Remember awhile back when I talked about the new copy protection scheme from the folks at SunnComm Technologies? The one that included the tracks on the CD in Windows Media Player 9 format so that you could still listen to your CD on your MP3 player without having to rip the tracks? Well it turns out you can defeat this protection by simply holding down he shift key when loading the CD into your CD-ROM drive.
Seems the protection is dependent on the AutoRun feature of Windows being active on the PC in question and you can temporarily stop AutoRun by holding down the shift key when putting the CD in the drive. You can also (as many people do) turn off AutoRun completely thus negating the copy protection altogether.
Oops.
The folks at SunnComm still think this will stop “casual pirates” which, if you ask me, isn’t too bright a line of reasoning considering that this isn’t actually a difficult thing for a casual user to figure out how to do. Perhaps if they can convince Microsoft to remove the ability to disable AutoRun it’ll be effective in the future, but it’s a pretty major weakness as it stands now.
Posted on 10/08/2003 at 05:26 PM 
Posted on 03/03/2004 at 11:06 PM 
Ha,ha,ha… How lame is that protection? If I were one that copies cd’s (which I’m not), I would have never even noticed the protection. Auto-Run is the first thing I turn off.