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Microsoft Brings Back DRM

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the perhaps-skydiving-is-not-for-you dept.

Barence writes "Microsoft yesterday unveiled its MSN Mobile Music service — and a surprise return to digital rights management (DRM). While companies such as Apple and Amazon have finally moved to music download services free of copy protection, MSN Mobile locks tracks to the mobile handset they are downloaded to. It also charges more than the other services per track, and offers no way to transfer your tracks to your new phone when you upgrade. The company's Head of Mobile UK spoke to PC Pro about the launch, but his answers are almost as baffling as the service itself. Best quote: Q: 'If I buy these songs on your service — and they're locked to my phone — what happens when I upgrade my phone in six months' time?' A: 'Well, I think you know the answer to that.'"

1 of 414 comments (clear)

  1. And you know what.. by Creepy+Crawler · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I had a friend who bought a eBook from CourseSmart (hint: DONT BUY from them).

    He's not that smart in computers, but bought this ebook and then found out you can only print 10 pages and it disables itself after 6 months. He paid 50$ less than the real textbook. I said WTF...

    Anyways, he's stuck with some god awful cripple-book... until I un-fucked it. Well, what did I do?

    1.The book was reminiscent of a PDF reader, however, rotation options are not present. So, I tell the screen driver (running on the eeeclone from acer) to flip 90 degrees.
    2.I tell the cripplebook reader to go full screen, which it does. It turns out, you can turn pages by pressing left and right.
    3.I found a GPL MSWindows screenshot tool that formats pngs via name_0001 I set it up to save to ./book/
    4.I do prtscn/right 812 times for those images.

    Hooray, you have unDRMed images of cripplebook.

    Now for cleaning:
    5.Use gimp to determine crop area (use mogrify to mass crop). We need a rect region with offset. Then use mogrify to mass crop.
    6.Use convert to convert all sequential images to 1 pdf.

    You now have an unfucked PDF that would have "deleted" itself otherwise.

    --