Re: OT: And so it begins...

Thusly Clay Cahill <cacahill@xxxxxxxxxxx> Spake Unto All:

>I heard that "mace" <mmace@xxxxxxxxxxx> said:
>
>>http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html
>>
>>But, of course, most of you don't even mind Steam et al. so why would
>>you care.
>
>But of course music fans have been dealing with this for months and
>the simple response is to not allow the CD to autoplay... bingo bango,
>you have your full spectrum cda files ready to rip to your ipod in all
>their glory or play as per usual and no software install.

Not always the case. I bought Deleriums "Chimera", and it was
protected by something called Midbar, a protection scheme owned by
Macrovision, e.g. it was in an encrypted non-standard format which was
unreadable to the OS (and to any other program) and could only be
accessed by installing the buggy-as-hell-and-twice-as-slow player +
driver (the CD remained inaccessible to all other software).

When the CD was put in the drive, it popped up a notice that the Media
Player needed to be upgraded to play the CD. If you clicked OK, it
installed the new player & the driver. Neither the player nor the
driver could be uninstalled except by rollback.

My experience with the filth:
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.windowsxp.music/browse_thread/thread/ca42d578b5d9bcfd/66ee5d7f774eb394

Incidentally it seems the Midbar scheme has a past as chequered as
that of Starforce; one version could be "cracked" by marking areas of
the disk with a felt tip pen, and one version resulted in the return
of hundreds of thousands of unplayable CD's. It seems to be a
mandatory requirement to use godawful highschool-reject programmers to
make copy protection.

.

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