Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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It seems that Paul Thurrott is astonished that Apple would apply DRM to purchased music on the client (iTunes) rather than the server. Seems like a really bad design decision and a good way to open the door for two programmers to crack it.
The statement from their blog is precious:
"Our intent was not to circumvent copy protection, and if Apple did DRM on the server, we would leave it in place! But applying DRM in an opensource project is not worth the time it would take to code it."
If memory serves me right, when Apple first released Software Auto Update back with Mac OS X they did not cryptographically sign their updates, which of course opened them up for a man in the middle attack delivering malicious code to their customers. Nor did they use any form of HTTP authentication or certificate validation when downloading updates. I remember this because when we developed our software update for Microsoft Office X I was sort of astonished that they did not code sign their updates or use https. Well it was a matter of time before they had to fix it.
I guess hindsight is 20/20 (that goes for everyone). But personally I'm not surprised.