA's stupíd regulations. We have our own rules, some of us are quite good in following those, and our rules can be relatively sane -- much saner than the DMCA, that is completely insane.
The USofAn gov'ment can be easily *AA-persuaded, but the other countries' are not the same.
The problems with criminalizing attempts to defeat DRM are:
* you criminalize acts that should not be criminalized (reverse engineering for instance)
* you criminalize the possesion or use of tools that increast productivity and security
* you create slippery slope
* it's immoral to defend a business model that is doomed because it's based on selling a high number of ultra-low-cost copies of something for a price not-so-ultra-low
* some countries and their governments realize the last point.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Apparently napster are frenchphobic. After installing succesfully it tells me upon launching that napster lite can not run in my country. This makes little sense. First I assumed it was for legal purposes but last I checked the RIAA was an American organization. Bizarre
Okay, I went home and checked. I've got 5000+ songs as mp3 files, and theres lots of music I can think of that I don't have. Okay, so much of that came from ripping my 100s of CDs; but not everybody does it that way.
500 songs? Just think of 100 bands you like 2 songs from, and 4 bands who you just have to have all 50 (pulling a # out of the air) songs they've ever released. And don't forget to count all the 100 1 hit wonders and so on, or if you actually have a spouse or sig.other who likes some tunes, too. And the idea is that I don't have to know them off the top of my head; I look through the PC and see them.
you could probably use the same idea on any sort of sound that comes out of your computer. like you could use yahoo's launch music video service and rip out the sound from there. for free. and forever. napster really doesn't deserve to be the target of all this hype.
All you have to do (that how my modchip works) is to fool the loader presenting it with the old rom to hash (thus making it load it) and then, after, switch the rom for another one, modded. Once you switch to this second ROM, the environment is yours to do whatever...
... -> decrypt -> write to some port so you can get it into any HD.
Cell phones are not different. My neighbour is a private eye. He has a box (costed him less than US$1000, and is nicely shaped as a briefcase) that you attach to a Siemens A* phone and voila. It uses the phone hardware to make calls, fool the cell phone towers in many different ways, intercept other people's calls etc. If he grabs your phone -- and I've seen him doing it -- it can reflash it with a ROM that, for instance, when you turn off your phone, it just turns off the display and makes a hidden call so he can hear what you're talking around the phone.
You are trolling unstoppingly, and I did not understand why. My point (and a lot of crypto experts will agree with me) is that there is no real DRM because when you can listen to something or watch something, you have the data. As a last resort, you have it in analog form (just connect your DRM-d iPod to your Line-In in the computer), but usually you have it in digital form, too.
Using the police (DMCA) to leverage DRM protection is not an option -- it's the digital version of the Prohibition and of the War on Drugs (those did not work, remember?)
I used the word bollocks because you used it first, but this just set you off into orbit. So, let's try again, friendly:
Hey, there is no DRM.
Let's try to implement DRM with cryptography:
film -> ADC -> file -> encrypt -> send -> decrypt -> DAC -> watch
now, you disassemble the watching gadget, put a tee-junction before the DAC part and you have...
voila. no more encryption.
See my point? Unless, of course, your watching gadget is all in ONE IC (cell phones?), but even then you can usually make a software "tee-junction", exploiting security holes in the phone's software, etc.
And I have read a lot of crypto books, thank you.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
In the light of your other post (where you say you work for the cell industry etc) I am relieved and glad that you are so naive.
Go Bears!
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Is DRM ethical?
;) These issues have been tried in the courts of the USA and other countries and things like photocopying, second sale, etc have been upheld. So now industry is trying to work around the legal system by inventing one of its own where the judge and jury are themselves and the police are bits of DRM code.
It is often within the rights of and ethical for authors and publishers to restrict freedoms. Even the GPL, poster child of the Free Software licenses, relies on restrictions enacted through copyrights and license to guarantee certain things can not be done. So simply saying DRM restricts freedoms does not mean it's unethical or somehow inately wrong.
But restricting certain types of freedoms is. for instance, it is generally considered unethical to restrict some one else's freedom of speach outside of certain exceptional circumstances. Similarly, removing someone's rights to fair use and negating the doctrine of second sale is also generally considered not right. Because of this, second hand book and music stores are possible and even thrive. You know, like Amazon.com
Since this is the most common use of DRM when it comes to media, DRM is usually considered to be generally negative. And this is before we even get to looking at secondary effects like making any media non-accessible to those with disabilities as it removes their ability to recode the data into a something they can use.
So while DRM itself is not unethical in my opinion, it's general application today more often than not is. Invent all the possible good uses for it you want, in the real world it's used to limit previously guaranteed rights and to rob the blind, well, blind.
But there's something that trumps all the philosophizing in the world: pragmatism.
Let's get realistic: DRM only works when the user has their freedom removed prior to the DRM being introduced. It's a lot like sucker punching someone when they are expecting it: it's much easier to accomplish this task when you have a couple of friends holding them down. Otherwise they can just step out of your way.
DRM is a freedom removing sucker punch. It's a "sucker punch" because it isn't tied to any mutual interests between the creator and the audience, nor is it done with any consensus outside of the will of the publisher (which may not be the creator). No, instead DRM tries to enforce the will of the publisher by forcefully removing freedoms by implicitly assuming the user can't simply remove the DRM enforcement mechanisms.
What does DRM really protect?
DRM protects a business model that relies on something that no longer is true: that it's prohibitively expensive to copy large volumes of information. Instead of looking at ways to reform the premise of the industry and instead of engaging the consumer market, they are trying to force the world back into the 1800s by making modern technology behave more like antiquated technology. How could the business of publishing be changed to keep up with technology, rather than try and deny it?
DRM also primarily protects the publisher. Not the author and not the consumer. If the author and the publisher were more closely related that would be one thing. Today, they often aren't. This tends to raise people hackles. Publishers need to reexamine their place in the world, or risk taking down not only themselves but also the authors many of them truly wish to promote and help through their creative process. Most disgusting is the use of DRM by publishers on works that are in the public domain.
DRM also protects business interests from the law. By creating their own extralegal means to define the rights of the audience, we are seeing the formation of a dangerous precedent: economic interests playing the role of government. And this is the most extreme problem I see with DRM.
These are just some of the Big Questions with Hard Answers. just ask Lawrence Lessig.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
If you are not advocating DRM, then you are really naive. My credentials: I have a hacked XBox running Linux, a hacked Nokia 6820 phone with stealth "spy microphone" mode, and an actual metric ton of equipment I amassed in the last 10 years in the field of network and gadgets' security. I think I can hack everything that is in my hands and that is mine to hack. I don't rent or let phone companies lend me phones -- I buy them so I can hack them (first buy doctrine is part of our consumers' law, too).
... in the XBox, in a cell phone, and in any commercialized gadget. Simple as that.
As a lot of bomb defusers would tell you, even things engineered to explode when tinkered with can be hacked, if you try it "the right way" (disclaimer: I actually know three bomb experts).
And to complete: you admit in one of your posts that you could exploit some bugs in the XBox and then you say that "it was luck those bugs were there or something." I am just arguing that it wasn't luck, it's a high probability that bugs will crop, enough people tinkering will find them
But to be sincere, since you are bugging and trolling me without dropping, I became decided to have the last word, and to enjoy myself in the process.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Nobody knows how many people are using Napster in this way. It could be 1% or 97%. Useage would be approximately the same either way. So if they're not panicking one bit right now, which I don't think they are, I think they're going to let this slide under the door.
Synergy is your friend
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