Toolkit

Story: Linux 'needs DRM support' for consumer success

Posted by: Alexander E. Patrakov (Sunday 9 April 2006, 3:21 PM)

(Yes I know this post violates DMCA, please don't read further if you can't accept this. DMCA doesn't apply in my country)

Please understand that such thing as "trusted drivers" simply doesn't work if you are going to mark SoundBlaster drivers as trusted. Step-by-step guide for circumventing arbitrary type of audio DRM based on the concept of trusted drivers:

1) Download QEMU from http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/

2) Install any OS inside QEMU, including the sound driver (this is the same driver as for the real SB PCI hardware, so non-marking this as "trusted" will result in lawsuits from Creative Labs)

3) Install the DRMed player inside QEMU

4) Reboot QEMU, tell it to use ALSA for sound output, tell ALSA to mirror the sound stream to a wav file. Alternatively, tell QEMU to write the wav file iteslf.

5) Play the DRMed audio inside QEMU. The DRM software will have to trust the driver, because it has no way to determine that it is not a real SB PCI. However, QEMU will dump the raw audio stream to a wav file that has absolutely no sign of DRM.