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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...""
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.
"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.
To be fair, this is a far more crude hack than Hymn.
Hymn (the iTunes DRM remover) keeps the encoded data encoded, simply removes the copy protection, wheras this takes the decompressed audio, writes it as a wav file to the disk. As a result, if you want to encode it to save space, say, WMA, or ogg or MP3, you're losing more information (I suppose you could also go with FLAC, but that's a lot of space for a mediocre bitrate WMA version anyway).
All in all, I'd say wait for a better way of bypassing the DRM before you hog up to the Napster smorgasboard.
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
I don't see why you couldn't create a fake audio driver for Windows that let you swipe the digital signal. Or a fake CD-RW to steal to the MP3s iTunes lets you download.
And of course the DarkNet paper showed us all what we already knew: With DRM, you have to give the user everything needed to play the file. That includes the cryptography algorithm and the key. Thus, all DRM is breakable.
..."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
To be fair, there always must be a "WAV" step; you just don't see it in action using method described for the link.