DRM

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance for Mac killed by bad DRM

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Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance
There is no workaround.
Photo: Konami

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance can no longer be enjoyed on Mac after the studio that ported the game to macOS shut down.

Transgaming decided it would be a good idea to protect the title with DRM that required a constant online connection to one of its own servers to confirm the game was genuine. Now that those servers are no longer available, the game is worthless.

Remove DRM from iTunes and Apple Music to play your audio on any device

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Apple Music Converter
This app converts audio files into MP3, removing their DRM restrictions so you can play them on any device.
Photo: Convertanymusic.com

This post is brought to you by Convertanymusic.com, maker of Apple Music Converter.

When we download music from iTunes, or audiobooks from Audible, the files that get onto our devices are DRM-protected. That means they can’t be played on “unauthorized” devices. This, let’s face it, is pretty inconvenient.

Chrome browser bug makes movie piracy even easier

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Stealing movies is simple with Chrome.
Photo: David Livshits/Alexandra Mikityuk

A worrying flaw uncovered in Google Chrome makes it even easier for pirates to download movies and TV shows from the web. Google was made aware of the issue a month ago, but the company is yet to release an update that fixes it.

Apple Music metadata is messing up your music

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Apple Music
Apple Music uses a less accurate method for song matching than iTunes Match.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

If you’ve been having problems with Apple Music and iCloud Music Library incorrectly matching songs in your library, you’re far from the only one. It turns out the reason is that Apple Music doesn’t use the same method for matching songs you own as iTunes Match does. This results in significantly more errors and frustrated users.

Though iTunes Match used acoustic fingerprinting to identify songs you own and match them for all of your devices, Apple Music uses the metadata of those songs. That means if you change something as simple as the title and artist, it could match to an entirely different song despite the unchanged audio.

Calm down and rock on; Apple isn’t adding DRM to your music

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The only problem is when you start deleting files without a backup. Don't do that.
Photo: Apple

No, you won’t lose all your DRM-free iTunes music. At least, not without deleting your actual files and not having a backup. Apple isn’t adding DRM to your iTunes files, either.

The reality here is that Apple will not automatically remove any iTunes music files you own on your computer and replace it with a digital rights managed (DRM) file.

However, the convergence of iTunes Match, Apple Music, and the new iCloud Music Library can be confusing, and there is a small potential to re-download files you’ve deleted from your Mac as DRM-protected Apple Music files.

Luckily, the folks at iMore have a pretty fantastic, clear explanation of what’s going down here, and a pretty neat way to check and see which of your music files have been matched, uploaded, or purchased. Even John Gruber linked to it, so you know it’s good.

Mall Santas, ‘rollover’ data, and our most-wanted gifts on The CultCast

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Photo: izismile.com
Photo: izismile.com
Photo: izismile.com

Merry CultCast, boys and girls! This week: Santa gets a little “grabby”; Apple wins a major lawsuit; our iPhones deserve “rollover” data plans; the incredibly low payouts artists get from Spotify; and the high-end gifts we really want but will never get on an all-new Get To Know Your Cultist.

Thanks to Audible for supporting this episode. Audible, the home of over 150,000 audio books from practically every genre in existence. Grab our Leander Kahney’s book, Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products, for free with a 30-day Audible trial.

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Catch the full show notes ahead.

Eddy Cue blames record labels for craptastic iTunes DRM

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Apple was forced by major record labels to implement digital rights management technology in iTunes, according to testimony in an ongoing class-action lawsuit that accuses Cupertino of stifling competition with competing music services.

Apple contemplated licensing its DRM, called FairPlay, to other companies, “but we couldn’t find a way to do that and have it work reliably,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet software and services.

Escape Amazon’s evil Kindle empire with the cheeky Kobo Aura

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Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac
Kobo's ebook reader trumps even the best Kindle on several fronts. Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac

I just switched from Kindle to Kobo. Why? Amazon. It’s currently extorting publishing house Hachette by delaying orders and refusing to allow pre-orders for certain titles. The exact machinations are secret, but many people agree that Amazon is demanding discounts on ebooks.

I don’t want to see authors forced to get a second job to survive, so I switched. No more Kindle ebooks. I switched to Kobo, which has a great e-ink reader, a deep book catalog, and – most importantly – breakable DRM.

The results are mixed, with ups and downs for both the service and the hardware.

And The Winner Is… Best eBook Reading App

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Next time you are traveling somewhere or commuting your way to work, look around you. It’s evident that the number of book lovers who have taken to reading on a digital format has risen significantly over the years. In 2011 and 2012, Amazon said it sold 105 books for its Kindle e-reader for every 100 hardcover and paperback books, excluding free eBooks.

Though it has become apparent in recent years that there is a slight fall in the growth of eBook sales (particularly so in 2013), eBooks are still far too compelling to die out, and today we tend to use more than one medium to consume the same thing. So next time you’re hesitating to pull out your Kindle or iPad mini on the bus or train due to the watchful eyes of a “book snob,” just remember that it’s not possible to please everyone, and that there are still thousands of benefits to the electronic book format.

Ending Soon: Convert DRM AudioBooks On Your Mac [Freebie]

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CoM - ebookconverter

Cult of Mac Deals has another great freebie lined up for you – but this offer won’t be around much longer! Ondesoft AudioBook Converter for Mac allows users to easily strip DRM and any unwanted protection so your purchased m4b and aax audiobooks can be played on any device you like.

This converter is completely comprehensive which allows for top features to perform flawlessly. Chapter information will be preserved in the output M4A files, so don’t worry – you can easily start from where you left off.

New Ruling Continues To Let You Legally Jailbreak Your iPhone, But Not Your iPad [Jailbreak]

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The US Copyright Office reviews the Digital Millennium Copyright Act every three years, looking at requests to create temporary changes that act as ersatz loopholes int he law, typically to address continually changing technology standards. This year, the Copyright Office allows jailbreaking of devices like the iPhone, but not for devices like the iPad.

The Office also ruled that consumers can unlock phones purchased before January 2013, but not thereafter. You’ll also be albe to bypass encryption on a DVD to use an excerpt in a non-commercial way, like in a documentary, but it will still be illegal to rip a DVD for your iPad.

The rules seem pretty arbitrary, right?

Apple Brings iTunes Match To Hungary And Poland

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iTunes Match expands its reach across Europe.
iTunes Match expands its reach across Europe.

iTunes Match has expanded its reach in Europe today as Apple brings the music matching service to Hungary and Poland more than 18 months after it made its debut in the United States. The Cupertino company is yet to add these countries to its iTunes Match availability page, but users report that the service is now appearing in iTunes.

Apple Hides One-Star Reviews Of Apps Affected By DRM Server Bug

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Although Apple quietly fixed the problem on their end that led to numerous corrupt app updates being sent out to customers, the after effects continued to plague app developers who had been bitten by the bug in the form of one-star App Store reviews from outraged customers. Now Apple’s done the right thing, and obscured these one-star reviews from influencing afflicted apps’ ratings.

Apple Reporting Server Bug Fixed – No More Crashing App Updates

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Apple has just reported that it has fixed a glitch that’s been plaguing app developers and downloaders today, rendering app updates downloaded today or late yesterday useless. The apps refused to launch, and no amount of re-installation would fix the issue.

Apple just issued a statement to All Things D that calls the all clear. The initial corruption was linked to Apple’s Fairplay digital rights management (DRM), and Apple said it only affected a small number of users.

Why Can’t Macs Older Than 2011 Use AirPlay Mirroring In Mountain Lion?

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Unless you have a Mac from 2011 or later, don't expect to be able to do this in Mountain Lion.
Unless you have a Mac from 2011 or later, don't expect to be able to do this in Mountain Lion.

One of the killer features of OS X Mountain Lion is AirPlay Mirroring. Just like on your iPad or iPhone, AirPlay Mirroring will allow you to beam video and sound from your Mountain Lion Mac to an Apple TV connected to your television set. The result? If you’re someone like me who watches a lot of video on his MacBook Air, you’ll never have to reach for that Thunderbolt-to-HDMI converter again.

There’s only one problem with AirPlay Mirroring in Mountain Lion: inexplicably, it doesn’t work on all Macs. In fact, unless you have an iMac, MacBook Air or MacMini from mid-2011, or a MacBook Pro from early 2011, you can’t get in on Mountain Lion’s streaming action.

Why? One theory is that it’s all about DRM.

How To Read Kindle Books In iBooks, And Keep Your Library In The Cloud [How-To]

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All your books in one place, DRM free.

I love e-books. I love them so much that I’m considering buying a double-sided, sheet-feed scanner, chopping the spines of all my dead-treeware books and having an OCR frenzy on their asses.

What I don’t like is DRM. Not for any idealistic reasons (well, maybe a few) but for practical ones. My bookseller of choice is Amazon, as it has the best range and Kindle books work on any device. But the Kindle app for the iPad sucks, and with an update this week it is almost unusable. If only I could read my Kindle books in the beautiful iBooks app. Well, it turns out that I can. And what’s more, I can keep all of my books in a DRM-free format in the cloud, ready to be downloaded to any device, whenever I like. Here’s how.

Are “Beneficial Viruses” The Future Of Mobile Security?

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Could viruses actually protect company data on an iPhone or iPad?

The BYOD movement has transformed the relationship between IT staffers and other employees in a wide range of companies. While there are benefits to BYOD, there are also headaches – and securing data on personal devices and/or securing the devices themselves is one of the biggest. While there’s an ongoing discussion about whether to manage data, apps, or devices, right now most companies are developing a strategy that has a mix of approaches.

All that could change if the mobile management industry unfolds the way Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney expects. Dulaney is an advocate of creating what he calls “beneficial viruses” that companies can layer into apps and data itself – the idea being that the data could delete itself if it becomes compromised.

This Free App Can Crack Apple’s iBooks DRM

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iBooks-large

The DRM restriction that prevents Apple’s iBooks from being opened on other devices can now be removed by the latest version of a free DRM removal tool. Requiem 3.3, a piece of software that is incredibly popular for removing the DRM from music and videos purchased from the iTunes Store, has been updated to crack e-books purchased from the iBookstore.

iTunes Match Can Replace DRM Protected Audio Files with Unprotected Versions [Ask MacRx]

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The new iTunes Match service is a handy way to share music among all your computers and iDevices. One reader is wondering if this feature can also be used to replace older 128kbps DRM encoded tracks with their higher bitrate, unencumbered iTunes Plus versions:

Just wondering something about iTunes Match. I’ve got a bunch of songs on iTunes that I purchased early in the game, and they are in .m4p format, so they have the DRM locks and can’t easily be converted to .mp3 format. They are only at 128kbps, which is the only thing iTunes offered back in the day. If I sign up for iTunes Match, will these songs be updated to their new DRM-free 256kbps versions, or do I have to pay for the iTunes Plus service first?

Linus Torvalds: Locked Down Technologies Lose in the End

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Sao Paulo, Brazil – Apple’s restrictive control measures and policies will ultimately fail, according to Linus Torvalds.

“Technologies that lock things down tend to lose in the end,” said Torvalds at the keynote of LinuxCon Brazil. (Cult of Mac is reporting from Sao Paulo; come to our Nov. 20 meetup for a chance to win a signed copy of the Brazilian edition of Leander Kahney’s “Inside Steve’s Brain.”)

iPad Shredded for DRM Restrictions

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A Jobsian-attired protester at the Apple event. @FSF
A Jobsian-attired protester at the Apple event. @FSF

Journalists streaming into the iPad event yesterday were greeted by a handful of volunteers from the Free Software Foundation protesting DRM restrictions in the about-to-be released device.

They dubbed the iPad the iBad for two reasons:

* All media in the iTunes store (with the one exception of music) is wrapped in Apple’s DRM. That means films, TV shows, movies and audiobooks (NB: books are in an open format ePub) are locked to Apple’s platform, taking away your right to share.

* All applications must be signed by Apple if they are to run, an unprecedented level of control for a general purpose computer. On top of this, Apple can push updates to the device over its wireless connection, letting them add or remove capabilities at any time.

There were only about six or seven naysayers outside Yerba Buena center yesterday, but they still hope to bring about some long-term change, namely by getting people to sign an online petition.