iTunes DRM Hole Closed

FrYGuY101 writes "As recently covered on Slashdot, there was a hole in iTunes which allowed music to be acquired from the iTunes Music Store without Apple's DRM applied. Well, Apple has just released an update which closes this exploit."

Comments

Impressive

[Quasar1999]

I like how they handled that... no horrible punishments, no wagging their finger at the community... just fix the hole, force the update (for obvious legal reasons), and carry on loving your customers... I like...

Too bad napster to go couldn't be so accomodating... :P

Re:Impressive

[Anonymous Coward]

Only because it was pretty damn embarrassing and very difficult to pursue legally.

Re:Impressive

[GigsVT]

loving your customers

By forcing DRM onto them?

Re:Impressive

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

I think they've realized that DVD Jon is pretty much untouchable. He walks a fine line, but hasn't yet crossed it.

It's not out of the goodness of their heart, but more because lawsuits are pretty damn expensive.

Re:Impressive

[cyngus]

Yet it remains the most consumer-friendly DRM around. Let's also remember that Apple itself could probably care less what you do with your music, but it has to reach some common ground with the record companies.

Re:Impressive

[2starr]

If you allow anyone to do anything with the music, the record industry won't allow songs to be sold digitally or would require higher fees to make up for the losses. I love getting my music digitally, so I would prefer that a few bad DVD John-like people not ruin it for me. So, yes... they were looking out for me when they made that move.

Re:Impressive

[jbarr]

loving your customers

By forcing DRM onto them?

They are simply "enforcing" a standing policy, not "forcing" DRM. And it is a policy that their customers have already agreed to. Plain and simple, if you don't want DRM, don't use their service.

Re:Impressive

[Satan Gave Me a Taco]

That's what he is you know, a fucking asshole ...The very simple and easy to live with rules that Apple laid out are just too much for some people ...All the crying people do about the big bad evil DRM screwing up the world and the "1984" type predictions are going to come true but it'll end up happening because the assholes among us will turn their noses up at every reasonable compromise along the way ...it will be in a sense our own fault.

It's wrong to assert that "assholes among us" are the source of the problem. The labels are the ones imposing restrictive DRM. When a person or a entity acts in a reactionary manner, it is their own fault, not the fault of the thing they are reacting to.

If you don't like the rules at iTMS then go buy your music elsewhere and quit screwing with the way the rest of us buy it)

I don't buy at ITMS. I buy CDs, so I can rip to whatever format I want, with no DRM. But I support people like DVD John who are proving that DRM doesn't work. The record labels will have to change their business model to work with human behavior. What you propose is us changing our behavior to work with their business model. I couldn't disagree more.

Re:Impressive

[ElleyKitten]

Except, everyone already can do anything with music. Almost every song you could want you can find through pirating, and when you pirate you don't have to deal with DRM, you can get the music in any format you want and it will play in any player you want. The goal when selling music digitally is not to attempt to make sure your customers don't pirate, but to make sure that what they're paying for is better than what they don't pay for.

Re:Impressive

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

You sir, are a very reasonable fellow.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world;
the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-- George Bernard Shaw

Re:Impressive

[Sanity]

I love getting my music digitally, so I would prefer that a few bad DVD John-like people not ruin it for me.

Yeah, those evil programmers hurting those poor multinational record labels by writing software that allows us to exercise our fair use rights under copyright law.

Your bend over and take it attitude makes me sick.

Re:Impressive

[Hamhock]

His point isn't that he loves DRM, it's that the record companies can pull support for online downloads altogether if they want, thus removing the very conveinent resource that iTMS is. Everytime DVD-John (or someone like him) releases something like this it makes the record companies nervous, and presumably less willing to deal with an online service as open as Apples is (if you think it's not that open, you're wrong, it could be a lot more locked down then it is, and it may get to that point if these 'hacks' keep coming). Record companies ARE evil, but that's irrellevant in the context of iTMS. iTMS is beholden to the record companies. Messing up iTMS as some sort of philisophical 'fuck you' to the record companies only hurts the end user and Apple, not the record companies.

Believe it or not, Apple's DRM doesn't bother me

[Anita Coney]

Considering you can burn Apple's song on CD and get rid of the DRM, who cares.

What I'd love is a way to download songs from Apple in a non-lossy format! If DVD Jon could do that, I'd give him a lifetime of gratitude!

So then..

[TheVampire]

..someone just releases a patch to PyMusique so that it looks like version 4.7 of ITunes to Apple's servers...
and the endless game continues....

Not really closed

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course the only change that Apple has made is to require iTunes 4.7 as the client. How long before someone figures out how to make PyMusique look like iTunes 4.7?

And as long as they are sending un-DRMd songs down to the client they are suceptible to man in the middle attacks (a proxy server which watches for iTMS traffic and saves the song streams to another file), or to someone directly pulling data out of the iTunes app (though the second would arguably violate the DMCA).

Re:No surprise

[Golias]

Our favorite music is owned and operated by an industry who cares more about money than music.

I write software for a living, and guess what? I care about money more than software.

You are welcome to work at whatever craft you do for free all you like, but professional musicians (and yes, professional music sales executives) have a right to charge for their work by whatever means they consider to best suit them.

The artists who write and play this music have sold their souls to this industry.

As the leader of a small-time garage band, I would LOVE to have a label come along and "exploit" us with a five-year, multi-million dollar record contract, even if it meant seeing every (crappy) song I ever wrote locked down by eeeeeevil DRM layers. There's no way schmucks like you are ever going to hear my music unless I "sell my soul" to the record industry, because I don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on marketing and promotion.

g/marketing and promotion/s//payola/

You'd be screwed too

[jocknerd]

If you think that you would be signing a big fat contract with the music label, you're just as dumb as most of the artists out there. What you would be signing is a loan. You would be at the record labels mercy. Believe me, you are better off now. At least you don't owe the music labels anything.

Re:No surprise

[Zeneris]

Only trouble is the label is only giving an advance (i.e. a loan) so in reality you will probably only see a tiny return or even be in debt, even after any nominal royalies, because so much gets sucked up as "expenses"! Wise up, even top 10 artists can be poor!

Re:No surprise

[Short Circuit]

The best music and software tends to be funded by culture, not money.

Re:Wouldn't that be crossing the line?

[Anonymous Coward]

Misrepresenting software to get around the DRM could be interesting legally. (Yes, I know browsers can do this -- but not to avoid DRM.)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Imagine..

[sh00z]

Sort of. He could only have violated the TOS if he had agreed to them through the iTunes EULA. Since this program wasn't using iTunes, the Terms of Service weren't invoked.

Re:Is it a fix or a patch?

[siriuskase]

It appears that they ask the application to identify itself and if it isn't iTunes 4.7, it won't download. Sort of reminds me of those websites that checked to make sure you were running IE. That led to other browsers acquiring the ability to misidentify themselves. If that's so, it'll only take a week.

Now what we need is for Slashdot to verify that the user isn't someone who's going to run off and tell Apple.

Parent is insightful? The mods are on crack!

[Frodo Crockett]

I would prefer that a few bad DVD John-like people not ruin it for me.

WTF? Last time I checked, all Jon (there's no 'h' in his name) wants to do is watch dvds and listen to music purchased via iTunes on his Linux box. What Jon has done is indeed illegal in some countries (more extreme /. members would call them corporate states), but I don't think that any honest person can say it's unethical.

It's really quite simple. If you buy something, you can do whatever the hell you want with it, so long as your actions don't harm anyone. Don't give me that "indirect harm" bullshit, either. I'd give you ground if we were talking about releasing the plans for building an antimatter bomb, but not for something so inconsequential as circumventing DRM and copy protection.