copy protection for the weak-spermed

[rone]

I recently heard that Jon "DeCSS" Johansen circumvented iTunes' anti-copying program (in what i find a fairly obvious manner). But the story's from around Thanksgiving. How is it that i didn't hear about this until this week? All of you nerds on my friends list have failed me.

Comments

[rbarclay.livejournal.com]

Well, maybe you should just put the RSS feed of /. on your friends list if you want to read such stories.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

You know, i'm going to pretend you never suggested that.

[waider.livejournal.com]

jeez, man, noone flongs anymore. It's all about the RSS.

http://nanocrew.net/blog/index.rss (DVD Jon's log, which seems to be down at the moment)

More conventional news sources where I learned about Jon's iTunes hack, in approximate ascending order of pain induced by reading them:

The Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/tonys/slashdot.rdf
Boing Boing: http://boingboing.net/rss.xml
Wired News: http://www.wired.com/news_drop/netcenter/netcenter.rdf
c|net: http://rss.com.com/2547-12-0-20.xml

I'm sure all these have convenient lj feeds, too.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

I didn't mention it here because I wrote it up for Rocknerd (http://rocknerd.org/), which is the more appropriate venue.

(And, well, the first cut at it wasn't so interesting -- what he's done now with VLC is entirely different and much more interesting.)

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Ahh, it's the VLC thing i just heard about, then. That's pretty sweet.

[kerri9494.livejournal.com]

Also, it's less exciting because, "QTFairUse then could be used as the foundation of other programs. In its current form, the software leaves the unprotected music data in a form that is unplayable without additional software."

[jwgh]

I want my files to DO SOMETHING! I shouldn't need SOFTWARE to make my files MAKE NOISE!

Good old journalism.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

They're right, even if they did express it in a clumsy fashion: the data you get from QTFairUse is raw AAC, not in any container (OGG, QuickTime, whatever) that player apps recognise -- so additional, quite possibly not-yet-available, software is required to make use of the results.

The VLC stuff is more interesting anyway. That's not a "crack" in the sense of providing a completely unencumbered copy, but it does allow playback of protected files on unsupported systems. Which strikes me as being the better, more easily-defendable-without-being-Andrew-Orlowski thing.