July 17th, 2007
FairUse4WM breaks Microsoft DRM again
A hacker “Divine Tao” has released a newer version of FairUse4WM that appears to have ripped Windows Media DRM wide open. It is interesting to note that “Divine Tao” is an anagram of the original author of FairUse4WM going by the name of “Viodentia”. This latest release posted on Doom9 forums seems to work on Windows Media audio and video files on Windows XP or Vista so all those conspiracy theories about Vista DRM were wrong.
Unlike the Apple FairPlay cracks which relies on the capturing of a decoded audio stream, this literally strips out the DRM in the file within milliseconds per file with zero degradation to the digital content. The significance of this crack is that a lot of Microsoft’s customers use the content subscription model which means someone could theoretically download thousands of songs and unlock all of them during just the trial period. When FairUse4WM was released last year, Microsoft rushed out a patch in just three days but was immediately countered by a patched version of FairUse4WM. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft responds to this latest attack and how “Divine Tao” counters.
There has never been a DRM scheme devised that couldn’t be cracked and any attempt to silence the crack or information on cracking is met with a massive user revolt as Digg found out. When DRM finally dies - at least for large-volume low-margin content - it will die because of the lack of ROI (Return On Investment) and not because of all the protest and conspiracy theories about DRM.
George Ou is Technical Director of ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
