Of the many programs I’ve taken the time to probe and dissect, none has instilled me with such a love-hate sensation as iTunes. My favoured media player by some distance, it is beautiful, easy to use, cleanly written, reliable, and all the rest. But with the iTunes (Music) Store came iDRM, as DVD Jon famously termed it. Apple make it pretty clear that they don’t like DRM any more than the users do, but that their hands are tied, and I respect that. Why then do they insist on doing such a bloody good job of making it very difficult to crack? Everybody knows that it will be broken sooner or later, so why go to all the effort - and it is a lot of effort - to choose ‘later’?

After months of sitting quietly while Apple’s DRM remained unbroken, with my previous encounters with iTunes encryption in mind (maybe I’ll write about them some day) I felt compelled, maybe even prepared, to take matters into my own hands. This was the birth of DisaRM, my home-grown iDRM-removal tool.

http://www.ring3circus.com/wp-content/uploads/disarm_small.png ("http://www.ring3circus.com/wp-content/uploads/disarm.png")

Why have you never heard of it? Well, call me a selfish coward but I didn’t want the attention or bother of being responsible for maintaining such a keenly sought taboo. And why didn’t I release the source code? Partly because my method was so awfully hacky, as you’ll see, that most programmers would run a mile. As it happened, QTFairUse6 ("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QTFairUse6") was released mere days after I produced a working prototype (and well before DisaRM was ready for human consumption) so the onus was lifted.

For the sake of education, and self-indulgence, I’ll take a few posts to describe the story of DisaRM, gory details included.



http://www.ring3circus.com/rce/how-i-cracked-the-itunes-7-drm-pt-i/