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Microsoft's New Audio Format Cracked
Barcode (JPB) was one of the first to send us the word from
Wired that the new audio format Microsoft introduced (Two days ago), supposed to be a secure format (resricting playback) has already been cracked. Dimension Music first carried the news-and what a name the crack has *grin*.
retract. My bad. Their site was down so I couldn't get their side of the story 'till now. it appears to be a true crack. The encryption is broken, the song is left in the compressed format.
Actually, the cynical part of me thinks that mayhaps MS made this format easily crackible in order to assure acceptence and still seem above board. After all, only a small percentage of potential consumes will ever use a cracking tool. It may cost them millions or billions, but it has the potential to make them many times that much.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
As long as I've got an SB16 or similarly open-hardware card in my machine, there's no reason I can't basically write a driver to sit there and read what the card is getting, and save it to a raw file (which can later be mp3'd).
My (vague) understanding of unfuck.exe is that it actually intercepts the audio somewhere in the windoze pipeline (therefore architecture independent) -- this is also pretty easy under Linux.
On the (admittedly short) consideration I've given this, I just don't see a way around that problem for the secure music bastards of the world.
Questions/comments/snide remarks?
This sounds like an urban legend in the making to me. I was a record producer for twelve years, and I can tell you no label would ever do something like that to a debut artist. They want that artist to recoup (be able to pay back the advance and recording costs) and no A&R guy is so sure of him/herself that they would call songs 'too good' for immediate release, especially with a new artist. One hit single on an album is no assurance of platinum, and unfortunately, unless a record goes gold or platinum, recouping the advance is very difficult.
In addition, Jewel's publisher (the company that publishes her songs, as opposed to master recordings of those songs) would scream blue murder if an A&R person ever suggested such a crazy scheme. Today's 'too good' song is tomorrow's boring yawner.
But I agree...albums have become collections of singles rather than the 'concept' album of 20 years ago. Marketing has done that. MP3 is fixing it. B)
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
sure, way back when artists like Pink Floyd were around and
a) actually cared enough to make a whole album that was good
b) had a record label that LET THEM put a bunch of good songs on one album.
I have a friend who is friends with Jewel. She told him (this is heresy, but it rings true) that she went to her record label with the songs that she wanted to put on her album (her debut album) and they told her that all these songs were too good and that she should "save" them for layer albums and just put a few of them on her debut album and write some "filler" songs to fill out the rest of her debut album.
So even if a band does have 15 great songs, the record labels won't let them put "all thier eggs in one (good) basket"
This is one of the many many reasons why the major record lables must go.
long live MP3 and indie label distrobution!
-geekd
I know I'm going to be drawn out and quartered for telling people this - but secure music is most likely to succeed by using PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) & watermarking.
By encoding each file with somebody's personal key, or any "tag" that uniquely identifies the person, if the file is released it can be traced back to the individual. I'll leave it to future posters to describe the shortcomings of each, but it's a helluva lot better than the current approach. The main problem is coming up with a way to keep the watermark even after filtering the data. I'm not sure how far they've gotten on this, but I know it can be difficult to remove them from image files.
Since everything would be maintained by the record companies (ie: the distribution servers), they would force you to register w/ them before downloading. The PKI could be used to tell the user where/who it was downloaded from. You could also use symetric keys.. although the NSA might get upset with you if you use any non-trivial size. :)
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For those of us who like having a few hundred (or a few thousand) songs on our hard drives to listen to without the annoyance of switching CDs, compression is a good solution. Buying 100 gigs of hard drive space is not.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Dimension has now posted a response to Microsoft saying that unfuck IS a crack.
From Dimension article: "UNFUCK.EXE actaully breaks the protection on any file. There is no loss in quality, the file isn't re-recorded or captured in some way."
So MS says it captures and Dimension says it doesn't.
Which is it??