Well, actually, I know what it means, but I wonder what the implications are. Here are my thoughts.

The iTunes Store is already very popular among those who buy music by the file. But, it ties into the Apple system: iTunes (the app) and iPods. Nota Bene: the majority of mp3 players/DAPs out there are iPods. Not hard to notice.

Enter a DRM-free movement that puts pressure on Apple. Apple eventually concedes; at first part of the Store, and then they're going DRM free (I don't know if it's happened yet). Seems like a smart move to me. After all, why should we buy from Apple's closed system when we can buy from the myriad of other digital music sellers, torrent it, or rip it off a friend's CD? Two things that spring to my mind are convenience and the very wide range of materials available in the iTunes Store (to my knowledge).

Now what? Two venues: DRM free downloads from the Store and conversions of previously purchased material to DRM free.

It seems to me that new DRM free downloads will have the bigger impact. I don't know how well the news will spread, but I can guess that among average users, they might not hear about it for a while, if ever. Or if they even knew there was DRM, or even what DRM is (perhaps thanks to Apple's successful integration scheme). When an already popular source offers a sweeter deal, maybe it'll go boom even bigger. I can't really see it hurting Store sales. Now, the second part to this venue: the format. No longer will people have to use the notoriously clunky iTunes to play their purchased music. Heeello Foobar, Winamp, Amarok, Banshee, Songbird, and everything else that can handle .m4a. And this also means players; I have it in my head that some players out there do handle that format and I know that Rockbox does (Sansa e200 v1 FTW!). So, because of the last two things I mentioned, some people who didn't like the iTunes system before may now join up/come back.

The second venue is conversion of your old Store goods to the new DRM free format. Actually I suspect they're not so much conversion involved; I think Apple may be doing some file modding that just removes the DRM, as has been done before by, umm, certain tools. So how many people are going to pay Apple's fee to convert their collection? I can't say. But it would be interesting to get some statistics on it, or even some feelings from the public on converting their stuff.

One note here: I've assumed in this post that the conversion involves videos, and I'm assuming they are DRMed. I don't know either for sure; in fact, I've never bought anything from the iTunes Store, only witnessed a purchase once. I don't even have iTunes installed right now (Safari, though… free Lucida Grande font and I should use it a lot more for webdev testing, but then again, Chrome has WebKit, so… sigh).

And, on a somewhat related note, I find the lyrics of this song somewhat funny. It's about pirating music and bucking the system, I think. Lolz. Take a listen for you health.

…for now, that is. My previous posts were: DRM CD's are uncool, More on the DRM CD case, the great DRM aha!

On October 7th, I followed the instructions posted at the CDFreaks Club to remove Macrovision CDS-300 drivers. This consists of finding the file sdcplh.sys on your Windows partition/drive, deleting it, and restarting Windows. Boom. It worked. Marvelously. I also decided to disable Autorun on my optical drive, but it turns out that for all my knowledge, I didn't know how. Lol. Annoyances.org readily gave the solution. Like many things in Windows, it was in the Registry, but TweakUI handled it easily. So anyway, I could rip tracks fine now, no scrambled audio effect. Great! I tested it out by ripping the first and last tracks. No problems detected, MP3's played fine. I'm pretty sure this only affects Windows, so if you use Mac or Linux, rest easy. It seems kind of stupid for me to get suckered in like that. Oh well, now I know.

removing CDS-300

So, here's a step by step on how to get rid of the CDS-300 protection (How do you know it's CDS-300? There is a folder named CDS300 on the disc. Simple as that):

1. Start Menu > Search
2. If needed, click to search All files and folders
3. Type in sdcplh.sys and then press Search
4. Once it has been found, right click it and select Delete and select Yes if you are asked for confirmation
5. Restart your computer once the file has been deleted
6. Once you're back, enjoy unscrambled ripping of your CD!

Thanks to CDFreaks (hyqwn) and Alex Halderman and Edward Felten.

And if you ever insert that CD into a Windows computer again, I recommend holding down Shift whilst you do (i.e. press down before you put the disc in, let up a few seconds after the CD tray has closed or, in the case of a slot loader, you've inserted the disc) so that the program will not Autorun.

Also of note, there is an Uninstall.exe on the disc. I'm not sure if this would actually remove the driver (sdcplh.sys), but it does at least set the "agreement" status on the disc's autorunning up to "not agreed."

Here are some pics… before and after removing sdcplh.sys

successful ripping!

There are also two other protections schemes I found out about during my research, MediaMax and XCP. I actually thought I had XCP on my CD, but it turned out to be Macrovision's CDS-300. So, I actually learned a fair bit about XCP and MediaMax. Much information can be found in Alex Halderman and Edward Felten's whitepaper. XCP, which only works on Windows, installs a rootkit on your system, which malware can and has taken advantage of. MediaMax, which works on Window and Mac (though the Mac version actually requires the user to start the installer), if Autorun is enabled (and it is by default), actually does automatically install software on your computer without notifying or asking you. Furthermore, MediaMax also opens up a security hole, as described in the whitepaper.

removing XCP

I've never actually encountered XCP (though I thought I had), but I'll list some instructions that I think would work to get rid of it, based on information I've gleaned from the internet. I am told that if the disc uses XCP protection, you'll see a file on it called VERSION.DAT (you might just see VERSION, depending on your Windows settings)

1. open Run (Start Menu > Run or in Vista, just type in the search box)
2. type cmd /k sc delete $sys$aries and press Enter
3. restart your computer
4. open Command Prompt (Start Menu > All Programs/Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt)
5. type cd \ and press Enter
6. type del $sys$*.* /s
7. wait until it's done (it will have a list of deleted files and then finally display the prompt C:\>)
8. restart your computer (I don't know if it's really necessary, but it's not a bad idea)
9. You're done; I do recommend downloading CCleaner to clean up your Registry, though. Just open up CCleaner, click the Registry button on the left, and click Scan for Issues. Once the scan is done, click Fix selected issues… when it asks you if you want to backup changes to the registry, just click yes and save it in My Documents or somewhere else convenient. That way, you can just double click the file to reverse your changes if your computer starts acting wacky after this (assuming the Registry cleanup somehow created a problem that made things act wacky).

Thanks to Black and White Incorporated for the information.

removing MediaMax

The other big CD protection software is MediaMax. Halderman and Felten kindly explained how to remove the Windows version.

1. open Command Prompt (Start Menu > All Programs/Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt)
2. type sc stop sbcphid and press Enter
3. type del %windir%\system32\drivers\sbcphid.sys and press Enter

In the future, always hold down the Shift key like I described earlier, if you put the disc in a Windows computer, because the software on the disc WILL install stuff without your consent. Unless you have Autorun turned off.

Regarding the Mac OS X version of MediaMax: I don't know too much about it, but I did find out that OS X does have an autorun feature (called 'autostart', I am told) that can start the process, but it still needs your permission to install the software. Don't give it that permission. Deny and rip away! If you do install it… I'm afraid I don't know how to remove it. Good luck if you try, and please share any findings with the community.

Well, that's it for now. Hope you have fun avoiding DRM.

Why am I getting nowhere on my case?

It's CDS, not XCP.

Let me elaborate.

My Switchfoot CD is protected with Cactus Data Shield, not Extended Copy Protection.

Now how did that happen…? I see that the Wikipedia article on the album mentions that some copies of the album were protected by Cactus. Ok. Why didn't I figure this out sooner?

A Google search led me to this page, which mentioned CDS-300, which struck a familar note with me from browsing the CD. Aha.

Alright. Hopefully I should be able to fix it with this new knowledge, and some helpful info from that page. And then I'll post on what happens, some summary information on this stuff, and info on how to avoid or fix the situation.

I read a really great white paper on Thursday on this issue from a couple guys at Princeton University, J. Alex Halderman and Edward W. Felten. Excellent work. They seriously tore apart this stuff, and they know what they're talking about. I found it with a Google search, but it was on copyright.gov, and don't ask me what it was doing there. I found a link to it on Wikipedia that was hosted at Princeton: here. And here is the original link I found.

The story goes that Mark Russovich first discovered this, or at least was the first to make it public, when RootkitRevealer turned up evidence of a rootkit. He eventually tracked it back to a protection technology on CD's, which reminded him of a CD he had recently bought that was copy-protected.

If you do accept the license agreement on the program that autoruns, something called active protection software will installed on your system, and a rootkit installed to attempt prevention of defeating the system. The whitepaper goes into detail in this, but it is very well written and clearly worded, so worry not. And, back to the CD, what also autoruns when you insert the CD (of course assuming AutoRun is enabled) is a executable named go.exe (though I have not been able to detect it so far) which is passive protection software.

Since Microsoft added this rootkit to their definitions in the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool, and I downloaded the September version, and it supposedly runs automatically after downloading, the rootkit should be taken care of. And, assuming everything is the same as mentioned in the whitepaper, it seems to be upon testing. What I did was to prefix the name of a text file with "$sys$" (no quotes). If the rootkit was in effect, that file should have disappeared, as mentioned by Mark Russovich in his blog post. And it didn't. Hmmm. But, much to my chagrin, the rogue drivers that the active protection software put on my system seem to still be in effect, though I cannot find them. Arg. I ran a Symantec tool that would take care of the rootkit, but the tool didn't find it, which confirmed that it wasn't there. The drivers still seem to be having the scrambled-audio effect on protected discs. Or at least this one.

One idea that I have is that I could have a new version of XCP. That would be extremely uncool.

Also something I read; there is evidence that the makers of XCP stole parts of open-source software and illegally put it in the XCP software.

So, this is really getting to be a nasty business. I'll make at least one more post on this.

Not too long ago, I got my Switchfoot CD, Nothing is Sound. It was all good, until I noticed the CD case said that the content was protected. Ummm… hmmm. That made me think of DRM. I popped the disc into my laptop, and sure enough, a program autoran… a nice and shiny Flash app that would let me listen to the CD, burn copies (limited copies, of course), or rip the music to my hard drive. I ended up ripping it. Took long enough. Once it was finally done, it was easy enough to launch Winamp and play the tracks. And the catch? They were in restricted Windows Media Audio format, or WMA DRM. Ok, so that works… I can listen to it, and the MP3 player I had ordered supports WMA DRM. Even so, I found the DRM annoying, especially since I didn't know about it when I ordered the album… and the app would rip the music at a maximum level of 192 Kbps, which is OK, but not the best possible quality.

Time to experiment. And… Winamp won't play the disc as a music CD. The audio files couldn't be found from Explorer. I had heard of DRM being removable, so I looked around online. OK, it could be done, but the programs were not free, and according to a blog post I found, doing it that way is illegal. Supposedly there is a analog loophole as mentioned in the post, but I didn't go that way… I think my sound card might not even support it anyway.

I stuck the thing in my old CD player and hit play. And it played. Ok, so the standard music CD data was there. I booted Ubuntu to see what I could do from there. Sweet! I could access the music data from there. Turns out it had both music and data on it, something I believe is called a multi-mode disc.

OK, so simple enough. Rip the CD to FLAC from Ubuntu, encode into MP3 in Windows, using BonkEnc. Easy as pie… almost. Everything was good, except for the fact that a few minutes of garbage sound were getting tacked onto the last track. The CD played just fine in Ubuntu, but for some reason or another, there was a problem ripping the last track.

I ended up using BonkEnc to transcode the last track to WAV, and then fired up Audacity for a little down and dirty editing. I could get the exact length of the ripped WMA using Winamp, and so I planned to trim the file down to that length. Except, Audacity doesn't seem to have any jump to time function. Arg. I hit Google looking for a plugin or some sort of solution, but didn't turn up anything.

So, I had to do it the hard way: zoom waaaay in. I found the time, put the marker there, highlighted back, and trimmed. Saved the WAV, transcoded back into FLAC. Woot. Transcode into MP3, and it's ready for my MP3 player.

It took long enough, but I got a set of unrestricted FLAC files. Later I read that the band wasn't exactly happy about the copy protection Sparrow Records put on their album. They even posted a workaround online, but Sony took it down, and I haven't found out what it is. I did found out on Wikipedia that this stuff is called Extended Copy Protection. And it's evil… but more on that later… it got enough publicity in 2005 anyway.