Hi Scott, Would appreciate your thoughts and interpretation on this news. Thanks, Rory
internetnews.com
Streaming Media News
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Microsoft's Windows Media Audio Hacked August 19, 1999
By John Townley
InternetNews.com Correspondent Streaming Media News Archives
When we reported Aug. 10 that pirates had a year to crack MP3's protective encryption, we wildly overestimated. They have done it already.
Microsoft's recent release of Windows Media Audio was accompanied by much executives' ado about its security from downloaders with duplication on their minds. But as they spoke, buccaneers with cybercutlasses in hand were already swarming the transom, opening the way for a host of scurvy song-snatchers.
According to published reports, a hacker tool is already making the rounds that foils Microsoft's security measures.Microsoft officially brushes off the attack as just another swarm of exzpected, if insidious, insects.
"It's a problem the music industry has had for years," Kevin Unangst, lead product manager for Microsoft's streaming media division told msNBC. He compared the hacker's tool to audio cassette dubbing and other illegal kinds of reproduction the industry is used to.
"Someone has to consciously break the law to do it," he unsurprisingly remarked.
There is debate about how the small 80K utility works.
Microsoft says it simply "listens" to sound coming out of the sound card and copies the file, exposing a hardware flaw like other hacker tools have before. That's the hardware equivalent of putting a tape recorder next to your PC speakers and making a cassette copy of the song in a degraded, analog format.
But others claim the tool actually removes the file's encryption, allowing the hacker to produce an all-digital copy.
Will this cause recording companies to spin into another protection panic that will impact Microsoft? The company doesn't think so. In fact, they're basically ignoring it. Unangst said Microsoft will not fix or patch its audio standard to prevent the hacker tool from working.
In the end, as with the fracas about illegal copying when cassettes first arrived on the scene, the fact remains: pirates, like the poor, are always with us, and the final task of stopping them falls not to the encryptors, but to the prosecutors. |
