When EMI announced that they were going to be offering DRM-free tracks on iTMS in May, I was pretty psyched to see that a major label has finally stepped forward and admitted that DRM doesn’t work. However, the month of May passed slowly, and I was somewhat paranoid that EMI would back out on the deal.

Finally, on the last day of May, iTunes has been updated to version 7.2 along with the arrival of “iTunes Plus”. DRM-less, 256kbps AAC files at last. I was excited enough to hop on right away and purchase 2 albums that has been sitting in my Amazon shopping cart for months (in their CD form, no less).

I’ve always been a very discerning audiophile, which only recently finally succumbed to the fact that keeping all of my music in Apple Lossless is really just a waste of hard drive space for a small (although still perceivable) quality gain. I have over thousands of dollars invested in pretty good audio equipments, most of which I no longer listen to on even a monthly basis anymore.

My Super Audio CD player is completely useless, as the format has died a painful and slow death. Now it is nothing more than a glorified CD changer that I never, ever bother to change. I have racks of CD’s that I don’t really want to deal with on my next move, only half of which has been ripped into MP3’s.

Fact of the matter is, there are only so many hours of entertainment…

A very interesting thing happened at Digg yesterday. There was public posting of a HD-DVD decryption key, which was very promptly deleted by Digg’s admin. It created a public outrage of Digg users feel like they are being censored, and prompted a reaction that resulted in even more posting of the decryption key, and more posting about the deletion and the censorship that Digg was exercising.

The whole fiasco is summarized at TechCrunch, with the users eventually winning out at the end. Obviously, there was no way that Digg can fight back against their entire user community. It’s a demonstration of how powerful the public voice can be, especially given the proper medium.

The question here, is that if a decryption key can be made into such highly publicized information, then what is the boundary for any information to remain private? Traditionally these type of information are always available, but only through backdoor channels, you always had to “know somebody that knew somebody” and digg around (no pun intended) for these ever-elusive hack. Now a HD-DVD decryption key is out in the wild, what’s a software maker’s right to protect say… their serial numbers?

If everyone posted their Windows Vista serial key, for example, what is Microsoft’s right to protect themselves against a possible outbreak of millions of serial keys being made public, and the ensuing windows activation nightmare?

Not long after my last post.. literally seconds, I saw this cute little news item:

Hackers discover HD DVD and Blu-ray “processing key” — all HD titles now exposed

Enjoy!

A bit after my last massive, wall-of-text post about Vista content protection, Wired’s Monkey Bites blog had a few things to say about it as well:

Vista Month: Welcome To The DRM?

It’s a good, short & concise post that pretty much summarizes all the ideas behind Vista’s new content protection scheme without going into too much details. Although the post itself is relative old news by now (not to say that my post isn’t), the comments following the post is most entertaining.

There are quite a few people who swear they’ll never use Vista. Which will most likely be challenged when they purchase their next machine which will inevitably ship with Vista preinstalled. A few said they would rather switch to Linux, and even fewer said they will switch to MacOS. Completely understandable, since you can get Linux distributions for free, and you would have to pay for a new machine to get MacOS.

The number of people who are willing to defend Microsoft on this point is also surprising. While a few valid counter arguments has been made, including that most of these security features are turned on/off depending on the policy of the content provider; the fact remains that the studio has absolute, revocable control over what we paid for.

As history has shown us, it’s really hard to disable or extend pre-existing devices of any sort. For example, add-on drives to enable extra functions in consoles has never really panned out (even XBox 360’s HD-DVD drive is nothing more…

A few weeks ago, A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection was published by a software researcher from New Zealand. The paper went into deep discussion on what was, up to that point, completely uncovered topic related to the underlying Windows Vista code to comply with protected content playbacks for next-gen formats (Blu-ray and HD-DVD). Subsequent conversations about this topic flared up across the web, on Security Now! podcast as well as other various TWIT network related podcasts.

Part of me didn’t believe that even Microsoft would go as far as implementing a content protection system that would come at a such detriment to the consumer. So I waited for weeks to see if Microsoft had any sort of public statement and rebuttal against it. Microsoft did eventually comment on the content protection behind Vista, and really couldn’t say much more other than admitting, and putting a good spin on what has been done.

Short blurb about AACS
To understand Windows Vista content protection, we have to first understand the difference between DVD, Blu-ray and HD-DVD. Our good ol’ DVD format was made during the adolescence of the digital content era. At the time the movie studios were promised that this complex encryption algorithm would never be cracked. As it turns out, CSS (the method of encryption used on DVD) wasn’t as impervious as we thought. If I recall correctly, the key to decrypting CSS was discovered in one of the software that plays back DVD…

The industry trend to start selling DRM-less music seems to be growing. Independent artists & small labels were where I expected to see those changes taking place. However, it seems that even some major labels has throw themselves into the fray as well. VirginMega France will start selling MP3 files without DRM, and even encode them at higher than traditional bitrates.

Take a look at Engadget’s article for more information:
VirginMega France to sell DRM-free MP3s in March

A few, rather small & quiet, news items caught my attention shortly over the holiday season. During the season of CES & Macworld, or the blissful orgasmic gathering of tech geeks as I like to call it, it’s easy for other important news items to be drowned out. Small, minor movements in the industry seems insigificant next to the big boys announcing the next awesome hardware-soon-to-be-vaporware. The first is the announcement of a label completely going digital. The second is Jason Mraz releasing his latest EP.

To be honest, I think the Jason Mraz EP has been out for quite a while, I just haven’t checked his website recently. I’m also not up to date with the ongoings of the music industry, part of which I contribute to my age. As my parents used to hang on tightly to the music that they heard in their youth, I used to struggle with the notion that I may one day be out of touch with the current state of pop culture. Inevitably I’ve lost connection with what is hot and cool (all at the same time), and thus transitioning from MTV to VH1, and now really nothing at all.

What is exciting to me, is that Jason Mraz released his EP not in iTunes, not in WMA format with DRM, and most certainly not on the Zune marketplace (that wouldn’t have done him any good at all, would it?); but in pure, unadulterated MP3 file format. The audiophile in…