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MySpace Music Player Hacked
Roy van Rijn writes to tell us about a little program called MySpace MP3 Gopher, with which you can download any song from MySpace as an MP3 even if it is marked to disable downloading. MySpace MP3 Gopher is a Windows program requiring no installation, and for those not on a Windows box the author offers an online version that anyone can run. It is hosted on his home computer so it is bound to get slashdotted rather quickly. All you need to grab a MySpace song is its "friendID," which is in every URL as a parameter. Tech-recipes has step-by-step instructions.
"It is hosted on his home computer so it is bound to get slashdotted rather quickly."
Ok, who on slashdot uses myspace? Ok, now how many use it for music? Alright. Lemme recount.
I sense a lot (more) myspace bashing. Otherwise, it's a cool program.
"I'm a well-wisher, in that I don't wish you any specific harm."
But in all seriousness, this is going to bring the "web-rip" scene of trash on P2P networks to a whole new level.
I have no doubt this project was funded, in whole or in part, by Universal Music group to support their BS crusade against MySpace and YouTube.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
I've ripped music from MySpace pages, but I did it using a recording program like Total Recorder. Basically it creates a virtual audio driver, records using that, then sends the audio to your regular driver. The only downside is that it does so in real-time, so you'd have to wait for the song to play.
Unfortunately MySpace music is only 96kpbs MP3s (AFAIK), so it's gonna be low quality, but lots of artists have MySpace exclusives or live songs only available there, which leaves it as the only choice.
No existe.
Really, it's the fact that they let you listen to music but try to stop you downloading it — it's stupidity in itself. If your computer is receiving the audio data, you can save it. But then again, similar things can be said about DRM.
it is rumored that the Americans in Guatanamo Bay in Cuba downloaded this program and used it as part of their "alternative interrogations" program. Quoth an anonymous source "Not even the most devout person in the world can withstand a constant barrage of myspace musical selections"
Monstar L
Why would anyone download a song off of Myspace? Honestly, i'd really like to know. Wouldn't it be easier to stick your head in a toilet and start screaming about your ex?
Am I missing something? It fails to grab any listings from any artists. Even the one used in the screenshot. Thats the web version and the desktop one.
1. Wait for 0-day news of product.
2. Create a trojan with adware.
3. Post a link to a "mirror" with the trojan. Bundling the original program is optional.
4. Sit back and earn 0.25 per install.
Caveat emptor.
I just tried downloading off my buddies band page, just to see how/if it works, and nadda.
So.. move along, nothing to see here.
LR
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
Any crusade against MySpace is a worthy cause, in my oh-so-pretentious opinion.
I dislike Myspace as much as the next guy, but Universal is just playing dirty. I mean, just days after they threaten to file suit against Youtube and Myspace, a piracy tool written to exploit myspace just happens to appear on the internet.
give me a break. It's pretty clear that a) MySpace and Universal have been in contract negotiations, b) those negotiations have broken down over fee structure, and c) Universal is doing its hardest to set precedent so that if MySpace doesn't come over to their side of the table, they can sue MySpace for as much money as possible.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
...Why do we need a whole program for this? It seems like the kind of thing you could easily do manually. Or better, a Firefox extension.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
so if I held a tape recorder up to my speakers would that not be stealing? If you're putting it out there on the internet, there are a myriad of ways to turn it into an mp3. If you don't want people transcoding your music, maybe you shouldn't have it on myspace?
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
for the record, i dont visit myspace, i dont care about the music there, and i certainly won't use this program.
/constantly amazed by the sheer cluelessness of media people
but really. if you don't want your music downloadable, don't put it online. there's nothing you can do that will prevent someone downloading it. in fact, to listen to it you first have to download it.
if you want people to be able to preview your music, supply them with 30 clips of it, not whole songs. because it WILL be downloaded
This is just another example of Web 2.0 security, or the lack thereof.
I disagree. They are letting people download this music, but they are supposed to prevent them from saving the file.
This is just an attempt at DRM, which really has little to do with our traditional notion of "computer security".
"Security" usually means preventing unauthorized access of your computers... not preventing unauthorized access to data after you give it to someone.
That's not the point. Sure, I understand that it's possible to record my music with software like total recorder et al, but I would imagine the majority would not take the time to do so. With this new tool, it gives the majority a quick and painless way to get copies of my music.
Saying "You put it online, so you shouldn't mind people ripping it" is like telling a car dealership that they should accept that their cars are being stolen because they put them on display in their lot. Whether they get it through total recorder or this hack, it's still unlawful and wrong. But now just about anyone can do it.
mund freud.
I tried it on four or five differnet artists, none worked.
Maybe MySpace devs fixed the hole
My posts are definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
If I want to make music my living, I have to be able to pay the bills. That's not going to happen if my music is free. Music takes time and money to create, just like any other art. Do you see painters giving all of their best paintings away for free? Perhaps the ones that are already wealthy.
Making music for a living is different than selling out. If I wasn't "doing it for the music", I'd find myself a job in a cubicle and "do it for the company". It's always for the music. But a guy's gotta make a living.
mund freud.
ARTS (Arts? ARts?) already allows you to do exactly what you just said, without downloading anything extra. I imagine other *nix audio technologies probably offer similar functionality ...
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
If you are going to illegally download a song, why use backdoors like this, when they are all available on the p2p and bittorrent networks?
38904334 won't work, and neither will any of the 7 random music pages I just tried. Maybe its already patched?
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
If you are using a Mac, Audio Hijack (http://www.rogueamoeba.com/audiohijack/) records live audio from any application (such as Safari) and saves it in whatever format is convenient for you. It's not as easy as this posted program since it is done in real time, but works with more than just MySpace.
Saying "You put it online, so you shouldn't mind people ripping it" is like telling a car dealership that they should accept that their cars are being stolen because they put them on display in their lot.
um...no. it's like a car "dealership" saying "i know we put these cars in the lot, with the keys in them, for people to use for free, but stealing them is wrong." the songs aren't there to be looked at and not used. as far as i know, there's no limit to how many times you can listen to a song on someone's profile. just keep hitting play, and it starts over.
The "hack" worked when it was posted to digg about 2 days ago. Looks like it was fixed early this morning.
Hmmm.
Now I know many musicians feel entitled to O(N) profits, which is understandable because the industry has been set up to work like that thus far (for better or worse). I respect your ability to make that decision for yourself, and accordingly, I do not download copyrighted music.
Having said that, as a potential customer, I'd much rather pay to go to a live show for an artist/band that I know I like than be nickled and dimed for every shiny little disc from artists/bands who can't figure out how to break out of the old business model. Don't underestimate the appreciation of fans who get tossed a bone here and there. If you really like what you're doing, and you really are good at it, you will be okay even if you don't play scrooge with your mp3s.
* For N copies distributed.
If we start buying CDs then the terrorists have already won.
It doesn't work, and I'm glad. Giving alot of morons an easy way to get a song isn't that productive. If anyone really wanted the song, they'd record it or create a virtual audio driver that writes to a file as mentioned above, but morons are too lazy to do that.
I actually work with a lot of MySpace artists with my site (I have a MS account, but I mean popexperiment). Ya, ripping off 96Kbps @ 22050Khz will really help you satisfy that need. Nothing like kicking back and taking in the hiss.
The only thing I really don't like about this is a lot of musicians and labels have come to depend on MS (say what you like, I work in a web-services company, I know Coldfusion and MySpaces scales poorly) and they might start pulling content. MS is actually the best resource out there right now for finding new work (since mp3.com really, which is shit now). Thats a simple fact. And artists can be very, very sketchy about 'lossing control' of their content. Another fact I have to contend with regularly (I run an internet radio channel/show on the previously mentioned site).
Lets hope they plug the hole quickly before knees start to jerk.
More interesting is the pending MySpace downloads. Assuming they don't build it out themselves (which the article seems to suggest isn't the case) this could be great for a lot of independant/international artists and even better for the listeners. Because MS encoded files are great for a quick taste but garbage to really listen to.
Anyway, as usual, we'll see how the chips fall. The net is pretty orgainic.
Quack, quack.
If you wanted to keep your music to yourself, you wouldn't put it on the Internet at all.
The MySpace player encodes at a pretty crappy quality. If it's a major label act whose music you're trying to get, there are a million other places you could get it (and the rest of the album it's on) at a much higher quality.
... and if it's an indie act whose music you're tryin to get, why not buy their freakin' CD instead of trying to rip them off?
That leave indie artists
Who doesn't like free music?
I don't agree. Sure, there will be ways round any protection, but then again all this stuff is out there on p2p anyway for anyone who can be bothered. For everyone else though... putting up a download is saying "you don't have to buy this, just have it", they're not likely to go buy stuff if you do that are they?
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Why would anyone want to download music from MySpace? It sounds like ass. Seriously, what is it, 32kbps? I realize that some bands post music on MySpace before they release it (like Weird Al), but I think I'd rather chop off my ears with a rusty knife than listen to those songs on anything other than some crappy CompUSA speakers.
not necessarily. all of the cds i've bought in the last 3 years were after hearing full songs on an internet radio (and sometimes saving the stream to disk, which i am allowed by law to do).
i was specifically addressing the OP's gripe that "if he wanted them downloaded he'd have checked the download this song" thing. he might or might not increase/decrease his revenue stream by putting a full song up for download. i have yet to see any serious research done on that. but common sense says if you dont want something to happen, don't do everything you can to make it happen.
What are you talking about? The topic is a webpage that plays music and attempts to deny the user the right to save the music they are listening to, and you are you talking about protocols with end-to-end encryption. They have nothing to do with each other.
Centralization breaks the internet.
maybe not today, but when your ears support DRM it will :)
Open Audacity.
Set recording to stereo mix.
Turn off or silence all other programs that might make a sound.
Hit record.
Open the myspace page with the music I want to "download".
Wait until it's finished.
Hit stop recording on Audacity.
Cut out the beginning and ending dead air.
Save file.
Duh.
For some reason I thought this hack would be a mozilla plugin that would automatically disable the myspace player when visiting a myspace page. Unfortunately, this hack doesn't protect web users from annoying music, it causes them to copy the horrible audio to their local computers. What's the phone number for DCMA enforcement?!?
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
everyone alredy now myspace was fucked everyone needs to go on hi5!!!
I post my songs on Myspace, and with my high-quality sound system there is not a single bit of artifacting that I can hear, and I upload all of my songs at 192 kbps. Thank you.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I think its a poorly designed service (part of why its so popular actually, lots of bugs (css expliots, less sanitising) that let users take more control, for better and worse.
:)
The catch with those great digital download sites for the small artists is you need a LABEL. They don't deal with artists directly. Which was great news for me, I was preparing to launch a 'virtual' label for artists who needed help with that part. But thats on hold now with MySpace's plan. I'll see how it works out.
Anyway, I agree about the great DRM free sites and believe me, I use everyone of them (you left off indie911, check my resources page for some more, foreign, etc). Magnatune I have mixed feeling about because while its a noble effort I don't think it gets enough exposure to actually help. While sites like the previously mentioned 911 (I promise, I have no affiliation) offer roughly %70 per track, which to me would sound a little more tempting (that and they are actively trying to gain more attention, we'll see how far they get).
Anyway, the downloads aren't quite the windfall to a lot of the artists who post their work there. Even if their reasoning isn't perfect (its their music, so its their call) a lot of artists really don't want their music freely available and for a variety of reasons. It'll probably get fixed quickly then they can play cat-n-mouse, who knows.
Quack, quack.
I thought gopher http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1436.txt died a slow lingering death...
http://signup.myspace.com/index.cfm
Quack, quack.
Coukld be worse. :P
Honestly, I thought about it and decided to abbreviate despite the similarities, simply because the post was about one company. Seems you managed and we've had a conversation despite this decision which leads me to the only logical conclusion: I was right (its always the same conclusion, I might have to re-evaluate my sample data, but I won't be telling my customers).
Ciao!
Quack, quack.
And on pirate bay you'll get mp3's with a usable sample and bitrate. 96/22050 is really only useful for previewing music ... like MySpace does. Anyway, it appears the hack is fixed. Now if they could just get their application to scale we'd have something to talk about.
Quack, quack.
I'd call it Musicians Rights Management. Which I feel more fuzzy towards they the stodgy old corps.
What were we talking about?
Quack, quack.
If you wanted to keep your music to yourself, you wouldn't put it on the Internet at all.
Exactly!!!
What is the difference between playing a song from your favorite MP3-player or playing it from the webpage? - Or sharing it or the URL to the webpage? - Making a song 'unsavable' is just a stupid way of exercising ultimate control. Doesn't make any difference but 'as creator I want to be in control and decide how and when' or something along those lines.
Make up your mind: Do you want to let other hear your music or not. If yes, let them. If not, keep it to yourself. It really is that simple.
Any concept designed to prevent normal and flexible use of digital music deserve to be broken.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
This program also downloads a dl.exe from the web. Pretty sure that's a known worm. Don't believe me, open the executible in a hex editor and search for "dl.exe".
What does this have to do with Web 2.0? The MySpace music player is a flash application. Web 2.0 is just a term to describe the new generation of social web apps which team up various mature technologies in innovative new ways to deliever a richer user experiences compared to the previous generation of web applications.
Web 2.0 sites simply focus more on user and community interaction, collaboration, and content-contribution. They also marry pre-existing technologies (javascript, xml, serverside-scripting) to create more responsive interfaces. What is inherently flawed or insecure about it? Digg, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Gmail, YouTube, and Last.fm all seem to be doing fine. Even older sites like Amazon.com, Google, Yahoo Mail, and Slashdot have adopted Web 2.0 trends. Technologies naturally grow and adapt to fill new or changing needs and demands over time. Web 2.0 just represents the next evolutionary stage of web development as people realize the potential for richer web experiences by combining various key technologies.
It sounds like you're just afraid of a little change. Making up FUD to scare your managers out of keeping up with growing web trends just seems like a cop out to avoid learning new development techniques and adapting to the new business climate and changing consumer demands. Almost all large sites are gradually taking advantage of Web 2.0 development techniques. You can't fight progress forever.