Topic Digest: Playfair
I'm trying something new today. I'm collecting digests of and links to recent articles on a single topic. Today's topic is Playfair, the program that strips the DRM from Apple AAC music files (mostly known as the file format used in iTunes, Apple's online music store, and iPods, the Apple portable music player).
1. In January Jon Johansen (of deCSS fame) reverse engineered the AAC format and released a program to produce the raw audio stream from a DRM-encoded AAC; this stream can be modified easily to produce an MP4 audio file (which is fully DRM-free and playable on a wide variety of applications and devices). See the Register for more details.
2. On April 5th the playfair program was released; see Mac Rumors, among others. The Register implies that playfair is based on Johansen's program, though Gizmodo reports it as based on a Windows program known as 'm4p2mp4'. It's possible these are the same. Playfair requires the user to have the ability to legally play the file before decoding, but once it's decoded it can be played by other nonauthorized computers and devices.
3. Playfair was originally hosted on Sourceforge, but an Apple cease and desist (based on the DMCA) caused it to be pulled (see Mac Rumors). It quickly reappeared on Sarovar (see the Register), though it was quickly removed.
4. Apple releases an updated version of iTunes in late April, version 4.5. See coverage here from Slashdot. Fairplay v2 is included which breaks the original version of playfair.
5. Rumors of Playfair's resurgence appear in early May; see p2pnet.net.
6. On May 11th, Playfair is recreated as hymn, which is supposed to represent "hear your music anywhere". The official web site is http://hymn-project.org/. FSF India has offered legal support for the project. MacCentral is reporting that the site is being hosted on US-based providers, which will probably have to change. One nice feature of hymn is that the Mac OS X version has a drag-and-drop interface.
The story will not end here. Apple will respond, but I don't know what they can do except keep updating Fairplay (and I expect hymn will keep updating in return). I personally think they should have kept using the name Playfair for ironic effect.
1. In January Jon Johansen (of deCSS fame) reverse engineered the AAC format and released a program to produce the raw audio stream from a DRM-encoded AAC; this stream can be modified easily to produce an MP4 audio file (which is fully DRM-free and playable on a wide variety of applications and devices). See the Register for more details.
2. On April 5th the playfair program was released; see Mac Rumors, among others. The Register implies that playfair is based on Johansen's program, though Gizmodo reports it as based on a Windows program known as 'm4p2mp4'. It's possible these are the same. Playfair requires the user to have the ability to legally play the file before decoding, but once it's decoded it can be played by other nonauthorized computers and devices.
3. Playfair was originally hosted on Sourceforge, but an Apple cease and desist (based on the DMCA) caused it to be pulled (see Mac Rumors). It quickly reappeared on Sarovar (see the Register), though it was quickly removed.
4. Apple releases an updated version of iTunes in late April, version 4.5. See coverage here from Slashdot. Fairplay v2 is included which breaks the original version of playfair.
5. Rumors of Playfair's resurgence appear in early May; see p2pnet.net.
6. On May 11th, Playfair is recreated as hymn, which is supposed to represent "hear your music anywhere". The official web site is http://hymn-project.org/. FSF India has offered legal support for the project. MacCentral is reporting that the site is being hosted on US-based providers, which will probably have to change. One nice feature of hymn is that the Mac OS X version has a drag-and-drop interface.
The story will not end here. Apple will respond, but I don't know what they can do except keep updating Fairplay (and I expect hymn will keep updating in return). I personally think they should have kept using the name Playfair for ironic effect.
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