Hacking and Tech Mischief

Apr 27 2009

Playing Copy Protected CD’s on the Mac

By: Jon Gales

**MacMerc.com does
not condone the STEALING of music. We also don’t condone the RIAA cutting off
ALL Mac users (and all other non-Windows users). This is why I
have written this article. These directions are for use on CD’s you have purchased
legally and wish to back-up. Don’t distribute the songs to people that haven’t
directly bought the CD**

If you were not disturbed by an article
stating how certain CD’s play on PC’s but not Mac’s (we’re talking audio CD’s
here) you must not be a true Mac guy. If you didn’t read the article, do so
now.
After you have read it, come back and finish this one. After reading that piece
I immediately went to Amazon
and ordered the CD "More
Fast and Furious: Music From and Inspired by the Motion Picture".

Now, I am not a fan of this
type of music at all (so stop the hate mail) but it was known to not play on
the Mac so I had to give it a try. After popping it in, iTunes hit the
CDDB and got the track names. At this point I was feeling suckered that I paid
for an awful CD that will play just fine in my Mac. I selected a track and the
CD player spun and spun until iTunes started to not respond. So, this miracle
of the RIAA actually
freezes up iTunes. Nice. ::pats the RIAA on the back::

A quick Force-Quit and F12 gave me
back the CD to start cracking. It plays just fine in my home CD player, which
is as expected. It also plays nicely in my portable CD player (a Philips Expanium).
The Expanium has a line out jack (you could use a head phone jack if your player
doesn’t have a line out). It doesn’t matter what kind of CD player you use (portable
or not), just as long as it has a way to get the audio out to a mini jack).
Using a Mini-to-Mini cable from RadioShack (Cat.#:
42-2497) I hooked my Expanium into my G4 Tower. If you have an iBook you
will need something like Griffin
Technology’s iMic to mimic this setup. Mind you, this can be done at a friend’s
house and the songs taken home with you so that you don’t need to buy more hardware
than necessary. The iMic is very cool though, if you are an iBook user and think
you’ll have a few audio projects in the future go ahead and do yourself a favor.

As of writing this there isn’t a
software package to crack these suckers. If you are a budding Mac programmer
this would be a great project. If you have written one already (and I just don’t
know about it) please let me know and MacMerc
will give you some press.

The following directions detail what
is probably the most cumbersome and time consuming method to get the music off
of these Copy Protected CD’s. It will also work for other audio mediums that
your computer can’t play (cassettes, LP’s, live performances, 8-tracks, and
pretty much anything else out there that doesn’t directly play in your Mac).
It’s not a secret method, and it’s not hard. It just takes a little thinking
and a lot of time. Here we go!

In OS X, iTunes won’t record from
the microphone jack. Theoretically in OS 9 you can, since you can change the
monitoring source from the internal CD to the microphone jack. I haven’t done
this in 9, and won’t mention it any further. The software I mention is for OS
X but there are many packages available for Classic. Just peruse the Audio
section of MacUpdate and look for something that will record audio. That’s all
you need – audio recording. I downloaded AudioX,
Sound
Studio 2 and Audiocorder
OSX. If I had to suggest one it would be SoundStudio for two reasons: SoundStudio
doesn’t have an advertisement of audio recorded under the demo like Audiocorder
and it has a nicer interface than both the others. AudioX is free but very limited
(no gain controls, or editing…). SoundStudio has a whole lot more depth than
the alternatives and you can use it for 14 days without paying for it (so save
up all your copy protected CD’s).

Here’s a screen shot of my SoundStudio
import:

graph Playing Copy Protected CDs on the Mac

SoundStudio allows you to do linear
editing, which is really handy for breaking up tracks and taking out long periods
of silence. Here is what I did to import my audio:

  1. Make sure the lights are"dancing"
    when your CD is playing (while it is hooked into your Mac of course). To do
    this if they aren’t already showing go to Window>Show input levels. If
    they aren’t moving check your connections and then go to Audio>Sound input/output
    Setup and change it to the appropriate setting (it will be internal if you
    are using your Mac’s internal Mic port, and USB if you are using the iMic).
    If you have a fancy soundcard it will be different than those covered but
    should be obvious.
  2. Hit play on your CD player and
    look at the dancing lights. Make sure you look for a good while (sometimes
    there is a soft intro track that can throw this judgment off). Skip through
    a few tracks. If you get a bar that turns red, you got problems. Red is OK
    in analog but not in digital. To solve this just lower the gains or lower
    the volume of your CD player.
  3. Now that you aren’t maxed out,
    you can start the CD over and hit record in Sound Studio. This is pretty simple
    and you will want to record all the way until the first track is over. Once
    it is, hit stop.
  4. Now just save it off as an AIFF
    (File>Save As, type a name and hit OK). It’s a good idea to save all these
    AIFF’s into one folder (an empty folder with just the songs in it).
  5. Repeat for the rest of the tracks.

This method worked really well, and
has no shortcomings but it has two annoyances.

  1. You have to manually break up
    tracks. At least in the software I found. There may be a package out there
    that acts like iMovie and "thinks" for you. If you have written
    one or know of one please email me
    the link/info and I will include it on this page.
  2. Recording only happens at 1X.
    If you are an avid CD Ripper this will nearly kill you. The only thing that
    saved me was that I was pissing off the RIAA. iTunes normally imports at 5X-8X
    (at least on my system) so this means it will take 5 to 8 times LONGER to
    import a copy protected CD. However, it’s much more fun when you are circumventing.

So now that we have it recorded digitally
in the computer, we have to get it on a CD and in MP3 format. Both are really
easy to do.

For a CD:

Find the folder of AIFF’s. Drag
it into an iTunes play list and hit burn to CD. It’s that easy! Once your
CD is burned you have effectively negated the copy protection scheme on the
original – sit back and smile!

For MP3′s:

In iTunes go to: Advanced>Convert
to MP3… and select the folder that contains your tracks. Ideally when
you recorded it you should have saved it off as different files for every
track. If it is one big track you’ll have one long song icon smile Playing Copy Protected CDs on the Mac . Once you hit ok,
iTunes rips all of the songs and you are rocking and rolling.

Remember it only takes one person
to do this! If you have bought the CD and your friend has bought the CD, go
ahead and share the files. It makes no sense to do it twice.

It’s not fair that these CD’s don’t
play on the Mac but with these simple instructions all CD’s will be made equal
again. I think that implementing these protection schemes will backfire because
of people who rip the CD’s and make them public (I’m not giving any addresses)
just because they are "Copy Protected". If labels want to sell protected
CD’s why don’t they drop the price to $5 a CD? That would at least be some consolation
for not being able to listen to it on your computer or iPod (without the trouble
of doing what I already covered). It shouldn’t cost them more since no one will
be "stealing" it…. right? Wrong, the protection scheme is
a sham and it just takes a few users who take a few more minutes to have the
MP3′s all ready for P2P sharing.

If you want to read more about these
types of CD’s and what to do about them (fight the system, heckle the labels….)
point your browser over to: Fat
Chuck’s.

Jonathan Gales is a staff
writer and programmer for MacMerc.com.
He can be reached for comment at: jon@macmerc.com.

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Apr 27 2009

Apple Store security negated!

By xmachackerx@hotmail.com
3/5/02 © MacMerc.com

Here’s the
warning: MacMerc.com and
all of its writers and publishers DO NOT condone STEALING from Apple Computer,
this article is just for the curious minds in our audience. We suggest that
you NOT try anything discussed here.


It came to my mind after visiting the local Apple Store that a devious person
could easily suck software (or any sort of file) off of the rows and rows of
fabulous computers, each decked out with super high-speed internet access. At
least at my local store the upstream is at least 50K/s which is pretty zippy.
The downstream is blistering but we don’t need to download anything to pull
off this hack. Internet access on ALL of the computers seems really cool, you
can check your email or send an iCard off from the mall. Ohhhh…. Ahhhh….
But to me I saw one thing and one thing only, FREE SOFTWARE.

MacOS X is pretty
much the only MacOS that could pull this off so easily. If you have a classic
machine that you want stuff off, read Method 2. Included in
X is: an FTP server, an HTTP server, compression utilities and an FTP client.
These are all of the tools to pull off both of the following methods. Yes, I
have tried these at the Apple Store. They could work anywhere with Mac’s and
broadband but the Apple Store is the most high profile location with both (and
lots of goodies to take).

As of press time
the methods detailed in this article do work. They may become
obsolete once Apple reads this (I’m assuming they will fix this quickly, maybe
a mater of hours). So if you are reading this on the day of publication run
out to the store and try it out, just don’t tell them who sent you icon smile Apple Store security negated! . There
is a story circulating that the Apple Store will have Photoshop 7 on their computers….
That might be a nice thing to snatch but again we do not condone stealing. Please
do not try this if you aren’t prepared to face the consequences.

METHOD 1:

Step 1:
• On your home computer (I am assuming you are running X or another variant
of *nix) go to (/Applications/Utilities/Network Utility.app) and write down
your IP address. For this method you must have an always on connection. If you
don’t have it go check out Method 2. Some of you may have a
router to share access across a LAN. If so, go ahead and set Port Forwarding
(or something similar sounding) to forward port 21 to your node. This should
be in your router’s manual, it’s not a hard thing to do. If you do have a router
write down the IP of the ROUTER not of your node (this is a local-only IP thus
won’t be accessible at the store). To find that just lot into your router (most
home routers allow a web browser to log-in and change settings). With the combination
of forwarding and the IP of your router you can access your computer from any
internet access point.

Step 2:
•If you don’t already have FTP access turned on, go ahead and do it.

  • Go to the System
    Preferences and select sharing.
    shot 1 Apple Store security negated!

  • Select
    the check box that says allow FTP access.

Step 3:
• Go to the Apple Store and find a computer that has no one around it.
You may want to play around a little first and have a sales person ask you if
you need help. Just say you are just looking and thank him. After that they
will leave you alone, as long as you seem rather savvy. I used a TiBook but
all of their computer have Internet Access.

Step 4:
• Find the
item that you want. It doesn’t have to be software it can be any sort of file
that you have permissions for. I first tried this with pictures (they are nice
and small). If what you want is a single file and kind of small skip the following
step, otherwise continue. It can be hard to choose.

Step 5:
• Go to Aladdin drop stuff (in the /Applications/Utilities/ dir) and stuff
your file. If it is not there (it may have been deleted) open up the Terminal
(/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app on a default install) and type:


tar -cf /YOURFILENAME.tar
/path/to/file/free/warez


Where YOURFILENAME is what you want the file to be called and /path/to/file/free/warez
is the path to your file (you can drag it to the terminal and it fills this
in for you).
Now to save a little space we are going to gzip that file.

gzip
/YOURFILENAME.tar

Step 6:
• Now we are going to FTP… back at the terminal type the following:

ftp
your.ip.address

shot 2 Apple Store security negated!
*Note
– I took this screen shot at home as to not get busted. The IP is my local
IP so don’t try anything.

  • Obviosly replace
    your.ip.address with that number you wrote down.
  • After a second
    or two depending on the traffic between your two computers a prompt for a
    username will appear. Type in your log-in for X. It will ask for a password,
    which you must provide.
  • It is a very
    good idea to make a dummy user on your system before you go to the store.
    Who knows what monitoring stuff they are running? Better safe than sorry!

Step 7:
• We are now logged in to your computer from the Apple Store. Now just
type:

put /YOURFILENAME.tar.gz

  • All you do now
    is hit enter and wait.
  • The best thing
    to do in this situation is to hide the window (option-click on the desktop)
    and get interested in iMovie or something. Depending on file size you can
    play around for a few seconds or minutes.
  • After it says
    you are done you have the file residing on your computer…

Step 8:
• Good kids always trash the evidence…

rm /YOURFILENAME.tar.gz


Exit out of all the applications you may have opened, step back and be proud
you have compromised Apple Computer
(not that anyone would want to, or anyone would follow these directions).

 

METHOD
2:
This is the method that I tried originally… Basically because I had all of
the code written for a website of mine before the Apple Store was even around.
It is harder to pull off unless you like to tweak code (if you do it is FUN!).
The major advantage is that it will work with a slow connection as long as you
have access to a web host with a fast one. It can be shared among friends without
having to dish out passwords to your computer which is also a major plus.


The basic concept is that you set up a website with an HTTP upload form and
it just sends the file to your server. I will give some links to some CGI’s
with potential but no directions for setting it up on X, if you need directions
the CGI’s come with them. If you are more of a novice on X, just use method
1 or find a friend.


I wrote some PHP code that
lists all files that you uploaded to a certain directory. PHP can be installed
on X, directions can be found here.
The can be used in tandem with an upload CGI to make a nice file transfer site
that you can pass around to friends. I even built in a delete function on mine
so that you can delete files from the web. Pretty sweet! I used this code in
my first attack. The code follows below sans the deleting option:

function do_files
($dir) {
//written by xmachackerx@hotmail.com use at will
$handle=@opendir(“/path/to/$dir”);

while (false
!== ($file = readdir($handle))) {


if ($file == “.DS_Store”) {
echo ” “;

} elseif
($file == “..”) {
echo ” “;

} elseif ($file == “.”) {
echo ” “;

} elseif ($file == “index.html”) {
echo ” “;

} else {
echo “ $file
“;
} }
closedir($handle);

} //close
function

?>

If you really need
the delete feature just email me.
I didn’t include it because unless you are adding session management to the
page it is really pointless, anyone can delete files (like the Apple Store employee
that walks to the computer and hits [delete] and your upload goes bye bye).
Have fun and remember to NOT STEAL SOFTWARE… IT IS ILLEGAL.

Please email any suggestions directly to me, I’ll try my best to get back to all of you. Thanks!

-Anonymous Coward

*Editors note: We’ve set up a discussion thread for you in the forums.

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Apr 27 2009

Superior Ad Blocking on OS X

I love surfing the web. I have DSL and I get pretty good download speeds (compared to 56K modems, insane download speeds). Even though I have a good connection, I still hate downloading obtrusive ads. You know those huge “skyscraper” ads, or those pesky Flash ads that seem to take forever to download? Even more annoying are the pop-up ads that show up on a surprising amount of sites considering everyone hates them with a passion (except evil marketing types). I’m about to show you how to block almost all of the aforementioned ads in ANY browser in OS X. If you don’t want to be bothered with pop-ups use a program or browser that disables them. My method only stops the ads from loading, not the window from popping. Chimera has a killer pop-up blocker installed by default (haven’t seen one so far).

Some people may say that it isn’t right to block ads… That’s how sites stay free. That’s true, and that’s exactly why I’m only giving directions to block the big boys that have no concern at all for your privacy (can we say doubleclick?). This will not block ads on MacMerc, MacMinute, MacUpdate or any other well run site. My goal by blocking ads is to speed up surfing. Only graphical ads are blocked… Text ads are let through. If you really like a site and you’re afraid that they will lose income when you block its ads, look around on that site and most likely there are other ways you can support it. Most webmasters would rather all their visitors gave $10 a year than have to run ads. I know MacMerc would icon razz Superior Ad Blocking on OS X . If you can’t find anything just email someone there and ask where you can send a donation. It will be appreciated.

The following is a list of the “Big Boys” in the adserving market that many sites use to outsource ads:

doubleclick.net

linkexchange.com

adsmart.net

admonitor.net

msn.com (not an outsource service but gobs of ads come out of ads.msn.com)

smartclicks.com

focalink.com

bravenet.com

bfast.com

sextracker.com (You’d be surprised)

hitbox.com

valueclick.com

fastclick.net

realmedia.com (these ads are hugely huge)

And there are several more. If you do a lot of “source hunting” you’ll soon notice that 90% of ads come from less than 100 locations.. Should be easy to block right? Well, in OS X it’s a piece of cake.

Open the terminal by going to /Applications/Utilities/ and opening Terminal. You may not have ever used the Terminal before but do not worry, this won’t be hard. Type:

sudo pico /private/etc/hosts

When prompted, enter in your administrator password (if you’re the only user of your computer, it’s just your regular password). When you type nothing will appear on screen (not even *’s). This is a security mechanism. When you finish your password just press enter. You’ll be taken to a screen that should look something like below:

pico1 Superior Ad Blocking on OS X

Pico is a simple text editor for Unix. It’s commands are a little funny for Mac users since it uses control instead of command, but it’s otherwise really easy to learn. The ^ key signifies control for any interested souls out there icon razz Superior Ad Blocking on OS X . What this file does is associate hosts. The first line means when a request for localhost comes in send it to 127.0.0.1 (almost the universal address for the local-computer). What we’re going to do is insert some well known ad servers into the right hand column, and send them to 127.0.0.1 in the left hand column. For extra points we’re going to set up a custom 404 error page to keep blocked ads looking pretty. Here is a list I compiled of the most popular/annoying ad servers along with the 127.0.0.1 forwarding address. Copy and paste this list into pico (select the text and press Control-C, in pico use the arrow keys to highlight an area below the last line with text on it and press command-v). Once you successfully copied the addresses press Control-o and hit enter once you see the message asking for a file name. Then hit Control-x. Keep the terminal open for the 404 message step (not a real message that shows in the Terminal, but you need to keep it open for the step that prevents nasty errors to be shown).

Now you need to turn on your personal web server. If you don’t, you’ll have to click through warning messages about every 2 seconds for most every page you visit. To do so just open up the System Preferences by going to the Apple Menu and choosing “System Prefrences…”. Once the preference pane opens, choose Sharing. In the sharing pane, check the persona web sharing box. The pane should look like this before you click the check box:

sysprefs Superior Ad Blocking on OS X

If you were to restart your computer now, and started browsing the web, you’d notice a lot fewer ads. But, you’d also notice really weird looking error messages. Here’s a picture I took of my browser at Tucows.com:

tucows Superior Ad Blocking on OS X

I think having the ads in place might look better… But the load times without them are much nicer. To fix this, we’re going to make a custom error message. All that text means is that the ads can’t be found on your computer… Of course they can’t… We’re trying to get rid of them! Get back in the Terminal and type:

sudo pico /etc/httpd/httpd.conf

You’ll be greeted with the now familiar Pico interface but now with a lot more text. No worries, this is a down and dirty task. Press Control-w and type (or paste):

ErrorDocument

Look for the following text:

# ErrorDocument 404 /missing.html

Move your cursor with the arrow keys until it’s one character to the right of the #. Hit delete. This “un-comments” the line. We’re telling Apache that when there is a missing page, use missing.html instead of the error message. If you run a web server (like I do) you can get more tricky and throw it to a script that dynamically decides if you’re trying to block an ad or if someone found a broken link on your web server (I’ll save that for part 2). To save this file hit control-o and then control-X. You can close the Terminal. Now just download this file and place it in /Library/Webserver/Documents/.

Go ahead and restart your computer. When you next start your web browser, head over to a large site like CNN or TuCows and notice the difference. I’d suggest using Chimera to get the best effect… no pop windows and no large sive ads. If you go back to TuCows you’ll see a nice ad free version like this:

tucows2 Superior Ad Blocking on OS X

If you find this saves you time, please consider supporting MacMerc by donating through PayPal below or by purchasing through our MacMerc.com Store. By offering you this tutorial we are effectively removing this site’s only source of income. We love every aspect of this site except the hosting bill.

Don’t forget to support the sites you like if you block their ads!

UPDATE (10/23/08 – 19:02 PT): Thanks to a MacMerc.com reader who submitted this tip to update this tutorial for Mac OS X 10.5:

Just wanted to let you guys know that I recently figured out how to get the Superior Ad Blocking walkthru to work in 10.5. Instead of editting the /private/etc/hosts file (which actually changes the correct one in 10.5) it’s easier to change the /etc/hosts as it will also apply to other users on the computer. Second the httpd.conf has moved from /etc/httpd/httpd.conf to /etc/apache2/httpd.conf. Just trying to help out! Cheers and Good Luck!

Our readers are the best!

–Rick

Superior Ad Blocking on OS X

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