Day: October 4, 2005

CDEX Can Defeat Copy Protected CDs?

Billboard has a story about the increasing prevalence of copy protected music CDs. Typically these CDs are designed so they won’t play in — and therefore cannot be ripped by — computers. Most come with a second layer containing DRMed Windows Media files of the music.

There’s a very odd claim by Billboard buried in the article, however,

Columbia Records act Switchfoot, whose latest album, “Nothing Is Sound,” is copy-protected — and debuted at No. 3 on The Billboard 200 last week — recently took copy-protection defiance one step further. Band guitarist Tim Foreman posted on a Sony Music-hosted fan site a link to the software program CDEX, which disables the technology. The post has since been removed.

Umm, CDEX is an open-source CD ripping software that is hasn’t been updated in more than two years. The last release of the software is from September 9, 2003.

If Sony’s copy protection can be defeated by CDEX, they might as well not have any copy protection at all.

Source:

Musicians tell how to beat system. Billboard, October 4, 2005.

Rollyo.Com Is A Beautiful Thing

In another lifetime — i.e. a few years ago — I used to run a small search engine. Rather than try to index every possible site in the world, this search engine used some pretty basic technology to index the then-handful of web sites on the Internet opposed to the animal rights agenda. It was fairly rudimentary, but it was also very cool just to search this particular slice of the web that was relevant to me and others following the animal rights movement.

I’ve always had a goal in the back of my head of bringing that back someday, but Rollyo.Com has created something much better — an easy-to-use system to create a front end to Yahoo!’s search engine to search a limited number of sites.

For example, here’s an anti-animal rights search engine front-end that I created using Rollyo. Search on any term there, and the results come back only from the 7 or 8 anti-AR sites I’ve added. The user can currently add up to 25 sites.

This is extremely useful and I’m surprised its taken so long for such an application to emerge. And as much as I like Rollyo.Com, I’m hoping that Google comes up with something like it as I find their results more useful than Yahoo!’s.

Rollyo.Com is currently in beta and some of the functionality isn’t complete — what I’d really like to be able to do is throw a search box on my web site that searches the entities I’ve created, but that’s still a “coming soon” feature.

Still, even in its infancy this is an awesome tool.