Microsoft stuck in endless DRM battle with Hacker: Part 2 of Many
Yesterday, I reported on the battle between Microsoft and the hacker known as Viodentia:
Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM, used by online music stores like Rhapsody.com and Napster.com, was recently cracked by a hacker known as Viodentia. In response, Microsoft released a patch to fix the hole. Viodentia struck back within days with a new version of his application to bypass PlaysForSure DRM that works even with Microsoft’s patch. Microsoft retaliated with a second patch and today filed a lawsuit against Viodentia. Unfortunately, Microsoft has no idea who Viodentia is and had to file the lawsuit against “John Does 1-10″
The premise of the post was that DRM is impossible to secure, so this back-and-forth battle would continue indefinately. Yesterday’s post ended with a prediction:
But for now, the battle continues without an end in sight. Viodentia has already announced that a new verison of his program will be available within days to work around Microsoft’s latest patch. A response from Microsoft soon after is all but assured.
Well, less than 24 hours after that post and only 4 days after Microsoft notified it’s partners about it’s last patch, Viodentia struck back. Today, he released FairUseWM 1.3 that once again breaks Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM, even with the latest patches applied. Before most of online music services that use this DRM system were even able to distribute Microsoft’s newest patch, the DRM is again broken.
I feel bad for the programmers at Microsoft who are no doubt being forced to work “around the clock” again in an attempt to patch this.
technorati tags:microsoft, playsforsure, fairusewm, viodentia
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I didn’t see an email address to contact you directly, but I think you’d find this blog post interesting.
http://www.engadgethd.com/2006/09/28/on-xbox-1080p-and-the-lack-of-hdmi/
Yeah, there are similar problems with all the HDTVs sold before HDMI came out. Those sets only have component cables and are at risk of getting locked out of HD content just like the Xbox 360 HD-DVD add-on. It’s a mess out there.
[...] Microsoft quickly patched the vulnerability and sent updates to their PlaysForSure business partners. But before Microsoft’s partners were able to deploy the fix, an updated crack was released that nullified the fix and again left Microsoft’s partners with no effective copy protection. [...]