Jon Lech Johansen, better known as DVD Jon for his authorship of the DeCSS decryption software, has turned his attention to Apple"s locked music format. While he hasn"t decrypted the DRM which Apple uses, he has produced a simple Windows command line utility which will install a DLL which dumps the output of a QuickTime stream to a file. The short C program is called "QuickTime for Windows AAC memory dumper". An application called MyTunes already performs much the same function, but Johansen"s is open source. He therefore unveils the analog hole, and the entry wound the bullet made. And the exit hole. So let the fun and games commence: until OS vendors bring in portions of the "trusted" architecture which Intel is building, such illuminating capers (such Great Deeds) are possible. The analog hole isn"t widely known, but it"s there, and it"s wide open.
An arms took place in the early 1990s, when IBM used a similar technique to wrap its OS/2 for Windows product, a rival operating system, around Windows 3.1. IBM wanted to halve the steet price of its rival operating system, and at the time a big chunk of that OS price went to back to Microsoft, because as part of their messy divorce, IBM had agreed to bundle Windows into every copy of OS/2. So the IBM product, which came without Windows (and thus the Redmond royalty) could be sold much cheaper. But it relied on being able to run the copy of Windows that was there, so needed to know the entry points of the key Microsoft system DLLs.