JJ does it again, AAC/iTunes cracked

[Hanty]

Old for some of us.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/11/27/itunes.code.ap/index.html

A young Norwegian who became a global hacker hero by writing and distributing a program to crack DVD security codes appears to have struck again, this time against Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes online music service.

So when is BeSweet incorporating AAC support? ;)

[mf]

Oh yeah, that one :D. I like the "So sue me".

[Tuning]

Originally posted by Hanty
So when is BeSweet incorporating AAC support? ;)

BeSweet already supports AAC via Nero's AAC.dll.:)

[Doom9]

old news indeed.. I pusblished that last week ;)

But apparently it doesn't seem to always work.. there's another tool that does the same, also linked from my news.

Oh and by the way, the guy didn't write the actual decryption routines, and DeCSS wasn't the first ripping tool. Two facts that the mass media tend to forget because it makes their story look less flashy. The first ripping tool was called dodsrip, was a cli tool and released by DoD, a warez group that was dissolved after the big FBI warez raids.

[Atamido]

Yes, its important to note that this utility simply intercepts the AAC data after QuickTime has decoded it. So, if you can't decode it with your QuickTime, its useless to you.

[mf]

Wasn't dodsrip the thing that leeched off of... Crap, what was the name of that DVD player again.. Something with an X.

[Doom9]

you mean xing? Both dodsrip and decss contained a CSS code obtained from the xing software DVD player.. but the movie industry was quick to disable that key (the programs appeared in October 99, and by February 2000 the first discs without those keys were already out.. soon thereafter vobdec was released which once gain gave us the upper hand).

[mf]

Originally posted by Doom9
you mean xing? Both dodsrip and decss contained a CSS code obtained from the xing software DVD player.. but the movie industry was quick to disable that key (the programs appeared in October 99, and by February 2000 the first discs without those keys were already out.. soon thereafter vobdec was released which once gain gave us the upper hand).
Ah yes. I've been there from the start too, but very quiet. I was too busy learning to bother anyone :).

[fu2k]

Originally posted by Doom9
The first ripping tool was called dodsrip ...

You've forgotten about DVDrip (August 1999), which was designed to hijack the unencrypted video from inside a software DVD player of the time. In fact, this hijacking of an authorised player is exactly what these new iTunes decryptors are currently doing. (This always seems to be the first step in cracking the encryption).

[Doom9]

@fu2k: No I did not forget, but I was refering to ripper as a descrambling tool.. and dvdrip didn't do that. In a way, it is still a rippiing tool, but not in the ways I'd use it. Plus, I never got it to work.. my PowerDVD versions were always superior to what was needed to get dvdrip working. So my first experience at backupping DVDs did not get very far and I put those things on ice for quite a while until I stumbled upon dodsrip.

[Stux]

Originally posted by fu2k
You've forgotten about DVDrip (August 1999), which was designed to hijack the unencrypted video from inside a software DVD player of the time. In fact, this hijacking of an authorised player is exactly what these new iTunes decryptors are currently doing. (This always seems to be the first step in cracking the encryption).

Actually, this isn't quite true. From what you've said DVDrip 'hijacked' the decompressed video bitstream, where as this itunes 'crack' is hijacking the decrypted but not decompressed aac stream from inside iTunes.

The thing is, there is no reason to create a tool to 'hijack' the decompressed aac stream from inside iTunes, because you can decompress the stream fairly easily using plain QT API. The trick is this tool is grabbing the raw unencrypted but compressed aac stream. The analogy would be if DVDrip had hijacked mpeg-2 rather than decompressed video.

Unless of course that's exactly what DVDrip did ;)

[mf]

Originally posted by Stux
Unless of course that's exactly what DVDrip did ;)
Which is not the case, cause it exploited PowerDVD's screenshot function to make a screenshot every frame ;).

[fu2k]

@Stux: DVDrip did, in fact, write the unencrypted MPEG2 stream to a file on disk. So it is very much like the current iTunes crack.

@mf: It was PowerRipper (aka VideoMatrix) that took screenshots of the decoded video and exported them, not DVDrip.

All these programs were created at around the same time, a month or two before DOD Speed Ripper and DeCSS were available. In fact for my first DVD rip I had to use a combination of DVDrip, PowerRipper and TotalRecorder.

[mf]

Originally posted by fu2k
@mf: It was PowerRipper (aka VideoMatrix) that took screenshots of the decoded video and exported them, not DVDrip.

All these programs were created at around the same time, a month or two before DOD Speed Ripper and DeCSS were available. In fact for my first DVD rip I had to use a combination of DVDrip, PowerRipper and TotalRecorder.
Bah. My memory fails me :(. It's all so vague what happened back then :confused:.

[ultimatebilly]

Do you know this site:
DeCSS-Gallery (http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/)?
There is much more information than the gallery...
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/
I just stumbled upon it, thought you might find it interesting...