# AAC Protection Cracked?



## bjurusik (Nov 22, 2003)

According to Mac Rumors (http://www.macrumors.com/).  What does this mean for the ITMS?


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## chevy (Nov 22, 2003)

As Apple make the emission and the reception devices (iTMS and QT), they have no great deal to update their copy protection.


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## Cat (Nov 22, 2003)

AFAIK you can only circumvent the protection on protected files you can read: hence only your files, files you have purchased and can play. 
It's simply a capture tool for the output of QT. If you can't play the song, because you are not authorized, you cannot rip the protection.
The impact of this is not that the DRM has been circumvented, but that the conversion from protected to unprotected is lossless. There already were ways to strip the protection from your own file by re-ripping and encoding in other formats that did not support the DRM. This resulted in loss of quality, this new method not.


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## chevy (Nov 22, 2003)

Most copied files are MP3... so I don't think that the fact that AAC copy is lossy or not does change anything.

iTMS does not stop people from copying CDs... it gives them a legal alternative. That's enough.


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## davidbrit2 (Nov 22, 2003)

Hmm, the old method was to burn a CD full of your DRM audio files. Then you could just rip them to mp3 in whatever bit rate you wanted. Is this new conversion method any different/better?


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## monktus (Nov 22, 2003)

Remember if you were to rerip from a burned CD then you're in effect encoding twice which will make to quality suck. As cat says, it seems to be lossless (from the original AAC) so it's better than the old method. But to be honest, Apple's DRM isn't a big deal, I don't think this will have much of an impact as there's already enough freedom of usage for most people.


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## UNIX X11 (Nov 22, 2003)

?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?!?!??!?!?
i dont speak geek, can someone translate that article to stupid language?!


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## ElDiabloConCaca (Nov 23, 2003)

It sounds like the program is actually re-ripping the protected file into an unprotected format, along the lines as if you were to just play a protected file and got the audio through AudioHijack or something.

To truly "crack" the protection, a program would not need to play the file from start to finish -- it would simply strip out the protected code leaving you with an unprotected file.  That's TRUE cracking.  This program sounds like it just employs already-available technology and claims to do one thing when it's actually just kind of working around the problem.


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## fryke (Nov 23, 2003)

actually, the code doesn't re-rip at all. it just writes the decrypted code from QT into a file. which means: unencrypted raw AAC stream. this would then have to be added some file headers etc. to get clean, playable AAC files. no quality loss whatsoever, contrary to the Audio->AAC(encrypted)->AudioCD->MP3/AAC(unencrypted) way of before.

And: Cat is right - it's still no way of decrypting protected AAC files, as you can only do it on a PC that is authorised to play the files, anyway.


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## ElDiabloConCaca (Nov 23, 2003)

Well, wouldn't the same effect be achieved by using a utility like AudioHijack, with the exception being that AudioHijack files already have the header information in them and need no further processing?


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## fryke (Nov 24, 2003)

No, I think AudioHijack is taking the _audio_ and reencodes it, which means loss of quality. Or, if I'm mixing things up here and AudioHijack is only for MP3-streaming, then that's the answer: It's only for MP3-streaming.


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## joek (Nov 25, 2003)

This is nothing like AudioHiJack.

This truly takes a Protected AAC and converts it to an Unprotected AAC without losing any quality.  Just like if Apple had encoded it for you.

AudioHiJack can take a Protected AAC and convert it to a raw audio file... which you can then re-compress.  But you lose something whenever you do that process.


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## toast (Nov 25, 2003)

The story in non-geek.

A few years ago, a Norwegian guy found it funny to crack the DVD encoding process. He reversed-engineered it all, from beginning to end. As the process was called CSS (one of the S's is for 'Scrambling'), he called the program DeCSS. He was sued and defended in court by the EFF lawyers (www.eff.org).

Now, the guy (Joe Lech Johansen) recently posted a new program on his website (www.nanocrew.net/blog/). The program is called QTFairUse.

Fair Use, or Fair Trade, is what you're supposed to do with electronic data, according to the international norms defined by WIPO (www.wipo.int) and WTO (www.wto.org), as well as by others.

QTFairUse will, to make it simple, make any protected MP4 file (AAC file) unprotected (by copying it to a new, unprotected file called QTFairUse on your desktop). The program is to be built in UNIX. I tested this morning, works great.

French radio France Info also explains that Johansen defends himself from being a cracker by saying he works on a Linux platform and that his own aim was to listen to music encoded into AAC protected format on it. This piece of info I did not get well.

I hope this helps.


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## mindbend (Nov 25, 2003)

FWIW--Audio HiJack is a straight non-lossy*, uncompressed digital extraction of the OS's audio bus. In theory there is no loss of quality in a "hijacked" file and the original, whatever that original may be. I have done several tests recently to confirm this. 

*
On a technical level, the only opportunity for audio corruption (in addition to bus noise, assuming HiJack is not smart enough to avoid this) is doing any bitrate/sample rate conversions for whatever file type you wish to save your audio file in as different from the source. Depending on their algorithms, they might not be as pure as others. AFAIK, 44.1 16-bit files are the only option in AudioHiJack.


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## mindbend (Nov 25, 2003)

The bad news is that the guy is a major trouble maker and has now assisted hackers everywhere in their efforts.

The good news is that ITMS's success is based around the simple concept that most people are willing to pay for fairly priced and easily accessible music. Hackers will always be here. Apple knows that. It was just a matter of time. But his software will not change the fact that I, as a reasonable and fair person, will continue to pay for iTunes music. Recent stats (http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2003/11/25/ipsos/index.php?redirect=1069776328000) indicate that the majority of the music-buying public is the same, for now.

What I might use the software for (even though it is wrong, illegal and otherwise) is maybe to unprotect my (paid for) library simply for the convenience of not having to worry about remembering to authorize/deauthorize my computers. It's still wrong though. Shame on me.

The reason this guy and others like him pisses me off so much is not that he wrote the software for his own use, which is totally legal as far as I can tell, but that he willingly distributed it under the Napster-esque loophole and total B.S. premise that his software is not for illicit purposes. Yeah right. And my bong is just a vase. 

I don't really have a bong, but it makes a funny analogy.


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## stizz (Nov 25, 2003)

Apple takes 1/3 of the 99¢ for every song. The artists are STILL getting ripped off. Do not buy music from ITMS if you support artists rights.

http://downhillbattle.org/itunes/index.html


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## tree (Nov 26, 2003)

Thanks Stizz! This page is the best I have ever seen. We can see here that mp3.com has the intention to ask money to artists. I don't do that.


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## Arden (Nov 26, 2003)

I think the iTMS is a step in the right direction.  Sure, it's still a way for the RIAA to screw over their artists, but it brings music distribution to the masses who don't know what P2P is, and hopefully it will turn into something DHB supports.

As for the AAC crack, this has the potential to start up P2P with .m4p instead of .mp3.  How did all those MP3's get onto the original Napster in the first place?  They magically appeared out of thin air, or, more logically, speakers, right?  Well, no: people bought CD's, ripped them, and shared them like there was no tomorrow.  What's to stop people from doing the same with songs they've bought through the iTMS?  It's not about circumventing something for yourself, it's about sacrificing something of yours for the betterment of your fellow P2P'ers.

Believe me, this crack is a very bad thingfor Apple and the RIAA.  Frankly, I hope it gets going and puts the RIAA in its place, like the first Napster did.


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## toast (Nov 26, 2003)

The success of the AAC format, still, resides in the fact that you can now distinguish pirates (they distribute MP4 cracked files) from legal users (they use M4P files). With MP3, this distinction was impossible, all users were sharing a same, unprotected format.

I'm not sure this crack is so bad. It'll help making a clear distinction between people who care about intellectual property and others.


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