Personally, I think if they did one right now, it would be legal since I see no difference between an app that strips DRM and an app that strips DRM and shares files.
Probably not, but that's a pretty pointless comparison. How about comparing an app that shares files with an app that strips DRM and shares files. This is a much more telling comparison.
See, sharing files is fine and legal, if they're your files. You don't need to strip DRM off your own creation to share it, because it has no DRM that you didn't put in there. You created it. This is why file sharing apps are legal, because they have a legal purpose.
Stripping DRM has a legal purpose too, as we've discussed already. It enables Fair Use of the content that you have purchased. However, Fair Use notably does not include copyright infringement.
So combining them has no legal use. A DRM'd file is almost by definition copyrighted by somebody else. Integrating a DRM stripper with a file sharing app has no legit purpose other than enabling the user to commit copyright infringement. Which is why it's a bad idea, and I think most everybody who creates P2P file sharing applications is capable of recognizing this distinction. The users may not be, but they aren't programming the applications they're using to share files.
To steal.
It is not stealing and it is not theft. It's copyright infringment, which is a wholly separate criminal act. Please use your words correctly. Sloppy use of words leads to sloppy thinking.;)
I see more AAC, so AAC's popularity is growing, so such a feature becomes increasing more tempting to irresponsible coders.
I grant you this one. The use of AAC is growing, by leaps and bounds. However, very little of the AAC I've seen out there was purchased from iTMS. Mostly, people who are sharing this stuff are ripping from CD's, using iTunes. I have seen a couple of instances where "iTunes exclusives" have been converted by the process of burning and ripping, but those are pretty few. I've also seen a disturbing amount of AAC out there that was obviously transcoded from MP3, which I'm not happy about.
But as for "irresponsible coders", I don't quite agree. The people who code the most popular file sharing apps are very responsible about this sort of thing, because they're skating the edge and they know it. Going after the file sharers themselves is hard and difficult, but going after the people who write the file sharing apps is very, very easy. So they tend to not encourage copyright infringing activities, and not put in bits in the code that very directly enable such activities. Go read some of their developers forums and you'll see what I mean.
All the money in the US is in voice because, thus far, they haven't been able to get the public to adopt any of the other services over cellular connections yet. Not in any big way.
-Text messaging: Picking up, but still not used by 90% of the US cell carrying public -Web services like WAP: Used by less than 2%, easily. Everybody hates surfing the web on small screens. They'll go buy a PDA first.. and even then it's rare that they want to pay for wireless web access. It's just not very useful. -Camera/pictures: Newish, and in the process of being introduced. But also in the process of being banned virtually everywhere because it's damned annoying, really. -Video: I know of no cell phone that will do this that is available in the US, but even then I suspect it'll flop.
Voice is virtually the only market over on this side of the pond. The reason there's so much competition is that hell, they can't even get that right half the time.
If/when I can take a cell phone to anywhere in the USA and make a call and have it be clear enough to hear, then I might buy your argument that there's no more money left in voice. Hell, over here, *all* the money is in voice. Few people want anything else.
Wifi doesn't support roaming between APs who are controlled by different entities
Funny, I seem to have no problems, assuming that the AP's are setup to be open to everybody. That is, no WEP or MAC filtering, and SSID broadcast enabled. Works great.
Um, no. The idea of an algorithm was invented by an Arab (al-Khowarizmi, or something like that) centuries before Turing *or* Jacquard. We also get the word "algebra" from the title of one of his writings.
Hmmm, what you seem to be describing is the idea of representing programs and data in the same store, which IIRC is due to von Neumann.
What I'm describing is not an "algorithim". I'm trying to explain the concept of "algorithim execution" and I'm obviously not having a lot of success... So go Google for it or something.
As to whether or not something is "programming" seems to be subjective. The loom has hardware to arrange the threads this way or that; the computer has hardware to add or shift. Either way there are some data which the machine would interpret as "do this, then do that." One is a data-driven device which operates on thread; the other a data-driven device which operates on data.
I agree, but I think the difference is in the more general purpose nature of the computer processor than the loom. I highly doubt the loom's instruction set is Turing-complete.:)
How long do you think it'll be until someone uses it to write a new P2P client that has built-in DRM stripping?
Umm... why in the four hells would anybody want to do that?
Look, it's obvious that you don't spend a lot of time on P2P networks, but I've never seen any client with any file munging utilities built in. I mean, early WMA versions is cracked too, and there's no automatic WMA stripper.
It's just not the kind of thing you'd put in a file sharing client. For one thing, it exposes the file sharing client itself to liability claims. File sharing is legal. Under the DMCA, distributing tools to strip DRM probably is not.
Assuming the owner of the property doesn't object, I have no problems with it.
It's not collecting any data on who's out there, so no big deal. It's just collecting the times that the beam was broken (or whatever the method is). Would also give you a good estimate of how many people use the trail, sort of thing. Many national parks have these, or have pressure plates embedded in the trail to get the same sort of infomation (generally just a counter increments on those though).
Only thing I'd watch for is false data from animals or something. But beyond that, I see no privacy issues involved here. If you had a camera out there, that that would be a concern, but just a timestamp? Big deal.
Hymn seems to include the code to extract the key from the keyring without the need for the VideoLan Client, as previous versions of Playfair required. At least on Windows.
I haven't tried it yet, but the documentation reads like you don't need any other programs to do it under Windows or Mac. If you want to do it in Linux, of course, you will need to extract the key into a file to bring across into your Linux box.
The iTMS is a service, not a God-given right, and if you don't agree to the terms of the contract...
I agree to the terms of the contract that do not violate the law. However, no contract can supersede the law in these matters. The anti-reverse engineering clause, for example, is illegal, or at least unenforcable. I have the right to reverse engineer for several purposes, including compatibility. Even says so in the DMCA of all places.
Just agreeing to a contract can't take away rights that the law may give you. That's why there's always a clause at the end that says if any part of the contract is voided due to supercedeing law, the rest of the contract still applies.
So here's the deal: I *can* decrypt my purchased music, and I *can* convert it to other formats, and I *can* put it on other players than the iPod. And I can do all this and *still* be abiding by the terms of that contract. Because these are rights that you can't simply click away from yourself.
This is moot for me, BTW, as I own an iPod, but the point still stands.
Perhaps the easiest way would be to check the BitTorrent sites. These are usually full albums, and have a wide selection. Another way would be some of the DirectConnect networks out there. They can be pretty stringent about what they'll allow people to share.
Finally, you can find songs individually, and I have yet to fail in a search for a song, no matter how obscure. E-Mule, while slow to download anything, has a huge selection. Gnutella and Gnutella2 have pretty wide ranging files too.
There's a *lot* of P2P out there. It's really just a matter of knowing where to look.
"... and it's perfectly ethical to do this." That's an opinion, not a fact. I personally think that using software that may lead the RIAA to kill iTunes is unethical because it screws me.
Wait a second here.. How is me decrypting music leading the RIAA to kill iTunes in any way? Answer: It ain't.
Look at it this way.. say I developed equivalent code to Playfair, for my own usage. Never released it to anybody. Just used it myself to exercise my fair use rights. Decrypted my purchased music, converted it to a format compatible with the player I bought in a store, and happily listened away.
Where is that unethical? I paid for the music. I paid for the player. I've not done anything illegal. Okay, I broke the iTunes usage terms, but beside that, where has any wrongdoing occured? The RIAA wouldn't know. Apple wouldn't know. There'd be no issues whatsoever with this.
No, what you are arguing is that RELEASING CODE to allow others to exercise their fair use rights is somehow unethical. You're saying that because now everybody can exercise their fair use rights, and because it's reasonably easy to do so, that somehow that's unethical. You're saying that it's unethical for me (as a developer) to tell other people (by handing them a piece of code) how to do something that's perfectly legal for them to do (indeed, protected by fair use). You're saying that's unethical?
I admit that under the DMCA, me handing out that code might indeed be illegal, but unethical? I can't see how you could successfully argue that.
And with respect to all those arguments claiming that you're just converting formats for personal use, it's nieve. The RIAA doesn't care about what you say anymore than you care about what they say. The power to work around a DRM is a power which we can abuse, and they have no reason to trust us not to abuse it.
a) The word is spelled "naive". b) Naive it may be, but it's true nevertheless. What's the point of putting decrypted songs on the P2P networks? They're all already there, and in better quality than 128kbps AAC too. c) The power to work around a DRM system is not a power that they have the ability to take away, so whether they trust people with it or not is irrelevant.
where do you want to draw the line?
I'm perfectly satisfied with the line as it stands. They can keep trying to protect things with DRM, we can keep breaking them. Until they finally understand that it is not possible to create an unbreakable DRM scheme, it'll likely stay this way.
Structured society is all about trading certain rights for benefits
Yes, and that's why we have laws in place to define those rights. Fair use is something we, the people, do have, and I will not trade it away for anything.
This isn't about encryption or breaking DRM or even copying music. This is about taking the music I paid for and using it in the way that I want to use it. Are you seriously suggesting that I no longer have the right to listen to music I purchased on a portable player? Because that will be the main use of this software. Whether you believe that or not is irrelevant, because it's still true.
So it's too inconvenient to burn & rip, even if it's legal and within the usage rules.
What if I don't have a burner?
Besides that, decrypting the music I paid for in order to achieve compatibility is perfectly legal. The usage rules can go hang, as far as I'm concerned.
You would rather install some code that you have no idea what's it's doing (who really looks at or can understand the source).
I looked at the source, and I can understand it perfectly well. I don't know about your abilities.
In any case, it's beside the point. It is open source and that definitely mean that someone, somewhere is looking at it.
Apple made the usage rights very generous, and as it's been said before in this thread, the more people abuse it, the more likely the RIAA will pull the plug.
How generous the usage rights are is irrelevant. And whether the RIAA pulls the plug (which they likely can't do, contractually) is also irrelevant. If I can't buy music easily, then I'll just go back to committing copyright infringement. Tough shit to them, in that case.
You act as if they have a real choice in the matter... they don't. They have to sell their product to somebody. If they don't choose to sell it in a way where people will buy it, then people won't buy it. Simple free market economics at work. The pricing was wrong, so people found alternative methods.
Playfair actually decrypted the music directly, it didn't intercept it in Quicktime.
The key to decrypting iTMS files lies in its keyring. See, when you get "authorized" by Apple to play your purchased music, a key gets downloaded to your machine. This key is used to decrypt your music. The key is stored inside a keyring, and the keyring is encrypted using other information specific to your machine (Windows key, chunks off the BIOS, etc, etc).
The method to decrypt the keyring was reverse engineered, giving you the key, giving you the ability to decrypt the songs directly.
What they really want is for the music they buy to be playable on the music playing devices that they own.
If someone is sharing music on P2P, I can virtually guarantee you that they ain't buying it from iTunes, and furthermore, this program will be of no use to them. You have to buy music to decrypt it. You can't decrypt other people's music.
Next to none of its use will be for piracy. Why? Because the music is already out there. It's not like iTMS has anything special that isn't already shared. Okay, they do have the iTunes "Exclusives" that show up every once in a while, but beyond that I seriously doubt most people will be buying music and sharing it with the world. Hymn (as I see it's now called) will be mainly use for compatibility reasons. You should see the Apple forums, where the majority of questions are about how to play back iTunes Music Store songs on this or that MP3 player..
Someone violating the GPL is using other people's work without giving them credit or compensation. It's copyright infringement.
Someone decrypting FairPlay'd songs has a whole host of reasons to do so, including using those songs in a fair use manner. You have to *buy* the songs before you can decrypt them.
Example: Say you want to convert the M4P's into MP3's for compatibility with your portable player. iTunes won't let you do that, without the tired hack of burning and reripping an audio CD. But if you FairPlay, you can decrypt the songs into M4A's and then iTunes will convert them to MP3's for you just fine. No (sane) laws have been broken, and it's perfectly ethical to do this. You're not giving away the music, you're just converting it to another format for compatibility with other devices. That's fair use, as I see it.
And frankly, getting iTunes store music, decrypting it, and sharing it isn't going to happen. Nearly everything you can get at the iTunes Music Store is *already* out there on the P2P networks. It's not like this creates more copyright infringement.
I'm guessing that the decryption keys for the songs themselves didn't change. What they most likely changed with iTunes 4.5 was the method used to encrypt the iTunes keyring.
This is just a guess, however, I have no real info on the subject.
I just moved to Memphis recently and got digital cable from Time Warner. One of the things I found most interesting was several of the "On Demand" channels are much like you describe. Example: The HBO package includes "HBO On Demand" which has, essentially, a lot of the stuff HBO is showing now, including the last several episodes of their various series. Showtime on Demand had the last 8 episodes of Penn and Teller, for example, which allowed me to catch up on the ones I had missed. There's also Discovery Channel On Demand, Comedy Central On Demand, and several other non-premium cable networks in there.
The functionality is basically to to that On Demand channel, pick your show, hit play, and wait a couple of seconds for it to begin streaming it to you. Only thing I don't like about it is that the FF and RW controls are a bit laggy (since they have to talk to the headend) and only work at one speed. But they do work.
I didn't opt for the PVR built into the cable box, but in these cases, I'm led to understand, it streams the show directly to your hard drive in the PVR and thus you get the show much faster, along with better control over playback. I dislike the Cable Box PVR controls too much to use that though. I'll stick with my Tivo in that case.
Jacquard developed looms that could be controlled by using punched cards, but this wasn't really "programming" as such. What Turing created was the concept of algorithm execution, which until then nobody had come up with.
Algorithm execution is where the data and the sequence of instructions for manipulating that data are all part of your input. Jacquard's loom was more along the lines of just the data being in his punched cards, while the sequence of events that occurred was built into the loom, and only dependant upon the punched cards for specific info about position and such.
RFID can have quite a significant range. They vary, but a meter is not unusual. They really wouldn't be in a position to replace bar-codes and magnetic strips if they could only be read from inches away.
No doubt that the signal can be picked up from that far away with suitable filtering, but how do you power the thing from that far off? The further you are away, the more and more powerful that magnetic field has to be. Especially for a portable reading device, that makes it more and more bulky.
Umm.. Reality? Seriously, the things don't have any power source. You put them in an alternating magnetic field, a loop of wire trace creates a tiny current in the circut, enabling it to send a short burst of RF. That's how they work. They don't transmit far because they don't have any power to speak of in order for them to transmit far.
No, no. I'm not talking about the entire device, just what is essentially the antenna... The rest of it can be far away, hooked up to a phoneline or some such...
Yes, there's an antenna to read the signal, and a power source to provide a large alternating magnetic field. If you're going to make a portable RFID reader, you have to have some form of battery on the thing, and it ain't small. The readers built into the wall can be hooked to the 110AC, but you ain't got that luxury when you're building a portable reading device.
Hehehe.. Well, hey, it's true. "Gamer nerds" (that guy's definition) and overclockers tend to ride the edge a lot in their computing activities. When you ride the edge of the limitations of the processor, the memory, physical laws, etc, then you tend to not have the most stable machines in the world.
Most gamer nerds I know usually clock their systems back down a few notches during actual LAN play, so that they can actually finish the game. Real people into the game will take a minor quality hit for stability and speed, any day, especially when they're concentrating on 0wn1ng j00r a$$.:)
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Personally, I think if they did one right now, it would be legal since I see no difference between an app that strips DRM and an app that strips DRM and shares files.
;)
Probably not, but that's a pretty pointless comparison. How about comparing an app that shares files with an app that strips DRM and shares files. This is a much more telling comparison.
See, sharing files is fine and legal, if they're your files. You don't need to strip DRM off your own creation to share it, because it has no DRM that you didn't put in there. You created it. This is why file sharing apps are legal, because they have a legal purpose.
Stripping DRM has a legal purpose too, as we've discussed already. It enables Fair Use of the content that you have purchased. However, Fair Use notably does not include copyright infringement.
So combining them has no legal use. A DRM'd file is almost by definition copyrighted by somebody else. Integrating a DRM stripper with a file sharing app has no legit purpose other than enabling the user to commit copyright infringement. Which is why it's a bad idea, and I think most everybody who creates P2P file sharing applications is capable of recognizing this distinction. The users may not be, but they aren't programming the applications they're using to share files.
To steal.
It is not stealing and it is not theft. It's copyright infringment, which is a wholly separate criminal act. Please use your words correctly. Sloppy use of words leads to sloppy thinking.
I see more AAC, so AAC's popularity is growing, so such a feature becomes increasing more tempting to irresponsible coders.
I grant you this one. The use of AAC is growing, by leaps and bounds. However, very little of the AAC I've seen out there was purchased from iTMS. Mostly, people who are sharing this stuff are ripping from CD's, using iTunes. I have seen a couple of instances where "iTunes exclusives" have been converted by the process of burning and ripping, but those are pretty few. I've also seen a disturbing amount of AAC out there that was obviously transcoded from MP3, which I'm not happy about.
But as for "irresponsible coders", I don't quite agree. The people who code the most popular file sharing apps are very responsible about this sort of thing, because they're skating the edge and they know it. Going after the file sharers themselves is hard and difficult, but going after the people who write the file sharing apps is very, very easy. So they tend to not encourage copyright infringing activities, and not put in bits in the code that very directly enable such activities. Go read some of their developers forums and you'll see what I mean.
because there's no money left in voice
All the money in the US is in voice because, thus far, they haven't been able to get the public to adopt any of the other services over cellular connections yet. Not in any big way.
-Text messaging: Picking up, but still not used by 90% of the US cell carrying public
-Web services like WAP: Used by less than 2%, easily. Everybody hates surfing the web on small screens. They'll go buy a PDA first.. and even then it's rare that they want to pay for wireless web access. It's just not very useful.
-Camera/pictures: Newish, and in the process of being introduced. But also in the process of being banned virtually everywhere because it's damned annoying, really.
-Video: I know of no cell phone that will do this that is available in the US, but even then I suspect it'll flop.
Voice is virtually the only market over on this side of the pond. The reason there's so much competition is that hell, they can't even get that right half the time.
If/when I can take a cell phone to anywhere in the USA and make a call and have it be clear enough to hear, then I might buy your argument that there's no more money left in voice. Hell, over here, *all* the money is in voice. Few people want anything else.
Wifi doesn't support roaming between APs who are controlled by different entities
Funny, I seem to have no problems, assuming that the AP's are setup to be open to everybody. That is, no WEP or MAC filtering, and SSID broadcast enabled. Works great.
Just set your card's SSID to "any" and roam away.
Um, no. The idea of an algorithm was invented by an Arab (al-Khowarizmi, or something like that) centuries before Turing *or* Jacquard. We also get the word "algebra" from the title of one of his writings.
:)
Hmmm, what you seem to be describing is the idea of representing programs and data in the same store, which IIRC is due to von Neumann.
What I'm describing is not an "algorithim". I'm trying to explain the concept of "algorithim execution" and I'm obviously not having a lot of success... So go Google for it or something.
As to whether or not something is "programming" seems to be subjective. The loom has hardware to arrange the threads this way or that; the computer has hardware to add or shift. Either way there are some data which the machine would interpret as "do this, then do that." One is a data-driven device which operates on thread; the other a data-driven device which operates on data.
I agree, but I think the difference is in the more general purpose nature of the computer processor than the loom. I highly doubt the loom's instruction set is Turing-complete.
How long do you think it'll be until someone uses it to write a new P2P client that has built-in DRM stripping?
Umm... why in the four hells would anybody want to do that?
Look, it's obvious that you don't spend a lot of time on P2P networks, but I've never seen any client with any file munging utilities built in. I mean, early WMA versions is cracked too, and there's no automatic WMA stripper.
It's just not the kind of thing you'd put in a file sharing client. For one thing, it exposes the file sharing client itself to liability claims. File sharing is legal. Under the DMCA, distributing tools to strip DRM probably is not.
Possibly, but the majority of blogs out there have "Otto's Blog" or some such thing on the page somewhere. Stuff like that.
It's not a perfect solution, I grant you. But it helps.
Assuming the owner of the property doesn't object, I have no problems with it.
It's not collecting any data on who's out there, so no big deal. It's just collecting the times that the beam was broken (or whatever the method is). Would also give you a good estimate of how many people use the trail, sort of thing. Many national parks have these, or have pressure plates embedded in the trail to get the same sort of infomation (generally just a counter increments on those though).
Only thing I'd watch for is false data from animals or something. But beyond that, I see no privacy issues involved here. If you had a camera out there, that that would be a concern, but just a timestamp? Big deal.
Hymn seems to include the code to extract the key from the keyring without the need for the VideoLan Client, as previous versions of Playfair required. At least on Windows.
I haven't tried it yet, but the documentation reads like you don't need any other programs to do it under Windows or Mac. If you want to do it in Linux, of course, you will need to extract the key into a file to bring across into your Linux box.
The iTMS is a service, not a God-given right, and if you don't agree to the terms of the contract...
I agree to the terms of the contract that do not violate the law. However, no contract can supersede the law in these matters. The anti-reverse engineering clause, for example, is illegal, or at least unenforcable. I have the right to reverse engineer for several purposes, including compatibility. Even says so in the DMCA of all places.
Just agreeing to a contract can't take away rights that the law may give you. That's why there's always a clause at the end that says if any part of the contract is voided due to supercedeing law, the rest of the contract still applies.
So here's the deal: I *can* decrypt my purchased music, and I *can* convert it to other formats, and I *can* put it on other players than the iPod. And I can do all this and *still* be abiding by the terms of that contract. Because these are rights that you can't simply click away from yourself.
This is moot for me, BTW, as I own an iPod, but the point still stands.
Seriously. It's rare to see a blog without the word "blog" on the page somewhere. Works pretty well.
Perhaps the easiest way would be to check the BitTorrent sites. These are usually full albums, and have a wide selection. Another way would be some of the DirectConnect networks out there. They can be pretty stringent about what they'll allow people to share.
Finally, you can find songs individually, and I have yet to fail in a search for a song, no matter how obscure. E-Mule, while slow to download anything, has a huge selection. Gnutella and Gnutella2 have pretty wide ranging files too.
There's a *lot* of P2P out there. It's really just a matter of knowing where to look.
"... and it's perfectly ethical to do this."
That's an opinion, not a fact. I personally think that using software that may lead the RIAA to kill iTunes is unethical because it screws me.
Wait a second here.. How is me decrypting music leading the RIAA to kill iTunes in any way? Answer: It ain't.
Look at it this way.. say I developed equivalent code to Playfair, for my own usage. Never released it to anybody. Just used it myself to exercise my fair use rights. Decrypted my purchased music, converted it to a format compatible with the player I bought in a store, and happily listened away.
Where is that unethical? I paid for the music. I paid for the player. I've not done anything illegal. Okay, I broke the iTunes usage terms, but beside that, where has any wrongdoing occured? The RIAA wouldn't know. Apple wouldn't know. There'd be no issues whatsoever with this.
No, what you are arguing is that RELEASING CODE to allow others to exercise their fair use rights is somehow unethical. You're saying that because now everybody can exercise their fair use rights, and because it's reasonably easy to do so, that somehow that's unethical. You're saying that it's unethical for me (as a developer) to tell other people (by handing them a piece of code) how to do something that's perfectly legal for them to do (indeed, protected by fair use). You're saying that's unethical?
I admit that under the DMCA, me handing out that code might indeed be illegal, but unethical? I can't see how you could successfully argue that.
And with respect to all those arguments claiming that you're just converting formats for personal use, it's nieve. The RIAA doesn't care about what you say anymore than you care about what they say. The power to work around a DRM is a power which we can abuse, and they have no reason to trust us not to abuse it.
a) The word is spelled "naive".
b) Naive it may be, but it's true nevertheless. What's the point of putting decrypted songs on the P2P networks? They're all already there, and in better quality than 128kbps AAC too.
c) The power to work around a DRM system is not a power that they have the ability to take away, so whether they trust people with it or not is irrelevant.
where do you want to draw the line?
I'm perfectly satisfied with the line as it stands. They can keep trying to protect things with DRM, we can keep breaking them. Until they finally understand that it is not possible to create an unbreakable DRM scheme, it'll likely stay this way.
Structured society is all about trading certain rights for benefits
Yes, and that's why we have laws in place to define those rights. Fair use is something we, the people, do have, and I will not trade it away for anything.
This isn't about encryption or breaking DRM or even copying music. This is about taking the music I paid for and using it in the way that I want to use it. Are you seriously suggesting that I no longer have the right to listen to music I purchased on a portable player? Because that will be the main use of this software. Whether you believe that or not is irrelevant, because it's still true.
So it's too inconvenient to burn & rip, even if it's legal and within the usage rules.
What if I don't have a burner?
Besides that, decrypting the music I paid for in order to achieve compatibility is perfectly legal. The usage rules can go hang, as far as I'm concerned.
You would rather install some code that you have no idea what's it's doing (who really looks at or can understand the source).
I looked at the source, and I can understand it perfectly well. I don't know about your abilities.
In any case, it's beside the point. It is open source and that definitely mean that someone, somewhere is looking at it.
Apple made the usage rights very generous, and as it's been said before in this thread, the more people abuse it, the more likely the RIAA will pull the plug.
How generous the usage rights are is irrelevant. And whether the RIAA pulls the plug (which they likely can't do, contractually) is also irrelevant. If I can't buy music easily, then I'll just go back to committing copyright infringement. Tough shit to them, in that case.
You act as if they have a real choice in the matter... they don't. They have to sell their product to somebody. If they don't choose to sell it in a way where people will buy it, then people won't buy it. Simple free market economics at work. The pricing was wrong, so people found alternative methods.
You don't need an iPod. Just iTunes. If iTunes can play it, then this should be capable of decrypting it.
Playfair actually decrypted the music directly, it didn't intercept it in Quicktime.
The key to decrypting iTMS files lies in its keyring. See, when you get "authorized" by Apple to play your purchased music, a key gets downloaded to your machine. This key is used to decrypt your music. The key is stored inside a keyring, and the keyring is encrypted using other information specific to your machine (Windows key, chunks off the BIOS, etc, etc).
The method to decrypt the keyring was reverse engineered, giving you the key, giving you the ability to decrypt the songs directly.
Simple.
What they really want is for the music they buy to be playable on the music playing devices that they own.
If someone is sharing music on P2P, I can virtually guarantee you that they ain't buying it from iTunes, and furthermore, this program will be of no use to them. You have to buy music to decrypt it. You can't decrypt other people's music.
Next to none of its use will be for piracy. Why? Because the music is already out there. It's not like iTMS has anything special that isn't already shared. Okay, they do have the iTunes "Exclusives" that show up every once in a while, but beyond that I seriously doubt most people will be buying music and sharing it with the world. Hymn (as I see it's now called) will be mainly use for compatibility reasons. You should see the Apple forums, where the majority of questions are about how to play back iTunes Music Store songs on this or that MP3 player..
Someone violating the GPL is using other people's work without giving them credit or compensation. It's copyright infringement.
Someone decrypting FairPlay'd songs has a whole host of reasons to do so, including using those songs in a fair use manner. You have to *buy* the songs before you can decrypt them.
Example: Say you want to convert the M4P's into MP3's for compatibility with your portable player. iTunes won't let you do that, without the tired hack of burning and reripping an audio CD. But if you FairPlay, you can decrypt the songs into M4A's and then iTunes will convert them to MP3's for you just fine. No (sane) laws have been broken, and it's perfectly ethical to do this. You're not giving away the music, you're just converting it to another format for compatibility with other devices. That's fair use, as I see it.
And frankly, getting iTunes store music, decrypting it, and sharing it isn't going to happen. Nearly everything you can get at the iTunes Music Store is *already* out there on the P2P networks. It's not like this creates more copyright infringement.
I'm guessing that the decryption keys for the songs themselves didn't change. What they most likely changed with iTunes 4.5 was the method used to encrypt the iTunes keyring.
This is just a guess, however, I have no real info on the subject.
I just moved to Memphis recently and got digital cable from Time Warner. One of the things I found most interesting was several of the "On Demand" channels are much like you describe. Example: The HBO package includes "HBO On Demand" which has, essentially, a lot of the stuff HBO is showing now, including the last several episodes of their various series. Showtime on Demand had the last 8 episodes of Penn and Teller, for example, which allowed me to catch up on the ones I had missed. There's also Discovery Channel On Demand, Comedy Central On Demand, and several other non-premium cable networks in there.
The functionality is basically to to that On Demand channel, pick your show, hit play, and wait a couple of seconds for it to begin streaming it to you. Only thing I don't like about it is that the FF and RW controls are a bit laggy (since they have to talk to the headend) and only work at one speed. But they do work.
I didn't opt for the PVR built into the cable box, but in these cases, I'm led to understand, it streams the show directly to your hard drive in the PVR and thus you get the show much faster, along with better control over playback. I dislike the Cable Box PVR controls too much to use that though. I'll stick with my Tivo in that case.
Jacquard developed looms that could be controlled by using punched cards, but this wasn't really
"programming" as such. What Turing created was the concept of algorithm execution, which until then nobody had come up with.
Algorithm execution is where the data and the sequence of instructions for manipulating that data are all part of your input. Jacquard's loom was more along the lines of just the data being in his punched cards, while the sequence of events that occurred was built into the loom, and only dependant upon the punched cards for specific info about position and such.
RFID can have quite a significant range. They vary, but a meter is not unusual. They really wouldn't be in a position to replace bar-codes and magnetic strips if they could only be read from inches away.
No doubt that the signal can be picked up from that far away with suitable filtering, but how do you power the thing from that far off? The further you are away, the more and more powerful that magnetic field has to be. Especially for a portable reading device, that makes it more and more bulky.
Sources?
Umm.. Reality? Seriously, the things don't have any power source. You put them in an alternating magnetic field, a loop of wire trace creates a tiny current in the circut, enabling it to send a short burst of RF. That's how they work. They don't transmit far because they don't have any power to speak of in order for them to transmit far.
No, no. I'm not talking about the entire device, just what is essentially the antenna... The rest of it can be far away, hooked up to a phoneline or some such...
Yes, there's an antenna to read the signal, and a power source to provide a large alternating magnetic field. If you're going to make a portable RFID reader, you have to have some form of battery on the thing, and it ain't small. The readers built into the wall can be hooked to the 110AC, but you ain't got that luxury when you're building a portable reading device.
Hehehe.. Well, hey, it's true. "Gamer nerds" (that guy's definition) and overclockers tend to ride the edge a lot in their computing activities. When you ride the edge of the limitations of the processor, the memory, physical laws, etc, then you tend to not have the most stable machines in the world.
:)
Most gamer nerds I know usually clock their systems back down a few notches during actual LAN play, so that they can actually finish the game. Real people into the game will take a minor quality hit for stability and speed, any day, especially when they're concentrating on 0wn1ng j00r a$$.