Slashdot Mirror
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...""
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.
Bollocks - you're assuming you have complete control of the execution environment. That is not the case on some platforms (cellphones springs to mind) and there are incentives (I'm sure you know the acronym) to make a "secure platform" within our normal open platforms to reach the same goal.
it's in my head
Possible workarounds for them:
subverting the system (MS can do that) to allow locking the soundcard We can simply code a virtual soundcard driver. restricting Janus to work only if your soundcard has a driver signed by Microsoft's key (at the cost of breaking it for many people) We can use cards with extended functions. blocking all cards with such "extended functions" when Janus is in use At the cost of some quality, we can use the analog route, by simply plugging the card's speaker output into some other device.The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
True but this is much more a problem with a subscription service. If you use Hymn, you have already payed 99c for the track. You aren't really doing much other than making it so you can give a copy to your friends which you could do anyway with a cd. If you use napster you are permanantly keeping something you were only supposed to be renting. you could pay 15 dollars and get and get 5 gigs of music. Breaking fairplay will still require you to pay a little over $1000 for the tracks
yes. MP3, Ogg, and WMA all take away different parts of the waveform in their quest to be smallest. Therefore, transcoding from one to another results in the waveform being mangled more and more.
As the originator (as far as I can tell) of this "hack" (I wouldn't call it that), it is absolutely amazing how quickly this got around. 4 weeks from post on cdfreaks, to worldwide news, and an article on slashdot. Yay to me.
/Just sayin....
Click here to see the original post I made on this
Anyhow, I hope you all are enjoying it. I merely wanted to transcode the files I had bought (3207 and climbing....) so I could load them on a non-WMA-aware MP3 player like any other piece of music I own. I certainly didn't intend for Napster to start a 14-day free trial, nor did I expect this method to get "out into the wild" (although, posting on the internet is no way to keep anything secret.....). I would like to take this moment and kindly remind you all that unless you actually *buy* some tracks, Napster loses money. Napster loses enough money, they'll fold shop. The artists will then get reamed by iTunes. Don't let it happen guys, lets at least try to be honest.
--warlock1711 of club cdfreaks.