tunedriving
AirPort Express allows you to “enjoy your iTunes music library in virtually any room of your house”, using WiFi. (via PapaScott)
Cool functionality, but what if somebody drives by and finds a way to fetch all the tunes you’re playing? Could the music lobby sue you for sharing music?
Will tunedriving become the next wardriving?
2 responses
It couldn’t happen, because the music output from iTunes is encrypted before transfer and decrypted by the AirPort express. When you first fire up iTunes it uses rendezvous to find the local AirPort Expresses and makes you chose the one you want to zap music at. The encryption is there presumably to stop you using the whole AirTunes thing as a way of decrypting Apple’s DRMd iTunes music store files then intercepting the WiFi transmission (which uses lossless compression) and recording the music as unencrypted files.
#1 Simon Willison — 2004/06/09 at 3:17
But hasn’t the iTunes DRM been cracked before?
In the event that it gets cracked again, an “attacker” would just need to detect the start of a music file in the stream, and then decrypt on the fly or just record the encrypted stream and decrypt later.
(Using quotation marks around “attacker” because it could be argued this is fair use if done by the owner.)
#2 michel v — 2004/06/09 at 14:02
Your words