A student from Princeton has managed to circumvent the latest great hope for CD copy protection. However this wasn't achieved by mathematical decryption of a CD's encrypted music track or some complex piece of hacking, he simply held down the shift key.
The student in question John A. Halderman has posted a report on the internet detailing how he circumvented the lastest CD copy protection technology, called MediaMax, provided by SunnComm Technologies. Halderman found that SunnComm's technology uses two differently stored version of the music,
"One set of songs are CD audio tracks that play in standard CD players but are supposed to be difficult for computers to copy. The second set are compressed, encrypted Windows Media files that employ digital rights management (DRM) to restrict how they are used."
The first set of songs is not encrypted as this has prevented some CD players being able to use CD's in the past, so this systems uses a device driver installed by autorun to stop the computer being able to read the first set of tracks. This can usually be circumvented by holding down shift when the cd is first placed in the drive or disabling the driver once it has been installed.
Once the device driver was disabled it was apparently simple to copy the unencrypted CD tracks. So the search continues for the holy grail of a CD that can't be copied but can be played in all standard CD and DVD players. |
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