Wave to Disk

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?

On with the show....

Wave to Disk

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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