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So Apple dropped the DRM on all of its iTunes offerings. Are pigs flying? Did hell freeze over? This is a huge victory for the online freedom groups, and a potent statement for the long-term infeasibility of restrictive DRM as a whole. Don’t break out the party champagne just yet, though: DRM is most certainly dead, but that doesn’t mean the music industry has given up. You know the phrase: there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
As someone with a long-time fascination with cryptography and steganography – that is, scrambling data or hiding it in an otherwise innocent information, respectively – I’ve always suspected that music offerings from the larger-scale, DRM-free stores like iTunes might have little bits of traceable data hidden somewhere in their product. It’d be remarkably easy: your average music file is at least a couple of megabytes, and an embedded tracking code, account number, or some other beacon need only take a couple dozen bits.
Apple, of course, has done just this: DRM-free iTunes downloads embed the account holder’s e-mail address in each song file, and that embedded data is impossible to edit with normal software.
Source
So Apple dropped the DRM on all of its iTunes offerings. Are pigs flying? Did hell freeze over? This is a huge victory for the online freedom groups, and a potent statement for the long-term infeasibility of restrictive DRM as a whole. Don’t break out the party champagne just yet, though: DRM is most certainly dead, but that doesn’t mean the music industry has given up. You know the phrase: there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
As someone with a long-time fascination with cryptography and steganography – that is, scrambling data or hiding it in an otherwise innocent information, respectively – I’ve always suspected that music offerings from the larger-scale, DRM-free stores like iTunes might have little bits of traceable data hidden somewhere in their product. It’d be remarkably easy: your average music file is at least a couple of megabytes, and an embedded tracking code, account number, or some other beacon need only take a couple dozen bits.
Apple, of course, has done just this: DRM-free iTunes downloads embed the account holder’s e-mail address in each song file, and that embedded data is impossible to edit with normal software.
Source
Edited by error51, 14 January 2009 - 05:14 AM.
