Hidden stuff in your new music from iTunes

Music

Phillip Torrone

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iTunes hacker Erica shows you what’s hidden inside those new un-DRM’ed music files from Apple, open one of the songs via terminal and you’ll see some of your account information inside the file – Link – it seems like these have always been in there (part of the ID3 tags).

14 thoughts on “Hidden stuff in your new music from iTunes”

cyenobite says:

June 1st, 2007 at 11:23 am

I read about this on boingboing and on techdirt. At first I was angry at apple for including personal info (such as email address) into the files, then I read some interesting comments on techdirt that apple has always done this, and that actually it’s a good non-invasive way to prevent people from “sharing” music via p2p. I have to agree. Curious of other maker’s thoughts on this…
(yes, I know the id’s can be stripped easily).

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japroach says:

June 1st, 2007 at 11:41 am

How is it a good way to prevent p2p, when they dont tell you that they do this?

Chances are, the majority of people run a p2p app which automatically scans + shares their music files. It is unlikely they will ever even hear of this story.

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samurai1200 says:

June 1st, 2007 at 3:04 pm

right. its not a good way to prevent sharing, but its a good way to catch those who have…

screw apple.

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cowboyonahorse says:

June 1st, 2007 at 4:32 pm

Years I’ve been saying I don’t trust Apple (or Microsoft…basically any company that cozys up to the music recording industry). And now I have proof, thank you very much.

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paulbeard@gmail.com says:

June 1st, 2007 at 5:42 pm
What’s interesting is that the free single of the week is being released as DRM-free. But yes, the account holder name has been encoded in “protected” mp4 files before.
```
white:~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/U2/Under a Blood Red Sky paul$ strings 05 Sunday Bloody Sunday (Live 1983).m4p | grep name
namePaul Beard
name
name
```
Will it prevent file-sharing? I doubt it. Will it make file-sharers easy to track down? Maybe.

As far as iTunes 7.2 preventing you from creating anonymous mp3s from iTunes Plus files, that seems not to be true, unless I am missing something.
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tms10000 says:

June 2nd, 2007 at 1:20 am

So it was always there, but before you could not see it because it was “encrypted” with your personal DRM key.

Now DRM free files have it in the clear.

Should not it be easy to wipe the info out?

Why would you pay $1.29 per track in the first place?

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cheesy says:

June 3rd, 2007 at 4:25 pm

I give it a week before someone releases a tool to strip this info.

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