[116705] in Cypherpunks
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daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Anonymous)
Wed Aug 18 18:36:51 1999
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 00:03:01 +0200 (CEST)
Message-Id: <199908182203.AAA10284@mail.replay.com>
From: Anonymous <nobody@replay.com>
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Reply-To: Anonymous <nobody@replay.com>
http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/21325.html
Cracked: MS' New Music Format
by Jennifer Sullivan and John Gartner
1:45 p.m. 18.Aug.99.PDT
Talk about an inauspicious debut.
Just as Microsoft released its much-anticipated
digital music technology, a cracker found a way
to circumvent its security restrictions -- and put
a nasty moniker on it.
Microsoft launched the Windows Media Audio
(WMA) format as an alternative to the popular
MP3 technology on Tuesday. WMA files can be
encoded to restrict playback to a single PC, time
period, or number of plays.
Almost instantly, cracking software that
removes all playback restrictions began making
its way around newsgroups and IRC sessions.
The file, pointedly named unfuck.exe, was first
described on Dimension Music, a Web site
dedicated to the competing MP3 music format.
Wired News successfully stripped restrictions
from an audio file purchased from
Musicmaker.com using the utility.
The cracking file intercepts the audio data
stream as the file is being sent to an output
device -- such as a speaker -- according to
Kevin Unangst, lead product manager in the
streaming media division at Microsoft.
........snip
