“groovy mother...”

Playfair Building

When Apple’s comparitively-generous-but-still-restrictive policy for Music Store downloads was announced (summary: “you can play your music on 3 PCs and unlimited iPods”), I always figured the iPod was the loose link in the security chain. It either contained a skeleton master key to play any protected tune, or would store the user’s key in an easy-to-reverse-engineer spot.

And now, after far longer than I had expected, playfair (not, as far as I can tell, named after column-obsessed Scottish architect) tumbles into view, exploiting the loophole of the iPod (or, ironically enough, Windows PCs) to decrypt protected Apple music, and losslessly convert them to unprotected m4a files. Initial tests are successful.

Hurrah! I now own the music I paid for!