This almost feels like legal cover more than anything else. At least they "tried" to protect the music files from easy duplication & piracy. I wonder if circumvention of XOR is illegal under the DMCA. It feels just about effective as renaming the file extension from <i>.mp3 to </i>.shh
A few years ago, there was an article posted to Hacker News about some site that sold DRMed anime shutting down and how people who bought anime from the site would no longer have access to the things they bought. As it turned out, the special Flash-based anime viewer they provided just did a per-byte XOR with 0x42 on PNG files.
This "coding scheme" seems to be "unkillable" (don't know, if the wording is correct, the spell checker does not like it).<p>I thought, after Microsoft made a bad name about itself by using this in its "Access" product ten years ago or so (they "encrypted" passwords this way), some people should have been warned. May be it is was just to long ago ...<p>Within seven years or so (of operating), somebody could have come up with a different algorithm ...
Can you explain further how the key is used in the mapping? Maybe with a doodle? Thanks & well done btw<p>-- mixing the file with a single byte (0x25, or ASCII 37, or a percent sign)
Cryptography rule #1: Don't make your own.<p>I guess that AES (or some other standardized cipher) was too overkill, insufficient, or mainstream for them?
I had a Tidal trial and was trying to see how encrypted their lossless music was. It uses some Chrome NaCL executable to decrypt, then play the music. In any other browsers, you cannot play HiFi music since they do not support NaCL.<p>That seemed like a good solution to DRM encryption.<p>At the end of the day though, people can just record the input on their sound card if they really wanted...
"...after quite literally being sued to hell."<p><a href="http://theoatmeal.com/comics/literally" rel="nofollow">http://theoatmeal.com/comics/literally</a>