December 02, 2003

CD-protection problem solved!

from schneier's cryptogram
The Doghouse: SunnComm Technologies
The home page of this company says "lightyears beyond encryption." Actually, it's an anti-copying technology for music CDs. This technology is being used to protect the new CD by BMG soul artist Anthony Hamilton.
It's actually not worth fighting the pop-ups and the Flash and the annoying website to learn about how the system works or how you can purchase it. It turns out you can defeat this system by holding down the shift key when you insert a music CD into your computer. This disables autorun, so the SunnComm software never gets executed.
Unfortunately, SunnComm has some more tricks up its sleeve. They're suing John Halderman, the Princeton PhD student who first noticed this. That'll make the system secure again; of course it will.


Posted by Steve on December 2, 2003 11:43 AM
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