[Politech] iTunes DRM reportedly cracked wide open for GNU/Linux

From: Declan McCullagh (declan@private)
Date: Mon Jan 05 2004 - 15:43:46 PST

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    Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2004 15:14:59 -0800 (PST)
    From: Joseph Lorenzo Hall <jhall@private>
    Reply-To: joehall@private
    To: Dave Farber <dave@private>, Declan McCullagh <declan@private>
    Subject: iTunes DRM cracked wide open for GNU/Linux...
    
    On the heals of winning his trial and preliminarily cracking the
    iTunes format, Don Jon has just integrated the stripping of iTunes DRM
    into the VideoLan project... this allows one to play Apple AAC-DRM'd
    songs on multiple workstations or any mobile player (part of the
    problem is that Apple only supports its format on the iPod... which we
    all know has other vendor lock-in problems (ahem... the battery,
    lack of support in iTunes for other jukeboxes, etc.)). -Joe
    
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    http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/34712.html
    
    iTunes DRM cracked wide open for GNU/Linux. Seriously.
    By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
    
    Exclusive Norwegian programmer Jon Lech Johansen, who broke the DVD
    encryption scheme, has opened iTunes locked music a tad further, by
    allowing people to play songs they've purchased on iTunes Music Store
    on their GNU/Linux computers.
    
    "We're about to find out what Apple really thinks about Fair Use,"
    Johansen told The Register via email.
    
    Johansen cracked iTunes DRM scheme in November by releasing code for a
    small Windows program that dumps the stream to disk in raw AAC format.
    This raw format required some trivial additions to convert it to an
    MP4 file that could be played on any capable computer.
    
    But in the best Apple ease-of-use tradition, Johansen has now made
    this completely seamless, integrating it with the VideoLAN streaming
    free software project.
    
    [...]
    
    While Apple's iTunes Music Store is restricted to Windows and Apple
    computers, and Apple only supports its own iPod player as a playback
    device, VideoLAN is GPL software that runs on a wide variety of
    computers including Linux, the BSDs, Solaris and even QNX. Although
    users are at present permitted to burn a CD with music they've
    purchased, only three Apple or Windows computers are "authorized" at
    any time. These terms may be tightened at any time, Johansen himself
    noted recently.
    
    [...]
    
    -----------------------------------------------------------------
    Joseph Lorenzo Hall                    http://pobox.com/~joehall/
    Graduate Student             blog: http://pobox.com/~joehall/nqb/
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