We ran across this story last week, but after giving it some thought, decided that we wanted to hear the community response to this news.
22 year old Jon Lech Johansen, the crazy hacker who ripped DVD encryption technology wide open at the age of 15 has now decided to declare war on Apple's iTunes FairPlay DRM technology. Specifically, he and his company DoubleTwist have developed programs to bypass FairPlay and allow encrypted music purchased from non-iTunes music stores to be played on the iPod.
As early as 2004, Johansen had been working hard earlier at creating various "cracks" in the FairPlay DRM wall. Back in January of 04, he had successfully reverse engineered the technology and supplied the code used to develope the playfair utility. Later on, he released his own FairPlay removal utility called DeCRMS. An additional creation called FairKeys allowed DeCRMS to automatically retrieve keys from Apple's servers to use for decryption.
Now, his new FairPlay "enabling-patch" is based on adding code that emulates FairPlay encryption to non-encrypted songs, fooling the iPod to play the music. In fact, he claims that this technology is 100% legal as it doesn't involve breaking the encryption. If this fact holds, Johansen has stated his intent to license this technology to digital music stores, allowing everyone to sell music to iPod users. If he succeeds, Johansen could possibly sidestep any of Apple's own future plans to license FairPlay DRM technology to music stores.
It seems that Apple's DRM fishtank has sprung leaks...both ways.
Recommended Comments