PANDA chomps through Spotify's DRM

Not THAT Panda!

[tangor]

Music can be ripped from Spotify using a tool that cracks digital rights management copyright protection, a Georgia Tech University researcher says.

Code dubbed Platform for Architecture-Neutral Dynamic Analysis - aka PANDA - posted to GitHub does the job, says researcher Brendan Doln-Gavitt.

"[The technique] by itself is just the starting point for what you would need to really break Spotify's DRM," Dolan-Gavitt (@Moyix) said, noting that he does not condone content piracy.

[theregister.co.uk...]

Close one door, somebody will figure a way in...

Query: Does Google have a trademark on "PANDA"?

[graeme_p]

DRM is intrinsically broken - you give someone a key and try to stop them unlocking the door.

That said, the real purpose of DRM is to lock-consumers and manufacturers in to distributors (like Amazon with ebooks) and content producers.

[thecoalman]

I remember when blu-ray came out, uncrackable they said. They invested about 1 billion developing it, one slip up from a single software vendor and it was toast in a few months. Could you imagine the conversation in that boardroom shortly afterward?


I'm not going to say they will never be successful in protecting content but when you have the weight of millions of people on the internet as smart or smarter than your engineers that's one tall order.

[lucy24]

Does Google have a trademark on "PANDA"?

Doesn't fit the definition of a trademark: it has to be used in commerce. Patent, yes. Trademark, no. They do appear to have 577 other trademarks [tmsearch.uspto.gov] (counting the non-verbal ones), but "panda" + google comes up cold.

[lawman]

WW used to call the names of the updates and whatever name we called stuck. Don't know who comes up with the names now.

[Samizdata]

Don't know who comes up with the names now.

In a 2011 interview with Wired, Amit Singhal from Google said:

"Well, we named it internally after an engineer, and his name is Panda. So internally we called a big Panda. He was one of the key guys. He basically came up with the breakthrough a few months back that made it possible."

This is believed to be a reference to Navneet Panda, a software engineer.

Presumably a Mr/Mrs/Miss Penguin also works at the 'plex.

...

[tangor]

So does Al(fred) van Gogh, but usually appears as "algo" in commentary.