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Crime DRM United States

Aaron Swartz Ebook's DRM Has Been Cracked (hackaday.com) 63

Posted by EditorDavid from the cracking-open-a-good-book dept.
Slashdot reader jenningsthecat writes: From Hackaday comes news that the collected writings of Aaron Swartz, released as a watermarked eBook by publishing company Verso Books, has had its watermarking scheme cracked by The Institute for Biblio-Immunology, who also published a guide for removing the BooXtream watermarks.

The writings of Aaron Swartz, with DRM applied? Oh, the irony. Still, at least the DRM employed doesn't restrict a user from reading the book on any and all capable devices, so it's not a very intrusive form of DRM. But I somehow doubt that Mr. Swartz would take any comfort from that...
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Aaron Swartz Ebook's DRM Has Been Cracked More

Aaron Swartz Ebook's DRM Has Been Cracked

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  • Why are we still talking about this guy? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Yes, the files should have been pubicly available, but it doesn't mean he gets to break into server rooms to get that content.

    • Re:Why are we still talking about this guy? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 02, 2016 @01:59PM (#52434221)

      We are talking about him because his case in an example of prosecutorial misconduct [oxfordscholarship.com] and the forced application of intense sentences due to legislation that takes the discretion on sentence length away from the judge

      It is about filling our prisons with people who are simply warehoused with no plan on how they are going to be brought back into society, and nobody really noticed until rich white people started getting railroaded by it.

      It is a really big deal, and the more the people can be made aware of it and fix the problem, the better it will be for all of us

      • We still talk about him because he was a brilliant technologist. There was no real crime commuted (no loss or injury)

      • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I'm posting AC because I just don't want to deal with emails from the Aaron Schwartz fan club.

        Yes, the prosecutor was overzealous. No, it did not cause his death, which was an unfortunate consequence of his apparent mental illness. Yet he has become some kind of martyr. Every day, people of color are treated far worse by the legal system than Schwartz could even conceive of, and only in exceptional cases does the media even give a damn. With his dad's money for legal appeals and his white privilege, i

        • So in your first sentence you're telling us you're just like Aaron Swartz. You want to do what you see as a good thing without wanting to deal with the possible negative outcomes.

          No, it did not cause his death, but to claim it was not a factor is not dealing with reality. Other people have it far worse should pretty much be only an argument for other people have survived under worse, you can survive too sorts of things. Other people having it worse is not a justification for lesser bad behavior. Your sentence about it has no place in this discussion and just muddys the waters.

          Which means that the poor treatment of Aaron Swartz does not justify his poor behavior leading up to his treatment. Yes, that's what he should have done. However, the way they treated him was improper and partially at fault for his death. His response to their treatment of him by killing himself is improper. The way his parents raised him to be so bothered by the way he was treated is partially at fault, too. We should be looking for more precursors to the situation, not less.

          I don't buy for a minute that the fault for the change of policy at MIT can be all laid at the feet of Aaron Swartz. JSTOR had probably been pushing for tighter restrictions on the documents they offered before the Aaron Swartz incident. Was it additional leverage? Yes. But there have been any number of other things involved in the decision. Again we should be looking for more precursors.

          But this time instead of saying that something isn't at fault, you are committing the mistake of saying something is the only thing to blame, and not even the people with agency involved. Why are you so quick to blame only Aaron when it comes to his death, but so quick to absolve MIT of everything when it made a decision?

          That's what situations like the one surrounding Aaron Swartz is for me. Not about making him a hero, or vilifying him but speaking out against people like you who basically want the same things as Aaron Swartz, but don't realize that's what they are doing, people like you who want to make things all or nothing, and people like you who want to blame the person with agency when it is convenient for their worldview and absolve people when it is convenient to do that too. I don't view hypocrisy to necessarily be a problem, but I do find these behaviors that just happen to be hypocritical to be a problem. If you are going to be hypocritical, at least do it right.

    • The files were publicly available. Which did not stop them form also being available on many other locked down systems like where Aaron found them.

      • In order for you to know that they are publicly available, you must know where they are publicly available. So, where are they publicly available.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by DragonTHC ( 208439 )

      we're still talking about this guy because he fought to release the collective human knowledge which was locked away by by academic bureaucracy and held for ransom to keep a system alive which rewarded those with money and stifled human innovation through exclusivity of said knowledge. His story will go down in the history books, not as a thief who broke into restricted areas and released restricted content, but as the crusader for freedom of human knowledge that he was.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by hackwrench ( 573697 )

        The motives he had that you cite are good, it is true. His motives weren't pure though. What he was willing to justify in achieving his motives and the way he was willing to go about it aren't the best. There was no good reason for him going it alone. There are plenty of people who believe as he did. In fact, not long after he did what he did, someone discovered their own repository of JSTOR documents.

        From the 1st_READ.TXT:

        This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling 33GiB, all from Philoso

    • Re:Why are we still talking about this guy? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Saturday July 02, 2016 @04:06PM (#52434955)

      We're still talking about Swartz not because he was in any way heroic, but because the prosecution was so purely evil. The wronged party, JSTOR, quickly lost interest in pressing charges, but the federosairus persisted in being douches anyway, because that's how they are trained to behave.

      States' rights are the American equivalent of Brexit.

  • Is it irony... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 02, 2016 @02:04PM (#52434255)

    if the guy who cracked the e-book gets railroaded to a 50 year sentence and $1 million in fines then kills himself, only to have his writings published in a encrypted e-book, which in turn is ...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      No, that's recursion.

  • I suppose (Score:3)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Saturday July 02, 2016 @02:28PM (#52434413)

    If you've been wanting to read Aaron Swartz's writing but were philosophically opposed to the company's DRM, this is good news for you I guess.

    I always like hearing that another one of these silly DRM schemes has been cracked... but, practically speaking, it's unlikely that "Verso Books" has any content I care about.

  • Arguing semantics (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Watermarking is not DRM, and if you invent a term "Social DRM" to describe it and its consequences purely for the sake of controversy then it's still not DRM, because DRM and "Social DRM" are still two completely different things.

    That said, DRM can be used as a mechanism for watermarking, and watermarking is itself anti-consumer (because the mere existence of a watermark corresponding to you is a liability, even if you never infringe on copyright)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      Not necessarily. A watermark can be used to validate the integrity of a copy of a document. In this use the watermark is, for example, a document checksum embedded in the document, and validates that either the document has been altered, or that it hasn't.

      This use is like the encoded signing of an email, except that the presence of the signature is concealed from casual reading, but available for checking either by specialized applications or by a hex reader. It generally requires a graphics image be pre

    • It may not be DRM as the term is commonly used, but if you take the meanings of the words rights management, it is still a way of managing whether or not mainly people who access the material are the people who have a right to.

  • It's easy to break this kind of watermarking. You get K copies of the book, compare them, and take the most common version for each element. Choose K based on your budget and the degree of confidence you want that you've scrubbed everything.

    For bonus points, you can analyze the types of differences and create novel watermark elements to confuse the watermark reader even more.

    You have to analyze several types of media -- like CSS, HTML, and images -- but it's still pretty straightforward.

    So this isn't that i

  • Watermarking isn't anything like DRM. It doesn't limit access to the work; assuming it's an otherwise standard format, you can still play/read it with anything that you want.

    The fun thing would have been if they had use DRM. I suppose Swartz's estate (who?) is the copyright holder. DMCA defines circumvention as being a function of whether or not the copyright holder (not some other party) authorizes you to access the content. Presumably, Swartz' estate would authorize buyers to read the book. Therefore, you

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