June 1st, 2007
iTunes Plus songs are DRM-free, but hold something worse …
By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews
iTunes Plus is great, right? No DRM, after all. But what it contains instead, is information about the buyer of the song. What people didn’t know, and what Ars Technica found out, was that this information was in all songs sold by iTunes. But in the Fairplay encrypted versions, it’s less worrisome. But in these days of “too much information” available at the click of a mouse, you don’t want stuff like this hanging around, unencrypted for anyone to see. And therefore, this has attracted the attention of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Nowadays, the secrets buried in digital music are way too easy to find, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The consumer watchdog group, which focuses on the Web, claims Apple has left information belonging to customers of the new iTunes Plus service exposed. Music purchased from iTunes Plus is embedded with unencrypted customer names and e-mail addresses.
Apple has for a long time included a customer’s name and e-mail address within song files purchased from iTunes. But the personal information was encrypted. Source: News.com
We Say: Well, you can be sure I won’t be letting my wife fill up her iPod from iTunes Plus until (since the EFF is now involved), this is eventually resolved.
George Scriban says:
Your .mac account (required to make an iTunes Store purchase of any kind, DRM-ed or not), and your name are embedded in cleartext in all iTunes Store music files (and probably video files), not just iTunes Plus DRM-free files.
Just drop an .m4p file onto TextWrangler and search for your name, for example.
In other words, this information has *always* been embedded in your music purchases from Apple, and has never been encrypted. Old news.
June 2nd, 2007 at 2:54 pm
MissingFrame says:
So are we supposed to be worried that someone who hacked into our computer and downloaded our music will know our name and email address?
June 2nd, 2007 at 4:06 pm
Everitt Chase says:
STFU.
Stop The Freaking Unsanity.
(Or something like that)
DRM free does not mean free to copy to anyone anywhere. EFF is freaked out that somone could buy a song, post it on thier website, and get sued for copyright violation.
Big freakin deal.
June 2nd, 2007 at 8:16 pm
Breemneno says:
=”http://www.xrum.977mb.com”>new year foto
January 10th, 2008 at 8:26 am