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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.
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).
You forgot to mention The Man. The concept of The Man is essential to all sixties-flavored artistic-integrity rants.
Peace.
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/
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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
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!
The best music and software tends to be funded by culture, not money.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
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
If you really care about making money, then you definitely want to avoid the industry contract.
Steve Albini published an excellent rundown of how the industry screws signed bands. In summary:
You have no idea what you're talking about. I know bands (I live in Austin, of course I know bands) that have not only didn't make money on their contracts, but ended up in debt to their record companies. The record companies charge their "expenses" to the band. Bands get a "statement" every month showing all the details and transactions, and the band has to arrange to repay any negative balances on the statement. The record company can use this to blackmail the band -- like not releasing an album and locking down the masters so that the band couldn't release the album under any circumstances. It's all legal because, well, the band signed the contract.
Word to the wise: If you do get a record contract, and your AR guy shows up one day to "take you out to lunch", just simply decline. Otherwise, you'll be the one paying for lunch, 'cause they'll just charge the band for a lunch "expense". It'll show up on your next "statement". Especially if you were signed by a major label. True story.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
But to make real money, or do it without the risk, it's the cartel or nothing.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
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.
I just upgraded to iTunes 4.7.1 (after Apple released their "fix"), bought and downloaded a two tracks, and used j-hymn 0.7.5 to convert them. It worked flawlessly.
From a mid-90s interview with Neil Young on Canada's Much Music...
Pop-tart interviewer: "How do you feel about the commercialisation of rock music? How do you feel when a Bob Dylan song is used to sell cars?"
Young: "I hold no illusions. We lost. Long ago."
interviewer:"Did you sell out?"
Young:"Well, I'm here on your show..."
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
Please stop perpetuating this myth. Apple have publicly stated that they would continue to use DRM even if the music labels didn't ask them to.
FairPlay is about stifling competition as much or more as it is about protecting copyrights.
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