Filed under: Security, Microsoft
Microsoft update kills FairUse4WM
Enjoying those DRM-free music tracks you decrypted using FairUse4WM? Well, it looks like the fun is over, at least for now.Microsoft recently send out a Windows update that seems to block the Windows Media hacking tool.
We have every confidence that FairUse4WM's author, (a hacker going by the name of Viodentia) or someone else will come along and crack Microsoft's DRM scheme again. But it's anybody's guess how long that will take. When Viodentia released his first version of the program last year, Microsoft responded within a matter of days. It took another half a year before FairUse4WM was updated.
Does that mean it was harder to break the encryption scheme the second time around or just that Viodentia had better things to do? We don't really know. What we do know is that this means if you're downloading music from Napster, the Zune Marketplace, or another store using Windows Media DRM, you'll have to play that music on a Microsoft-approved device for now.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
nizzy1115 said 4:29PM on 10-28-2007
there are ways around this ;)
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Michael said 10:00PM on 10-28-2007
That's it.
I'm crippling the Microsoft Updates on all of my machines permanently while I switch over to Ubuntu.
I'm going to find ways to hurt them for as long as I live. Might be David and Goliath, but if enough people hurt them, and push garbage on them, like they force it on us, maybe it'll have some effect.
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Franklin said 10:13PM on 10-28-2007
It appears to be "Security Update for Windows XP (KB933729)". So don't install that. I'd also recommend not installing Windows Media Player 11. Uninstall it if you already installed it, and just roll back to WMP10 which is much better and faster running anyway.
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Apple said 10:16PM on 10-28-2007
I dont even know why peeps let windows install anything on there machines!
http://www.spymac.com/details/?2290046
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CoffeeDaze said 10:22PM on 10-28-2007
Wow, gotta love the crappy Spymac spam links in your comment.
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CoffeeDaze said 10:22PM on 10-28-2007
By the way folks, don't click that spymac link because he gets paid for spamming.
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Eddie said 11:19AM on 10-29-2007
Guys, I've been using SoundTaxi for about a year now and it works like a charm for tracks from Rhapsody. It isn't the most efficient decoding method (it basically just high speed dubs the file while you have the rights to play it) but it works and it's relatively inexpensive. It's paid for itself exponentially in all the music I've been able to play on every machine I own.
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Fred Thompson said 2:04AM on 11-01-2007
Uh...you could have saved that money and "burned" to ISO then mounted and ripped from it.
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Franklin said 4:03PM on 10-29-2007
I believe SoundTaxi doesn't actually decrypt. It rips protected audio files as if they were burned to an audio CD. So there is a generation loss. As far as I know, the Rhapsody encryption has never been broken.
The encryption Microsoft and Apple use have both been successfully bypassed on various levels by hackers.
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Kat said 7:29AM on 12-02-2007
And Tunebite isn't bad either - yes, the high-speed dub.
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Robert McGeorge said 8:20AM on 12-07-2007
I believe you can also do that by using "WHAT YOU HEAR" in ROXIO
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