Monday, July 16, 2007

A member of the Doom9 Forum known only as "Divine Tao" claims to have defeated Microsoft Relevant Products/Services's Digital Rights Management (DRM) platform for securing the distribution of digital media files over the Internet. According to other Forum members who have already downloaded it, the new utility program for PCs running Windows XP and Vista not only works wonderfully but can even run on Microsoft's Zune player.

Divine Tao's new upload to the Doom9 Forum is actually an update to a utility first posted by Forum member "Viodentia" way back in April of 2006, after which Microsoft was forced to release two patches as a quick fix. However, Viodentia quickly broke the software giant's fixes.

Microsoft subsequently went to court but was later forced to drop its lawsuit given that the software giant had been unable to identify or locate the utility's author.

"Lacking the source code to the extant programs, I can only offer this output of my own efforts," wrote Divine Tao in the hacker's initial posting at the Doom9 Forum. This is an apparent reference to the software giant's prior claims that the source code for its DRM platform had been illegally accessed by a company insider.

Labels: Digital media, Zune