Updated FairUse4WM Cracks New Microsoft DRM

Via arstechnica.com -

The Zune may not be the most popular portable media player, but you wouldn't know it based on the game of cat and mouse that has been going on for nearly a year between Microsoft and "hackers" who have continually found ways to defeat Microsoft's DRM.

Ars Technica has been able to confirm that the latest attacks on Microsoft's Windows Media DRM work as proclaimed. Via an update of the Individualized Blackbox component (IBX), FairUse4WM can now remove DRM for Microsoft IBX versions 11.0.6000.6324 and earlier, on both XP and Vista.

The release of the update was first announced on the Doom9 forums, where user 'Divine Tao' indicated that he found a way to update FairUse4WM to support new keys (v1.3 Fix2). It would appear as though 'Divine Tao' is not working with the same hacker(s) who broke the Windows Media DRM code last summer, as the user says that access to the FairUse4WM source code is not possible for him or her. ('Divine Tao' is an anagram of 'viodentia,' however, which is suspicious.)

FairUse4WM debuted last August, kicking off a battle between Microsoft and a user nicknamed "viodentia." Microsoft released a patch for the crack almost immediately but 'viodentia' fired back with another hack, which then Microsoft answered with another patch.

The back and forth at first made it appear as though 'viodentia' had found a serious backdoor into Windows Media DRM, and Microsoft suggested as much when legal representation, Bonnie MacNaughton, said that "our own intellectual property was stolen from us and used to create this tool." Microsoft had released two patches in a month's time, and both had been defeated. This was an inside job as far as Microsoft was concerned, though the insiders responsible could be anyone from Napster, Yahoo, or from within Microsoft itself. 'Viodentia' denied using any copyrighted Microsoft code: "FairUse4WM has been my own creation and has never involved Microsoft source code," the the user wrote on the Doom9 forums. "I link with Microsoft's static libraries provided with the compiler and various platform SDK files."

Microsoft's complaints were ridiculed by the hacker community, but their legal threats seemed to work: after the lawsuit was announced, there were no more updates to FairUse4WM. That is, until now.

------------------------------------

Perhaps Microsoft should follow the lead of Sony and sue itself for defective DRM.

The new FairUse4WM can be downlowned from BetaNews.