Geeky week and ever so geeky weekend

BarCampLondon

Yesterday (tuesday) was the very successful girlgeekdinner which was great as usual (pictures here and here). I recorded the talk and will upload it to archive.org tonight, so keep an eye on this url. The quality isn't great because it was so dark and I hadn't played with the best settings yet.

Friday looks to be a busy day but will be a quieter geekdinner with Ben Metcalfe, which is maybe a good thing because of course the rest of the weekend is BarCampLondon.

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Windows Media DRM cracked, no one cares?

DRM

Well I've just installed Napster and tried out the Fairuse4WM application. I'm pleased to say it worked for me just fine. But you know what, browsing through Napster's quite small catalogue of dance music, I've quickly come to the conclusion that Cory and Derek are correct

Last night, I got a tip that the WM DRM was cracked; Endadget has now confirmed that the tool exists and works. While interesting news, it's rather irrelevant to online media services using WM DRM. Most users won't care about these decryption tools, not because the DRM is 'consumer-friendly,' but rather because there are already easily-accessible alternatives for acquiring unencrypted copies of practically any song or movie. Thus, users already could readily get around the DRM's unfriendly limits, without any actual decryption tool.

Its actually getting really tired thinking about new tunes to download. See, unlike a torrent site or something like last.fm, there's no creditable community recommendations. The Amazon like recommendations are ok but not actually very useful when finding new music because there based totally on artists. Anyways, the fact remains that Windows play for sure DRM is broken and easily taken apart. This in my mind is still quite amazing and proves that – #59, DRM does not work because the customer/user has the key, cipher and ciphertext in the player. Now Napster, MSN music, etc with there all you can eat pricing are the playing grounds of everyone with a little knowledge.

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