Open today for public beta after long last, DVD Jon's first, um, "legit" software business venture: doubleTwist Desktop, a Windows-based app intended to help seamlessly organize, transcode, and sync your various media types to devices like the PSP, Kindle, and Symbian S60 and UIQ phones, as well as share online through Facebook. (Apparently a Mac version is due in Q2.) Nary a mention of DRM stripping or the like (just a couple references to "liberating" your iTunes media -- convert it to MP3, stripping the FairPlay DRM), just a whole lot of talk about making your media easy to move between devices and share with friends.

Hot on the heels of EMI / Apple's iTunes Plus offerings, and Amazon's DRM-free music store, comes news that the industry media-providing MusicNet service will be making a 1-million-song outlay of EMI and indie tracks to its waiting corporate partners, sans DRM. So what does this mean for us? Well, clearly the DRM-bucking trends that have been put into play are causing some serious ripple effects throughout the industry, and since MusicNet provides content to places like Yahoo! Music Unlimited, HMV Digital, and URGE -- not exactly small potatoes -- it's likely we'll start seeing free-er music popping up all over the place. Don't get too comfortable though, the RIAA will still find ways to make your life hell.

[Via TG Daily]

Oh, IT'S ON. After months of eager anticipation, it looks like either Viodentia has finally come out of hiding, or s/he's passed the torch on to another (Doom9 forum user Divine Tao?) -- but either way it looks like MS DRM IBX components up to version 11.0.6000.6324 are good to go with the latest version of FairUse4WM, v1.3 Fix 2 (read: this is the update we know you've all been waiting for). We haven't yet confirmed ourselves, but feel free to tell us whether you got a sweet taste of DRM freedom without having to continue using XP and Windows Media Player 10 with that subscription music service.

[Thanks, Abdul and Adam]

Just as the Times Online predicted last month, Amazon.com is set to strike a potentially major blow against DRM by launching a download store later this year that will offer millions of songs in unprotected, MP3-only format. Leading the list of a claimed 12,000 record labels is none other than Apple-buddy EMI, which has been widely praised for its decision to distribute unlocked 256kbps tracks on iTunes -- but the lack of any other participating majors means that Amazon just doesn't have the catalog yet to compete with other established megastores. However, a profitable showing from EMI's 'experiment' may very well convince the other labels to accede to consumer demand and start joining the free music party too, meaning that this move by a player like Amazon is certainly nothing to sneeze at. So, here's to Jeff Bezos for his decidedly anti-DRM philosophy (this time around, at least), and to that wonderful day in the future when we'll actually be able to watch all those Lost episodes from iTunes that don't play right on any of our three computers.

Last night the lot of us Engadget editors went to bed with sweet dreams of a DRM-free world dancing through our little heads. Lo and behold, this morning we woke up and to our pleasant surprise, EMI announced that in conjunction with Apple, it would make its entire digital catalogue available on iTunes completely DRM-free. The watershed moment we've all been waiting for -- the first of the Big Four music businesses makes one of the most pro-consumer moves we've seen in years. Or did they? Was today's announcement a real commitment dedicated to consumers' digital rights? Or was it a play for disenfranchised music lovers' hearts? We have a feeling the answer lies somewhere in the middle -- although we can't help but feel the whole thing is gestural at best, and subterfuge at worst. Here's why.

For years Apple has said that given the choice between DRMed and DRM-free media ecosystems, it would always choose the former. Thankfully things seemed to be looking up when Jobs apparently had a change of heart after last year's crippling European pressures wrought havoc on the public perception of the iMonopoly. But we're still nowhere near there yet -- and we don't just mean that the other big labels, Sony BMG, Universal, and Warner, haven't switched over to DRM-free. What we're seeing here is a rabbit being pulled from a hat; it's wonderful, but what does it mean?

Sorry Beatles fans, tomorrow may still not be your day -- but to everyone else we've got good news. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that option number two explaining Stevie J.'s visit to London tomorrow for EMI's quickly ballyhooed presentation is going to be exactly what's been rumored about for weeks: the first of the major record labels is going to allow online sales of it's digital music... wait for it... DRM-free. It sounds like savvy consumers the world over finally pounded the message home (with a little help from Jobs himself); tomorrow could mark the first great pillar of DRM crumbling under the pressure of so many end-users and nations. The only question is whether EMI will wind up regretting this decision (we sincerely doubt it), or whether this will start a domino effect with the rest of the major labels that would, in effect, spell the end of DRM forever (one can only hope). Hey, maybe EMI will even make this a twofer and offer up The Beatles DRM-free. Now that would be somethin'.

P.S. -For those without a WSJ account -- while this may not necessarily end up being true, this is at very least not an April Fool's prank.

[Via PSFK]

Bad news MPAA, good news fair use folk: this weekend not only marks the date of extraction for PowerDVD's AACS key (which, as you may recall, is one of the two HD disc-playing apps in Windows right now along with the already cracked WinDVD), but also signals the release of AnyDVD 6.1.2.9, which officially adds Blu-ray support. Go forth and enjoy easily ripping those heavily armored Hollywood titles, dear readers, and let no motivated power-user take the weekend off from sticking it to the man by consuming their media on the devices and whichever manner they wish.

[Thanks, Ren and everyone else who sent this in]

Read - PowerDVD
Read - AnyDVD

Last week's "discussion" surrounding the merits of DRM was a rare glimpse into the heavy C-level posturing usually obstructed by the gold-plated doors of the digital music industry. The event was, of course, kicked off by none other than Steve Jobs in his open letter titled "Thoughts on Music" -- a thinly veiled attempt to redirect the litigious ire of Europe toward the "Big Four" record labels, and away from Apple's own iTunes Store and FairPlay DRM.

Responses were mixed as you'd expect. First, Sandisk -- the number 2 audio player maker in the US -- had the gall to blow kisses and bat their eyes in the direction of the Big Four even after publicly chastising their use of DRM just a few weeks prior. Then the RIAA demonstrated their utter befuddlement by welcoming Jobs' non-existent offer to license FairPlay. Most poetically, Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman chimed in to call Jobs' DRM fight "without logic" -- this, from the man who admits that he's "fairly certain" his own children have pirated music, while simultaneously shielding them from his very own RIAA henchmen who merrily and routinely sue other children and their parents for the same crime. More recently, Macrovision's CEO Fred Amoroso presented a pro-DRM argument so fudged it was difficult to tell whether or not he was joking.

But Monster Cable came out to back "Jobs' vision" with Dave Goldberg, (now former) head of Yahoo Music, again voicing his support for "removing DRM on music." More importantly, Goldberg cites "experiments" where it offered music without DRM with a noticeable boost in sales. Taking that bait, David Pakman, CEO of eMusic -- the number 2 online music retailer in the US -- says that music sales "would explode" without DRM holding the market back. Ah, so that's what EMI is up to.

[Read on for an analysis and discussion of DRM technologies.]

It sounds like we may have another name to add to the pantheon of anti-DRM digital freedom fighters: Alex Ionescu, who's claiming his driver signing bypass method allows end users to bypass Vista's Protected Media Path DRM (the junky stuff that prevents you from watching "premium" content and HD material on non-HDCP outputs, like component, VGA, older HDMI TVs, etc.) Using Alex's technique (which has yet to be released to the general public, for fear of going the way of our man Viodentia), no unsigned drivers are loaded in the process, thereby convincing the media applications that are scanning for anti-DRM "badware" that everything's peachy, go ahead and output that signal even though it may be through the analog hole. We'll all be waiting, Alex, for you to move to Sealand so you can release the hack, we've got a lot of HD DVD and Blu-ray movies to watch, and not a lot of patience for HDCP-carrying gear.

[Via Slashdot, thanks gamebittk]

It's still early on to tell whether this is actually true, but HD DVD cracker muslix64 is back, and with the help of another anti-DRM cracker, Janvitos, claims to have also broken the Blu-ray's implementation of AACS. Although their protection does not yet account for BD+ copy-protection, they claim to have been able to implement the same key-grabbing known-plaintext attack as muslix64 used to crack HD DVD in order to successfully to crack Blu-ray without even using a disc or drive (apparently they just used a raw encrypted data file and nothing more). Unfortunately they haven't yet posted code for us to test this out, so we'll have to take their word for it for the time being.

[Thanks, Ken F]

We know that AACS, the DRM shared by HD DVD and Blu-ray, is touted as being practically unbreakable and impenetrable -- much like its predecessor CSS (and we all know how well that went). Last week we saw the launch of BackupHDDVD the first tool claiming to break down AACS, but a lot of people were left wondering -- us included -- exactly what does it do? Does BackupHDDVD really actually crack AACS? Well, yes and no. With the release of version 1 of the app today, muslix64, the app's author, helped out by shedding a bit of light about exactly how this thing works. (We'll assume you know a bit about public key crypto -- if not, see here, here, and here.) One of the tenets to advanced crypto and this particular DRM system is key revocation, which for AACS means that as soon as a content publisher or industry group gets wind of some funny business, they can revoke crypto keys and push an update down the line that basically invalidates whole groups of pirated movies, hacked hardware, player software, etc.

In simple terms (ok, not that simple), muslix64 does not claim to have cracked the AACS DRM itself, but instead to expose and use each disc's hard-coded private key in order to make the hardware device run through its routine decryption process. By doing so, BackupHDDVD effectively bypasses the key revocation system which might otherwise prevent it (or your HD DVD hardware, like an Xbox 360 HD DVD drive) from being mass-invalidated as soon as the RIAA blinks. The trick here, however, is the private key extraction -- no one really knows how muslix64 exposed and extracted the private keys on the HD DVD discs needed to strip the DRM from the HD DVD discs. S/he claims it can be done with any poorly built software or hardware as the private disc keys are held in memory, but we still don't have specifics. So while we're sure to see master key lists for HD DVDs popping up on file networks in the near future, we're still hazy about how a regular user can extract his or her own keys for their own fair use purposes. We'll be sure to keep you up to date on this, though, as more information becomes available.

Can it be? Is Hollywood's new DRM posterchild AACS (Advanced Access Content System, see more here) actually quite breakable? According to a post on our favoritest of forums (Doom9) by DRM hacker du jour muslix64, his new BackupHDDVD tool decrypts and dismantles AACS on a Windows PC. Just feed the small utility a crypto key (it comes bundled with keys for a few popular HD DVD titles, with the promise of more on the way), and it'll dump the video right off the disc onto your hard drive, supposedly playable in any HD DVD compatible player. If true, this would instantly become the DeCSS of high def optical (where you at, Jon?), as AACS is the copy protection scheme used not only by HD DVD, but by Blu-ray as well. Code and source posted in read link, let us know what you find!

Note: We're working on testing this ourselves, we'll report back with our findings asap.

[Thanks, Max and Adam]

Update: Well, it definitely does something. Click on for some pics and our experiences using the app.

After yesterday's news that Microsoft was launching a lawsuit campaign against the John Does responsible for FairUse4WM, we weren't expecting the next volley to come so soon. So it's somewhat contrary to expectations that Viodentia has released the newest version of his software to counter Microsoft's latest PlaysForSure IBX update (dated 9/23, regarding the memo which we recently printed). We asked Viodentia about Redmond's accusation that he and/or his associates broke into its systems in order to obtain the IP necessary to crack PlaysForSure; Vio replied that he's "utterly shocked" by the charge. "I didn't use any Microsoft source code. However, I believe that this lawsuit is a fishing expedition to get identity information, which can then be used to either bring more targeted lawsuits, or to cause other trouble." We're sure Microsoft would like its partners and the public to think that its DRM is generally infallible and could only be cracked by stealing its IP, so Viodentia's conclusion about its legal tactics seems pretty fair, obvious, and logical to us. An American megacorp swinging around bogus indictments in order to root out a hacker? Surely you jest!

Instead of our usual run of interviews with industry luminaries and the like, today we're aiming the camera a different direction. We had a few things to ask the person whom we've identified as Viodentia, the creator of FairUse4WM -- the thorn in Microsoft's (and Yahoo's, and Napster's, and Real's, etc.) digital media business for a month now. Seems at once likely and not that the big DRM scheme developed by the largest software company was broken and broken again by a single person, but here we are -- and here's what Viodentia had to say about the digital music business, where Microsoft went wrong with PlaysForSure, and what s/he thinks about this latest memo and patch.

Thanks for granting this interview. So FairUse4WM caused quite a stir. How long did it take you to crack Microsoft's PlaysForSure DRM? Was anyone else involved?

Finding a way to extract key information took about a couple of weeks of spare time. Going from a prototype to a more general tool took a couple of months. I am the only developer, although my friends served as early beta testers and sounding boards, and with the initial release I've gotten to know some very helpful people.

So apart from any ideological or political distaste you may have for DRM, do you have any personal reasons for wanting to crack Windows Media DRM? Like, are you a Rhapsody or Napster subscriber?

No, due to geographic location, I'm unable to subscribe to those services. Only my selfish rationale is the challenge in pitting my skills against the industry leader.

Without revealing the secret sauce, what were the fundamental flaws with PlaysForSure that allowed you to break it? Did Microsoft know about these flaws?

Once code is released, there's really nothing secret anymore -- Microsoft didn't follow standard security practices, and left sensitive data unencrypted on the stack while calling routines out of kernel32.dll. Even when they fix this by changing malloc() to alloca(), it'll still be a big task to audit other sensitive routines for DLL calls. On a theoretical level, they have to send the decryption keys outside of their control, and their only defense is through obfuscation.

The last time we heard from Microsoft on the topic of FairUse4WM, the infamous PlaysForSure stripping application, it was a red-alert memo after the release of version 1.2 pledging to patch that version as they had the first. Now, it occurs to us that once the floodgates have been opened there might not be any going back, but read the latest memo for yourself -- we're reserving judgment, namely because we're not DRM (or anti-DRM) developers.