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iPod Cracked, But Does it Matter?
According to an Associated Press story, "DVD Jon" Johansen is planning to market a technology for cracking the copy protection on songs purchased from Apple's iTunes Music Store.
This technology will probably be much discussed in the press as the release date draws nearer, but it's a case of using a flame thrower to kill a fly. It's already possible to convert Music Store songs to MP3 without even using any functionality outside of iTunes.
Apple doesn't make this easy to find, of course, and in fact tries to make it look impossible -- if you set your preferred import format to MP3, then right-click on a song in your iTunes "Purchased songs" list and click "Convert selection to MP3", you get the error: "[song name] could not be converted because protected files cannot be converted to other formats". But you can easily burn a series of songs to a CD, then select the songs on the CD and import them into MP3 format. (Of course, if you don't like wasting a writable CD each time you convert your songs, then wait until you've purchased a few more songs and convert them all at once.) All of this is based on core iTunes functionality, which won't go away unless Apple decides to stop letting users (a) burn CDs or (b) import CD songs as MP3 files, neither of which is likely.
But suppose Apple does manage to block this path. (The easiest way I can see would be to write a hidden code on each CD burned from protected songs with iTunes, so that iTunes would refuse to re-import that CD into an unprotected format. Users could re-import the songs with another application, but at least they'd have to open two programs!) You can still use a program like Total Recorder that can capture any sound output on the computer and save it to an MP3 file.
And even if it ever becomes possible for the audio playback application to seize control of the operating system in order to stop programs like Total Control from working, you can always connect a portable MP3 recorder to the audio output of your computer.
It's a common misconception that if a copy-protection algorithm gets broken, it must be because the encryption was too weak or the algorithm was flawed. But the Achilles heel of any such copy-protection scheme is that in order for the content to be playable, the playback program has to "break" the encryption every time, in order to play it. If the content is encrypted using a key, the key has to be stored on the user's computer where the playback program can find it. (If you didn't have to store the key along with the encrypted content, you could use encryption algorithms that are believed to be impossible to break with today's computers, by 15-year-old Norwegians or anybody else.) But even though every copy-protection algorithm is breakable in principle, it's usually easier just to capture the content as it's played back, which is what the previous examples do.
Logically, I think the only algorithm that would help to fight music piracy would be one that embeds a unique "fingerprint" or "watermark" in each downloaded copy of a song -- in the audio itself. A good fingerprint would have these properties:
- it should not be noticeable enough to interfere with the user's enjoyment of the song
- it should not be possible to copy the song in a way that destroys the fingerprint, without degrading the song quality and diminishing its value
In the meantime, don't get taken in by the hype around a new way to "crack" the existed restrictions on copy-protected song files. They were never really protected.
Is anyone really surprised by this?
DRM is such a futile idea that the only way it would be possible would be to lock down consumer electronics so badly as to make them virtually function free.
We call that the theatre or a live performance.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
He is going to market a way for COMPANIES OTHER THAN APPLE to create copy-protected content that is playable on the iPod. None of the crap you just wrote is in any way relevant to what he is up to.
You lose quality if you first convert audio from digital to analog, and then sample it again. But in the age of "CD quality" 128 kBit MP3s and crappy PC speakers, who cares about audio quality anyway...
There is value to a fully digital cracking technique. If you have a large collection of songs, it is a royal pain to set things up to re-record them, re-label them with titles and artists and such... it's good for one or two songs at a time, but for a big collection? Ick. With a digital cracking procedure, you can write an automatic tool that runs at well above standard playback speed and which you can walk away from (or leave running while you browse the Web...)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I read most of the article and it discusses breaking drm on music purchased on iTunes. Can someone explain what this has to do with cracking the iPod?
Burn an Audio-CD from within iTunes.
When the tray opens up, simply insert the CD again.
Rip using your favorite ripper.
Ok, this costs the cost of a CD. But think of it as making a backup and liberating yourself from DRM at the same time. A small price to pay for Freedom (Tm).
First of all the importance of the achievement of DVD jon depends entirely on how hard it was to break the DRM protection. Whatever insights he gained from succeeding might be useful to crack other things. Second the very same thing could be said when he cracked CSS. After all one could always have sampled the output with some video equipment (macrovision permitting but that is defeatable) and then resampled. Only, it's not practical. Even burning to rewritable and then ripping is less practical than batch removing DRM from your collection. So, what's the point of TFA? I won't read it :D
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
I'm using amarok anyways, but I think many people will think of this as useful. And in the end: It's not the nerdiest solution that wins, it's the one requiring the least work with the compared best results. At least when it comes to non-geeky, private software use.
First off, I read the /. post but not the linked article. I just wanted to put it out there. I believe, however, that this is significant news because this provides a method of decoding that I would assume to be lossless. If you burn an iTunes file to a CD and then rip the CD, even at the highest quality settings, there is going to be a slight degradation in quality. Converting it is going to be a much better option for any serious audiofile.
In the future, companies (those that are both hardware and media comapnies) will stop selling regular speakers and only sell digital/encrypted speakers. It's already illegal to "mod" the speakers by soldering a connection directly to the speaker output. Maybe it's not feasable, but don't pretend like they didn't already think about this.
It's clear that Bennett didn't even bother READING the article that he's supposedly using to back up his claims. Nowhere in that article does it talk about DVD Jon (or his company) selling a tool to crack the iTunes encryption. However, what it does talk about is DVD Jon's company selling a tool that will allow other music retailers to encrypt songs that they sell in the format that is used by iTunes and the iPod.
Remember kids, Reading Is Fundamental!
This guy's the limit!
Why I can't find the DRM removal tools that were supposedly available recently?
Can't really charge for something that anyone can download free, eh? Still, I guess I can't blame him for wanting to cash in on his work.
I know, it's trivial to convert it with the burn/import method, and I'm not gonna whine about the cost of a CD blank, but isn't the iTunes quality poor enough without tanking it even more with this method?
Now I'm kicking myself for not grabbing those tools the minute they were released.
It's a good thing because it makes it a lot easier to break the DRM. The other methods of audio-out to audio-in and record, or burn to CD and rip are much slower ways, as well as the loss in quality. If you could keep the original M4A, without re-encoding then it's a lot better solution. It's kind of like moving from the point where we were using frame-grabbers, or video out, to copy DVDs, to the point where we can just rip the encryption out of the VOB, without losing any quality, and doing it at much higher speeds.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Anyone that assumes that the iPods success comes from iTunes Music Store is mistaken IMO, iTMS helps the iPod alot but what makes the iPod such a hot seller is good marketing by Apple, and a good product. The user interface for the iPod is still the best one on the market (never mind the fact that Apple has a patent on the interface which prevents competition), and iTunes is extremely easy to use even for people that know little about computers. That combined with excellent marketing makes the iPods extremely popular.
Suggesting using the 'analog' loophole is a silly argument for not worrying about DRM and not breaking it.
The same way you should not then worry that your HDTV allows to play video at full resultion at only some devices because you can always watch the same video in lower resolution. If you use the 'analog' loophole, there is a loss of quality and the issue of speed - to convert to MP3 a collection with 30 days worth of music will take 30 days of recording.
We could take the analogy a bit further and say that you should not worry if e-books and documents get locked against, say, printing them. You can always take a screenshot of the screen and put it together in the Photoshop, take a picture of the screen with a digital camera. Or just take a sheet of paper and put down all the text of the document on paper. That's the kind of thing you are talking about when suggesting recording analog audio signal.
Let off some steam, Bennett!
Bottom line: there's no reason yet to get excited about the iTunes-cracking technology (and, indeed, no reason to buy an iPod), when you can already convert songs this way
Considering that the iPod is the top selling MP3 player right now it sounds more like he's missing the point than making great insights. He makes it sound like people only buy iPods for the specific purpose of playing music bought from the iTunes store. I'm sure there are plenty of people (myself included) that have never bought music online and bought the iPod for other reasons, be it usability, style, social status or whatever. The ability to play music bought from iTunes never even crossed my mind.
1st thing I do after purchasing music from Apple is burn an audio CD (for archive) of the song(s) and rip them back into iTunes removing the DRM in the process.
Who is this Bennett person and why do I get the feeling he'll be as popular as John Katz?
Developers: We can use your help.
It is about other media players being able to use ITMS content and about allowing other stores to release content that can be played on the iPod (and on other media players that can now play the ITMS content).
Fact is, if you want to operate a music store, you are going to need some kind of DRM. This module allows one particular kind of DRM (that happens to be used by the #1 online media store) to play on more media players players than it can currently be played on and to allow organizations other than Apple to release media protected with this DRM.
I wonder if the people who trot out the "analog loophole" argument are aware that the resulting quality sucks (D/A then A/D conversion) and you can only "convert" at 1x speed. In my mind, it's not really an acceptable method of stripping off DRM -- just a last resort for the desperate.
Rather than effectively making a coaster each time I want to create an MP3, is there any software that can emulate a CD Burner and write an iso to disk, which I can then mount with Daemontools and rip from? This seems like a laughably trivial idea, but I haven't found any good solutions for windows that actually WORK.
You don't "lose quality" if you leave it in the PCM wave form, or encode that using a lossless encoder. It's still "128 kbps AAC" quality but it's not any worse than you bought. Just don't use mp3, or any lossy encoded on it - that is very crappy and noticed by anyone that has normal hearing. Bluetooth A2DP, beknownst by few, does a lossy encode as well, but that's for another interesting /. article.
Dude
Early days before decss, frame by frame, capture to clipboard, then encode to avi mpeg4-v3
Sure it took 2x length, but it worked great, you just had to make sure the audio was in sync.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
... at least when it is used to identify the original buyer.
Just imagine you have lots of CD/iPods/whatever full of watermarked (with your name) titles. And you lost your stuff or someone stole it. Then those same files are found on P2P networks or on counterfeited CD. And tada, the RIAA lawyer charges you with massive copyright infrigment.
What should you do ? Go to the police to tell them precisely all the tunes you were stolen, then try to fight the RIAA lawyer with that ?
Sorry, but I do not want to take so much juridical risks for stupid songs. The scary thing is that iTunes or any other service could very well implement that in their "burn cd" features, and without telling you about it.
Yes, there are several programs to crack iTunes songs, although the whole 'rarr! we are the record industry! we have lawyers' DRM bollocks could in theory cause some legal hassle. On the other hand, several programs, such as Audacity let you actually record the audio file without any extra wires or somesuch, at exactly the same quality. So you're not reverse engineering anything. And given that you have the legal right to listen to the music, where's the issue?
This may be a bit didnt than what TFA says, but my way or moving songs from one place to another was (Show hidden files and folders) you would then get a list of music in a random order....just find what you want.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
One common misconception I've come across on Slashdot a lot is that security is either open or shut. An algorithm is either secure or broken. This is not how security works, and a couple real-life examples demonstrate this. You lock the doors on your car, but someone can still just break the window to gain access. But this doesn't mean locking the doors is meaningless, it makes it harder (or more risky) for a thief to gain access to the contents of your vehicle.
The same thing applies with iTunes. The question isn't "is it possible to strip DRM", but "how easy is it to strip the DRM". I don't think, for example, that being able to burn to a CD or capture audio output is practical for most people. I have over 40 GB of music. A lot of it is burned from my CD collection, a lot of it is from my wife's collection, and some of it is downloaded from iTunes. So I've got well over 8,000 files and of those a couple hundred are DRM-protected. I honestly don't know which at this point. For me to DRM-strip them using either of those methods is going to be like a day-long project that, frankly, I don't have time for. In addition to that, I'm not sure about the sound-quality degradation in converting from MP3 to audio CD and back to MP3. Or about going from digital to analog back to digital. In any case, it would be pain in the butt to go through my entire library, and I may not be able to practically avoid some quality degradation. Yeah - DRM is already "broken", but at what cost?
If the result of DVD Jon's crack is a program what will go through my iTunes library and batch process the files to strip any DRM automatically, then we have something on our hands that matters. In addition, there are a lot of additional potential applications for DRM-stripping to make music automatically portable across various music players. If my library was nothing but vanilla MP3s with no DRM, then it wouldn't realy matter if I accessed it with iTunes (for an iPod) or Windows Media Player (for various wannabe iPods).
The effect of DRM is not to make it impossible to move your music around, it's to make it inconvenient. Convenience is not a side-issue for digital music. It's the issue. Otherwise we'd all just carry around CD players and 500-disc CD wallets. The digital music industry exists because of convenience, so any approach that not only circumvents DRM but does it painlessly is a significant improvement over DRM-skirting strategies that require additional effort from the consumer.
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
1. The process causes quite a loss in audio quality
2. You loose your file tags
3. Is quite time consuming when you have a hundred albums to do.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
If DVD Jon can build a method of stripping the DRM from iTunes files that's easier than assorted python scripts and DOS command lines, or more universal than relying on a specific version of iTunes (Windows 6.0.4, or whatever), or more universal for other platforms (like for Macs, since just about every fricking Mac owner uses iTunes), then hell yes I'm excited about it. There's no mac solution, the solutions I know of know rely on specific knowledge about the structure of the DLL windows library (hens no mac, linux, etc), and it's a pain in the ass since there's no suitable UI for any songs from iTunes 6.x onward.
If he can build some commercial institution to create something like we're lacking, I'll pay, big time, to be able to play my iTunes songs on my other media players.
Thought I'd point that out
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Wait, so the guy who cracks DRMs for a living is offering a method for companies (other than Apple) to sell DRMed music to iPod users.
I bet he will crack it later!
The iPod wasn't cracked, the stupid DRM encoded into the AAC files you purchase from iTunes has been reverse engineered to allow others to apply the same DRM technology to their files without Apple's permission.
How misleading. And no, this isn't a reason to go buy an iPod. A reason to buy an iPod is that you like how it looks, operates, etc. It's not like this suddenly opens the iPod to a whole WORLD of music it wasn't able to access before. Aside from OGG support which is hardly prevelant, the iPod supports most major music encoding formats right out of the box.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
There is one way DRM can work. Force all customers to have decoders implanted into their brains. Then when that customer plays iPod it will play an encoded version of the song that only the customer can decoded.
Of course the music industry hasn't put out any music worth the trouble
I imagine that the early adopters of this approach would be the same people who put RFID's into their bodies/hands.
As a musician and home studio owner, I find any lossy format to be ugly. Whether you can hear it or not, information is gone no matter what bitrate the file was encoded at. Imagine the source code for a program you write gets compressed with a new compression scheme that, when uncompressed, results in a "fairly decent approximation" of your code. Bad. Now run it through that twice. It's NOT gonna get better.
To go from iTunes (lossy, I believe) to CD, then rip to MP3? Yuck. 2 stages of loss. Recording off the analog output is worse, as now there is the inherent loss of multiple AD/DA conversions on top of the double encoding to lossy formats.
Really, DRM just needs to die.
DoubleTwist has the potential to 'decouple' iTunes from the iPod. Want to buy DRM tracks on iTunes then play them on your Sansa? No problem - DoubleTwist will license its software to SanDisk so you can do just that. Want to buy DRM tracks from Walmart that will play on your iPod? No problem - DoubleTwist will license its software to Walmart so it can offer tracks in Apple's DRM for sale.
This could be huge for consumers and a huge blow for Apple. I expect extended court fights!
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
...I can Articulate at all times, whether I have anything to Say or not.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
Dear Slashdot,
I just wanted to say, I've loved reading you for the last few years. I'm sure I clicked on an ad or two to make up for it. I just can't stand the duplicates, unjust bias, and inability for the site to "grow up."
We're just not the same anymore. I don't have time for linux. have a job. I have money to buy a new pc when my old one breaks. I just don't agree with 90% of what you say anymore.
It's been great,
-Clinko
DRM is just to keep the dumb users from copying their music. If I want to copy an iTMS-encoded file, I do it digitally, on Mac's. Simple: Use jack (the open source music daemon) to relay data from your output to the input of any MP3 encoder (Lame for example). If you want to automate it you can use AppleScript to start/stop recordings, handle file naming etc.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I think it says a lot about Slashdot that the parent post is actually more coherent than the submission.
Le français vous intéresse?
Not only did both the submitter and the editor get wrong what the guy was actually planning on marketing, the whole thing was followed by an uninformed and irrelevant rant about watermarking. What's the problem, guys? Are mere dupes getting boring?
On that subject, I'm curious if anyone has done any studies to see if music converted from compressed format to compressed format has more playback "artifacting" issues if it's played through a stereo that does some sort of signal processing?
.WMA files to .MP3 format, I got what sounded like a perfect result on my computer speakers. (I was using 192 bit encoding for the MP3 and the .WMAs were, I believe, 160-bit to start with.) But I noticed a slight muddiness to the sound when I played them back on my car stereo that has a default setting of doing some signal processing to the music.
For example, most car stereos nowdays have settings that claim to simulate various types of listening environments. My Kenwood home stereo does the same type of thing, where you can select "Jazz Club", "Concert Hall", and so forth.
When I first started using a Windows package that digitally re-encoded
Don't buy DRM laden music. It's very simple. I don't understand what the bitching is all about. You know exactly what you're buying when you buy it. If you don't like DRM, then just don't buy it. Nobody is being forced to use iTunes. I don't use iTunes for precisely this reason. Besides, I prefer to patronize my local used CD stores.
Holy Shit! Did you drop it? Didn't you get a case with it? Damn, sorry dude. It'll probably still play. If you still have the box and stuff maybe you can give it to someone for Xmas and get a new one. MjM
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
There needs to be a consistent negative response to technologies that inhibit fair usage of purchased media. Not only should hackers continue to find work-arounds that fix defects such as the inability to tranfer media between devices, consumers should regularly use them. Maybe it is optimistically naive, but I think over a long enough period, companies will eventually come to see the waste of deliberately breaking their products.
Why bother.
> A good example is the "cap code" dots that appear in certain frames of a movie; these are supposed to be unique to each movie theaters so that pirated movies can be traced to the theater where they were filmed off the screen. Take a reasonably sized image and change a pixel and it's difficult to notice a change. Take a sound and make the smallest of change and it's far more evident to the listener. The big problem is that if the watermark isn't evident to the listener, then a good mp3 encoder should remove that right away since it will improve the compression rate without effecting the user experience!
You have to give it to Apple. They have a deal with some of the most vicious greedy people in the world to sell their wares. In return they build a DRM that most anybody can get around. With the talented programmers that they have at their disposal they could do much worse. We just need to keep complaining about how horrible it is and enjoy the fact that they have given us the means to control the music we buy. At least we have an alternative to spending $20.00 on a cd that contains one good song.
while stress >= sanity{ coffee++; }
I bought mine because the student discount and solid replacement plan allow me to cheaply carry 80gb of music and video. I buy DRM-free albums from emusic, and most of what I get from Itunes I get free from AppleStudents on Facebook, so I'd care less if I lost it. The last line slag stinks of iPod hater. If anything, the article talks about even more uses for an iPod. RTFA.
Bury me in mashed potatoes.
...is that Apple will sell even more iPods. Since they make more money on iPods than selling music anyway, their profits will get fatter, their stock price will go up, and my IRA will get bigger.
My guess is also that people will still use iTunes to manage the music that's on their iPod. And if people have to use something else to download their music, and then put it into iTunes anyway, my guess is also that the majority of people will stick with buying from the iTunes Store.
MacTacToe - for every problem, an elegant solution
The headline has it right.
This doesn't matter. What it does do is allow others to play in the iTMS space. I think that's a good thing.
It's just like someone will crack the Zune, if they have not already. Any standalone device with a form of encryption, DRM, or security will eventually become crack'd.
Didn't Apple just update iTunes the last time this happened... I think it was v6.4 Or to stop music being played as dowloaded from another download store, Apple will just force out another iPod update, after all there's a reason why they included auto-update software in iTunes v7 And even if I did buy music online why would I choose anyone other than iTunes as they have the widest choice of music/podcasts anyway Why can't he engineer something useful
Hey, there were ways of getting MP3's before Napster (Audiogalaxy, FTP's, IRC) but Napster was a big deal because it was so easy. If they make an easy way to crack iTunes without going through a bunch of steps (Like you have to do sometimes with stuff like Tunebite), then it can change a lot of things.
Saving the World: One Drink at a Time
It's just the "iTunes Store" these days. That whole movie, tv show thing kind of made the "Music" part of iTMS really not apply. Of course people still type iTMS out of habit. "iTS" just looks like someone has their capslock on.
I posted how to do it using a F/OSS program called Audacity. To quote D-Generation X, if the RIAA ain't down with that, we got two words for them, "suck it!"
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
(Of course, if you don't like wasting a writable CD each time you convert your songs, then wait until you've purchased a few more songs and convert them all at once.)
If only someone would make some kind of writable CDs that you could re-use instead of wasting... That'd be perfect.
And, a better question, how do you make money on software marketed to people that don't want to pay for things? Not a great demographic...
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
I've heard this argument for as long as there has been iTunes. And it's of course true that there is some non zero degradation.
But is there any objective information on how much worse the sound gets? Does it matter at all in practice? For normal people playing normal music on normal equipment? The few times I've done it, the results have sounded just fine whan casually listening.
A slightly bigger question is if there even is an objective way of measuring sound quality?
So in honor of that, I'm going to dupe my comment on that story
As a true Slashdotter, you failed to check your links. Real Harmony was blocked by Apple a while back, and Real realized what you and (apparently) DVD Jon didn't: as long as Apple can keep breaking your product by tweaking theirs slightly, you're not going to have many customers unless your price is "free".
Bravely bold Sir Robin rode forth from Camelot.
He was not afraid to die,
O brave Sir Robin.
He was not at all afraid to be killed in nasty ways,
Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Robin!
He was not in the least bit scared to be mashed into a pulp,
Or to have his eyes gouged out and his elbows broken,
To have his kneecaps split and his body burned away
And his limbs all hacked and mangled, brave Sir Robin!
His head smashed in and his heart cut out
And his liver removed and his bowels unplugged
And his nostrils raped and his bottom burned off
And his pen
Robin: That's... that's... er... enough music for now lads.
Looks like there's dirty work afoot.
you have the option of saving the bitstream in uncompressed (i.e. .wav) or lossless format, with exactly the same quality you paid for.
iTunes gives users the opportunity (by making a CD) to get full quality non-DRM copies of the music they purchase. It's a bit disingenuous to cry about lost quality when the user decides that they want to then use lossy compression on that content.
Copy LP to cassette, you lose quality. Copy CD to mp3, you lose quality. There's no rule which says digital copies must be equal or less in size than the original - that's a choice. Which do you want, smaller size or higher quality?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
If the end result of DRM was that I'd have a live band following me at all times, I'd be all for it.
Yes, but what if it was... a Mariachi Band!!!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
He broke this two or three weeks ago. Why all the fuss now?
Especially if we consider that these days, music is basically sold on the basis of the "honor system".
I have not seen a dupe on Slashdot in months, and I read it almost every weekday. For a while we had the "Backslash" summaries instead, but I haven't even seen one of those for a while.
At the same time, I am seeing more and more dupes on Digg as its popularity grows. New people have no idea whether something has been covered before so they just Digg it if it seems cool. As a result I've seen the same Flash-animated-OSX Web site featured on the front page of Digg like 5 times. (No I won't link to it.)
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
DO NOT LET THIS GET OUT! It's super secret.
1. Purchase iTunes album
2. Burn disc
3. import disc
4. what drm?
The math that their copy protection is based on is widely available. Part of his goal is to allow the music to play on other players while allowing ipods to play other protected song formats.
One of the articles I read clearly stated that DRM will only lock you down into one companies technology and if that company goes then you are in possession of a technology similar to the 8-track tapes.
Bottom line, something has to be done because if we can't get rid of this DRM crap we are going to be locked into certain companies. I'm sure you don't want to have your 200+ songs locked into the player from a company you may no longer wish to support. Apple, for instance, is no more immune to bad conduct than any other.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Sure, I could get my iTunes music to .mp3 format easily and then play it on a non-iPod device, but why? I can sit down at the computer, buy a few songs, sync my iPod for the treadmill, then burn a CD for the car in just a few minutes. With zero headaches.
.mp3 playing gadget. Not because iTunes is the best music playing software. It's because iPod / iTunes work so well together.
I love the idea that Apple produced a system rather than individual components that *kinda* work with other individual components after hours of tinkering. This is why iPod / iTunes is so popular. Not because iPod is the best
The article is correct in assuming that there is no reason for me to buy an iPod, because I already own 2 (one for me, one for my wife) and love them.
Making possible more sources of DRMed content for iPods just gives those who don't mind DRM that many more reasons to have iPods, so I don't really think Apple's going to complain, since they'll either maintain or gain share in the player market if this happens. :)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
"So with Intel and AMD including DRM features in current and future processors, and Microsoft making sure you only get access to protected content on DRMed PCs running a verified software stack, whose systems are you going to be buying in five years?"
The irony is that all this could have been stopped, if people simply had the backbone to stop buying, never downloaded or copied, and did their civic duty. We all made our beds, and now we're going to lie in them.
"To the previous poster, how do you "chip" a feature implemented within a CPU with resistence to chipping in mind?"
By hoping that someone smarter than the complainer will do all the hard work. And the complainer will reap all the benefits. Isn't that how the "gimme" economy works?
Where's the hack that lets us reprogram the things? To install arbitrary codecs? To make the Ipod play
media without the requirement that it be put on there via Itunes? Direct injection/extraction? That sort of thing.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
They are nifty devices, that are pleasant to touch, easy to use (apparently), and light to carry. There is a valuable market of compatible devices, and even some new cars come with "iPod jacks".
Just don't buy iTunes, and — when ripping your own CDs — be sure to use MP3 format.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Sure there is a way around the proctection allready. You can burn cd's or use Total Control or other programs. This program provides a little easier way to do it. It seems simplier faster and cheaper, not that a CD is all that expensive. Not everybody has a portable mp3 player to use to capture the audio either. there are lots of ways to get around the protection. This is just another way. Making it more available for people. The bottom line is that smart people who do smart things make it easy for ignorant people to stay ignorant and still get what they want.
Doctors do Massage in Longview WA now, who knew?
1. Why is this story titled, "iPod Cracked?" It's the DRM on iTunes Store-purchased .m4p files, not some software specific to the iPod.
2. If, as the story claims, this is unimportant and we shouldn't care, why is this a front page story?
When you buy a CD, you're giving up quality, since it's not as good as the (probably 24 bit/96 KHz or better) masters. So what? You get what you pay for. If you want CD quality, buy a CD and use uncompressed or lossless compression.
What iTMS offers is the ability to buy individual tracks - so someone can buy a single track for $.99 instead of a CD for $15. In exchange, you get lower quality. It's a choice.
If you want to take that $.99 track into something other than iTunes/iPod, you can, with no further loss of quality (you retain all of the quality you paid for). Just burn a CD, then use uncompressed or lossless on the other device. It's a choice.
If you take that CD from iTunes and recompress it, you get quality less than the original, just as you do if you compress from a regular CD. You've made a choice to trade quality for smaller files.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I've used Total Recorder for years and I love it. I have used it to create unprotected versions of protected songs so that when I lose my license (which always happens), I don't lose the music.
Which is exactly why I'll gladly pay someone 99 cents per song to rip from CD to AAC and attach accurate artwork & metadata.
"English as a second language" classes you would get to the point where you can understand the language. Burning an AAC to CD results in quality identical to playing the AAC directly, even though you're "converting it to something else."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Someone talk to this guy...can we get some LowID's posting in here???
Ahhh well.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
The submitter is going on a stupid rant about DRM. But YOU didn't read the previous coverage of DoubleTwist.
"Johansen has written [two] programs...: one that would let other companies sell copy-protected songs that play on the iPod, and another that would let other devices play iTunes songs.
That's what the DOUBLE means in "DoubleTwist".
Letting other devices play iTunes songs would mean getting either creating a psudo-Fairplay system for future devices to incorporate, or converting the song from Fairplay protected AAC to plain AAC or another format. Converting to MP3 would allow the largest number of devices to play the songs after that, but I don't think they would choose a non-DRM format since they would be removing copy protection and risking DMCA action.
...that DRM is the entertainment industry's version of checking under your kid's bed for monsters. It's not really there to prevent a skilled pirate (or even an unskilled one with a how-to) from circumventing it; it's there to make the movie and record companies feel better about releasing their stuff digitally. If you take that as DRM's purpose, then DVD Jon's new company makes perfect sense: they're providing the same security blanket to CD manufacturers that Apple offers to iTMS sellers.
Hey, you try to find an open nick these days!
Story: New Ipod Video Reviewed
Slashdot Apple Teet Sucker: OMFG! This is huge news! Ipod rules!
Story: Steve Job's Wipes Ass, Says "I really paid for that taco last night!"
Slashdot Apple Teet Sucker: OMFG! This is huge news! Ipod rules!
Story: Ipod Cracked! Itunes Song DRM Removed!
Slashdot Apple Teet Sucker: This isn't news pfffffffffft....................OMFG! Ipod rules!
I say you're full of shit. Or will you prove you really mean it and post the password for your account here?
Thought not.
Would help if Bennet knew something of the subject.
"Apple doesn't make this easy to find, of course, and in fact tries to make it look impossible -- if you set your preferred import format to MP3, then right-click on a song in your iTunes "Purchased songs" list and click "Convert selection to MP3", you get the error: "[song name] could not be converted because protected files cannot be converted to other formats". But you can easily burn a series of songs to a CD, then select the songs on the CD and import them into MP3 format. (Of course, if you don't like wasting a writable CD each time you convert your songs, then wait until you've purchased a few more songs and convert them all at once.) All of this is based on core iTunes functionality, which won't go away unless Apple decides to stop letting users (a) burn CDs or (b) import CD songs as MP3 files, neither of which is likely."
Of course there's the quality loss that results from converting an already crappy format back to wav, then recompressing it to MP3.
I did this for my car mp3 player and the result sounds harsh. It's listenable but no where near the quality of a CD. In fact I don't buy iTunes anymore for this reason.
It's much better (and cheaper) to go to the cd store and buy a used copy of the cd then rip it. At 6.99 to 9.99 the used cd is a bargain. iTunes can kiss it ; ).
Then again, I'm not the average user. I am an amateur recording engineer and noticable sound quality loss, combined with the lost value of electronic only format, makes iTunes not an option for me. Just for laughs I bought a cd which contained a song I had bought from iTunes, ripped it to 192kbps mp3, then did the same with the iTunes version of the song, and played them side by side for my wife, who has no musical background or training, and she instantly picked out the better sounding copy.
iTunes is crap if sound quality matters to you.
-AC
It's already possible to convert Music Store songs to MP3 without even using any functionality outside of iTunes. ... Apple doesn't make this easy to find, of course, and in fact tries to make it look impossible ...
..." command, I find that almost all the files' names end with ".mp3", with a few ".m4p" files. For some reason, there are four ".aif" files; they are files that I created myself with GarageBand. Dunno why they didn't get translated.
.aif files of mine caused problems for people without AIFF decoders, but that's about it for problems.
What??? When I got my Powerbook 3 years ago, one of the first things I did was to check out iTunes' Preferences stuff. Under "Advanced", I saw the "Import Using:" menu, and selected "MP3 Encoder".
Now, when I do a "find Music/iTunes -type f
As an experiment, I copied my Music/iTunes directory to my linux web server machine a while back, and invited a number of net.friends to download files and test them. Nobody reported having any problems playing them. Well, ok, those four
None of this strikes me as anything difficult to find. Putting it right there in the Preferences stuff seems like Apple's effort to make it as easy as possible.
So what am I missing here? Why was it so easy for me and difficult for others?
Maybe they the writer thought that putting it in the "Advanced" section of the Preferences stuff constituted some sort of hiding?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
...Let's see how long before Apple updates the iTunes software and forces a firmware upgrade for all iPods to "close" this issue.
"converting iTunes music into unrestricted formats like MP3 is already trivial" There is a reason to get excited about iTunes music being cracked. Converting a digital signal to analog and back to digital (the trivial way to convert an iTunes file to MP3) is lossy (unless you have really good sound equipment you are going to get noise from the wiring). The ability to go directly from digital copy to digital copy is much better.
"At this point, I don't pirate media to avoid the costs (I WANT to support the artists financially, though certainly not the Ass.s of America), I pirate media to avoid the problems that come with obtaining it completely legally. If it were an option, I'd send ten bucks in cash to the artist after pirating their album in order to show my support for them, but make it clear that I don't support the policies of their label (not to mention, they'd actually see some of the money from the 'sale')."
Then why don't you impress the rest of the planet by becoming the "One True Label" that artists can sign up with? The fact that you all DON'T tells the rest of us that pirates no more "think of the child...er, artists" than the present labels do.
"DRM doesn't do shit to prevent copying - small or large scale. "
I feel the same way about Linux security.
"I understand where they're coming from and that they want to protect their content. I have plenty of things that I'd want protected too. But unlike them, I've realized that treating (potential) customers like criminals in order to try keeping a couple sales drives them to steal an unprotected leaked/cracked version of what I currently have, and will encourage them to buy from other vendors that have an equivalent product without being so draconian about it."
Ah yes. The "potential customer" BS. Well as you said the only ones to encounter DRM difficulties are people who legitimately bought the content aka customers. Potential aka pirates aren't customers. Or as you like to say "I'm not hurting anyone because I never would have bought it".
I think its intersting that he's consulted lawyers and they feel he can sell his code. However, I have no issues with the DRM the music industry has imposed on Apple and everyone else. I think some people are blowing the issue out of proportion and a significant of those same people dont understand that there are numberous alternatives to Apple and iPod, or that by simply burning your tracks to audio CD removes the DRM.
Piracy is happening. Although I doubt that its the quaklity of contemporary music, not piracy that is lowering their profits. I used to work in a record store and losses are inflated by potential profit, and are not a measurement of overhead to produce the product.
Bennet's article is amusingly dismissive of Jon's accomplishment.
... You can record the analog sound". Yeah, and you can transfer an LP or cassette to CD too, so what? How often is anyone going to do that?
"Trivial
The important point of Jon's efforts is that they demonstrate the fact that "copy protection"
1. is, always was, and always will be ineffective;
2. punishes the legitimate customer more than the crackers.
That fact is "already trivial" to people who've been around since the founding of the Software Protection Agency, but it bears repeating over and over. Everyone screwed by the DCMA and the movie and record mafia needs to be made aware of that. And so, enter DVD Jon, or someone like him.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
As I recall, Apple acknowledged this way back when iTunes first came out. They said this was an acceptable solution because burning a CD and re-importing as an MP3 would result in a degraded-quality file. For those of us that can't hear the difference, this wouldn't seem to pose much of a restriction...
My definition of a watermark is something that does not impair the quality of the final product. Cap Codes do. I saw one in 'The Departed' the other day which was really quite distracting - something akin to the hard core porn spliced in in Fight Club(?).
When I checked your links I got a page that said the product wasn't available.
That was, apparently, because I was on a Mac.
Tit for tat?
None of this matters to me or anyone else who graduated from high school. I already own all the music I will listen to for the rest of my life.