George Ou casts a light on a dirty little secret for Microsoft: It's Windows Media DRM platform was open to the world for a whopping three months.
Just over a year ago when hacker “Viodentia” wrote FairUse4WM and broke Microsoft’s Windows Media DRM scheme wide open, Microsoft responded with record urgency in a mere 3 days. But when Viodentia came back as “Divine Tao” and wrote a second major revision of FairUse4WM this July and broke Microsoft’s Windows DRM scheme wide open again, Microsoft didn’t seem to be as concerned and spent their usual 3 months to patch the issue. As of the last patch Tuesday, the current version of FairUse4WM no longer works so the ball is in the hacker’s court again to break Microsoft’s latest DRM revision.
For those customers who wish exercise their fair use rights, they’ll have to go back to the old analog method of converting their music until the next version of FairUse4WM comes out.
I just have one question here. What took so long? When I first heard about this breach back in July, I did what I always do: Buy a song online that I already own and use the tool in question to see if I can bypass the DRM. It worked flawlessly, and if I'm not mistaken, it worked on songs purchased from the Zune Marketplace as well.