First, the `digital archaeology' bit:
Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2002 19:49:12 +0000 From: Chris Lightfoot To: Eben Upton, Tom Lynn Subject: wave to disk The Wave to Disk home page seems to have vanished. Do we want to (a) put it up on some other free hosting site; (b) put it up on a proper site (e.g. ex-parrot/Computing Lab/whatever); (c) forget about it on the basis that we don't want to risk being arrested the next time we go to the United States? -- ``I had one [good seventh grade teacher]. Smart, witty, excellent communicator, young, and beautiful. Naturally, she fell over dead in class from a brain haemorrhage.'' (seen on the internet)
From: Eben Upton To: Chris Lightfoot, Tom Lynn Subject: Wave to disk Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2002 21:27:03 -0000 I suggest we put it up on ex-parrot and my lab machine. I hear the American prison system serves nice food. Eben
Need To Know gave us a mention when this was new and we were idealistic:
<< TRACKING >> look what the mouse dragged in We don't usually trail products we haven't tried, but this one's for Windows NT, and there are some places we just don't go. In a nutshell, then, WAVE TO DISK is the same as that... uh, other OS... sound device driver that lets you grab raw audio from any source (including streamed RealAudio, one of the three games that runs on NT, or - I dunno - one of those hilarious new "secure" music distribution systems). By all means try it out, but do understand that the authors do not condone massive piracy and giggling at last-gasp attempts at protecting intellectual property. Also, if you do download it and it turns out to be a Trojan or HAPPY99.EXE - well, come on, you're using NT. You deserve everything you get. http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Program/3555/ - apart from all that LinuxWorld coverage, which we wouldn't wish on anyone http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19990129S0014 - Divx cracked too? IS *NOTHING* SACRED TO THESE PEOPLE?
The international music industry is currently attempting to find a solution to the problem of internet music piracy. One method is to force users to play music as they download it, with no permanent storage on their computers. The concept behind such schemes is that the files can only be downloaded with a proprietary player, which will refuse to save them. In order to demonstrate the weakness of such copyright protection schemes, we have hacked together a "Wave to Disk" device driver.
The WTD driver masquerades as a sound card driver, so audio players will happily play downloaded files with it. However, instead of sending the data to audio hardware, it streams it to a .WAV sound file on the hard disk, after which the files can be copied and played back at will.
This method is able to defeat the protection facilities in all of the current audio players, and promises to compromise proposed future standards such as IBM's Madison Project and Sony's MagicGate. Any other standard which attempts to prohibit storage by forcing the user to send downloaded music directly to the computer's sound system will fail to such a driver.
Note that this code is provided as a demonstration only, and that we do not condone the piracy of copyrighted information.
Currently we only have a Windows NT version of the driver, but hey, it's 6am and we're tired already.
The driver is released under the terms of the GNU Public License.
copyright (c) 1999 Eben Upton, Tom Lynn and Chris Lightfoot; portions copyright (c) Microsoft Corp.
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