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Re: [LUG] BBC IPlayer - A U-Turn ?

 

On Friday 16 November 2007 23:34, Michael Mortimore wrote:

> my point was that there's nothing to stop somebody with a valid key
> from making an unprotected copy and distributing it to people who
> don't. Unless the program is deliberately written to be
> unintelligable, surely modifying source is by far the easiest method
> of breaking DRM.
The easiest way of breaking DRM is by interception.
You've heard of keyloggers? Thats just basically a keyboard driver that sits 
on top of the OS keyboard driver - it looks like the keyboard to any program 
and requires no modification of any program. The same can be done for (in 
windows before Vista) sound and video drivers. Not quite so simple as 
keylogging but not that difficult nonetheless.

As for how to 'break' opensource DRM I think its not quite a simple case of 
modifying the source code.
The code is open source. But the private keys aren't. You can use the code to 
generate a library/program based on the private keys. You have to 
distribute/make available the source code along with your special keyed 
binary but you don't have to distribute  the keys - not even under GPL3. 
Its as secure as DRM gets.
Tom te tom te tom


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