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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."
from filling one of Apple's holes.
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
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...
:P
Too bad napster to go couldn't be so accomodating...
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
When holes like this one open, it's only a matter of time before they close.
Rant:
This is no big surprise. Our favorite music is owned and operated by an industry
who cares more about money than music. The artists who write and play this music
have sold their souls to this industry. Until the artists wise up and use the
Internet to distribute their music on their own terms, this cat and mouse game will continue. It's not going away soon since many artists do it for the money anyway.
Which of course requires that everyone upgrade their itunes to version 4.7. Apparently you can still use PyMusique to preview tracks, just not buy them.
iTunes 4.7 has been out for a year now. Apple didn't "just release" anything, they just made it so their servers required you to have 4.7.
Good question. Unfortunately, Apple will require the upgrade for continued use of the iTMS.
From the original story:
He explains that his program works by bypassing iTunes which adds the DRM itself at the end of the transfer.
I don't think it would be trivial to change the time that they add the DRM. So, is this a true fix that won't be broken again quickly? Or is this just a small patch that changes something just significant enough to break the Pymusique application?
I'm a big tall mofo.
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!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
..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....
Seems that Slashdot has become the standard bug-report mechanism across numerous OS's and companies.
It didn't plug a "hole". It modified things so that PyMusique won't work anymore. Like they did with Real.
...it requires you place a wad of chewing gum in the headphone jack.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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).
How was being able to PURCHASE something in a form that the user actually wanted an exploit? A bug that would allow someone to gain access to Apple's servers, or to steal information, or - for that matter - to steal songs without paying - all of those would be exploits.
I'm with you. I would cheerfully pay an extra ten cents (or so) per song and put up with the longer download times if I had the option to get iTMS stuff encoded with either FLAC or the "Apple Lossless Format."
In fact, I'm going to send an e-mail to the iTMS sales support folks saying exactly that, and I suggest you do the same.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
What I'd like to see is iTunes to have a 'compress when copying to portable' option, and then have Apple sell lossless.
I don't mind wasting the gigs for lossless on my desktop, but I would object to wasting them on my 1st generation 5Gig iPod. Allowing this option would let me store the master copies at home, but still carry a fair amount of them around portably.
Cheers,
Ian
Maybe you just hold the shift key down when you download
for crying out loud
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.
There's already an option for that for the ipod shuffle. I'd imagine that there's some way to either enable it for other ipods, or bug apple enough that they'll add it for other ipods like they did with the shuffle music and other options for the 4th gen ipods.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
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 based on user account deletion
I wonder how happy all the Hymn and J-Hymn users out there are about what DVD Jon did. By releasing PyMusique, he got Apple to force everyone to use 4.7 iTunes if they want to use the iTMS. I believe that 4.7 broke Hymn and unless that has been addressed, now people will no longer be able to remove the DRM from music that they purchased from the iTMS.
What happened was fine, nothing to get your knickers into a knot about. When you buy music with DRM you are agreeing to use it according to the terms set forth. One of those terms is that you agree to how the terms may change in the future. That is why I do not buy music with DRM, the fact that what I can do with that music can change at any time.
It is too bad that the Apple DRM happens to be one of the least onerous and DVD Jon gave Apple a reason to make people move to slightly more restrictive terms with 4.7, but still just the fact that Apple can modify what you can and cannot do with the music from the iTMS is an immediate turn-off for me.
I'd prefer to see FLAC support in iTunes. I know its probably not something they'd support on the iPod, but a lot of live sets are offered in FLAC format and it'd be great to be able to import the FLAC files directly into iTunes and only convert them to MP3/AAC if I wanted them playable on the iPod.
So, the music executives have forced DRM on Apple and so they have to provide it in their files. But they aren't really doing anything. Basically the DRM is to prevent files from being just put on Kazaa and spread around the world. Yet, the DRM doesn't really stop this. There's still the burn and re-rip strategy which is quite effective, as well as the "buy a CD method" which is also effective for getting files onto the internet. The only thing this does stop is file which the person has purchased being accidentally leaked on the internet by some hard-drive scanning P2P program. Anybody who still wants to distribute their purchased music can still do so. All it stops is people who don't want to share their purchased music from sharing it unintentionally.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
For so long, one of the more legit arguments for downloading music via p2p was that music publishers gave customers no other options other than to purchase an entire, overpriced CD when all a person wanted was one or two songs. Now we have a multitude of options for buying music pretty damn inexpensively online with a very reasonable implementation of DRM, and some people still want to jump through hoops to cheat the system? For god's sakes, write your own music if you're that cheap!
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
I'm not speaking strictly from firsthand analysis, but it doesn't look like the hymn developers are violating the ToS. hymn is a tool that performs certain operations on standard data objects (mp4 atoms). Actually using it on music files you bought from iTMS is a ToS violation... by the user. You can maybe make arguments about the "intended purpose" of hymn, but that's a much more complicated issue.
Incidentally, as much as I dislike DRM and will probably never buy any DRM'd music (it just feels unclean), I have to second Quasar's post: Apple could have gotten their legal action on, and they deserve credit for instead doing what they did. You can't even really fault them for trying to "pull the rug" via undocumented software changes; aside from the fact that such is really standard industry practice (laugh), iTunes and iTMS belong to Apple and can be changed at their will. (This lock-in is the cause of my first objection to DRM in general, but that's a separate argument.)
"There are hundreds of game theorists at the gates, sir, and they want to hold an election!"
You are (and always have) bought a license to use a copy, and the rights you have on how you can use that copy are limited.
You do not have, for example, distribution rights.
You cannot buy a copy of a movie or song and then broadcast it. That requires a different type of license.
You do, however, have your fair use rights, which, I agree, are being eroded and trampled upon. Sure, we can just burn to CD and then rip the MP3s back to get rid of Apple's DRM, but using any technique to bypass DRM or copy protection is a Federal Offense (tm) via the DMCA.
So all this bitching and whining about how YOU can't do what YOU want with YOUR music is drek. When you go produce your own music, then it's really YOUR music to do with what you want, and you can philanthropically hand it out on a web at your own expense all you want.
But you are buying a license from somebody with this stuff, and that license clearly delineates what rights do and do not come with it. If you don't like it, then don't friggen buy it.
You're like the people who bitch about gas prices going up but keep driving your cars. Or even worse - the people who plan a one-day "drive-out" where NOBODY BUYS GAS! That'll show those evil oil companies! That'll MAKE them listen!
Walking into a brick and mortar building and purchasing a good old fashioned CD is still a method for getting music. And it doesn't have a DRM attached to it. So why does everyone insist on attaching a DRM to purchased music files? How are they different than the physical CD? A physical CD takes me less than 3 minutes to either rip into AAC or make a physical copy and pass around to whomever I please. Putting a DRM on things is just like saying, PLEASE, TRY AND HACK ME. Its no different than telling kids that they can't drink until they're 21. If you don't make a big deal out of it, neither will they (look at countries that don't have a drinking age for example). On top of that, we all know that DRM is a useless technology. You give the person an encrypted file AND the keys to open it. Wheres the security? And now for the honer system theory.... If it were made blatantly clear when you purchased a song from the iTMS that YOUR NAME and ACCOUNT NUMBER were embedded into the file (just like a license plate on a car), I would certainly think twice about sharing that file on a P2P network. At the same time I would have an unlocked unrestricted file to do as I please with.
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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.
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
I'm wondering what the reactionary response to this will be.
In high school (a long long time ago) a friend of mine got a -3 on a question on a test. The girl sitting next to him got a -1 on the same question with a near identical response. He complained and the situation was resolved by giving the girl a -3 instead of a -1.
My point, instead of raising awareness of the stupidity of the law and making it better for the rest of us...will DVD Jon just ruin it for us? Will his escapade just serve to make DMCA laws worse? Will the RIAA use this to show that DMCA laws are not tough enough?
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
Sure, if you don't mind your musical career being over.
See, the big labels put in an exclusivity clause. Sure, you can "simply walk away", but you can't then release music commercially, even as part of another band, until you've paid them back what you owe and they've given you permission to record for someone else, or the duration of the contract you signed has expired.
And that's not the worst of it. It's not necessarily you who gets to decide whether to "simply walk away"; the record label can decide that it's not going to bother releasing anything you record, but you're still under contract and can't record for anyone else.
I know a couple of musicians who got fucked that way. They signed with a major label (Polygram). After a couple of singles, the label decided the musicians hadn't been profitable enough, so nothing more would be released. However, they couldn't go back to their indie label, because they were under contract for the next 8 years. So, that was the end of their musical career as artists; they worked as producers for a while, then found jobs outside the music industry.
I guess if all you care about is making money, and you don't mind your musical career ending totally if you fail to make big bucks, then a major label contract would seem like an OK deal.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak