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A little while back; Apple bucked the trend of most major record labels and started offering higher-bitrated, DRM-free music tracks (for a slightly larger fee than normal files). At the time, it was hailed and maligned as either a step in the right direction or a ploy to get more money, as the bitrate improvement was more of a relative bonus than objective. I came across a blog story posted in Ars Technica that indicates an interesting development: Customers purchasing the iTunes Plus music will have their name and email embedded into the song as what analysts are calling some sort of a watermark, as well as other unknown “goodies”. Uh-Oh…
In fact, it’s a little-known secret, but Apple has been embedding names and emails in all .AAC file versions for a while now, presumably for licensing or other reasons. While this isn’t exactly a huge deal compared to previous incarnations of file tracking, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) recently analyzed two identical songs downloaded on iTunes, in Plus format, on two different PCs and identified a significant difference in size between the two. One version contained 360Kbs more of data than its seemingly identical twin. The EFF admits to not being top notch experts on MPEG codecs, but they found inside structure what looks to be tables with similar indices, yet containing different sets of data. This could have to do with unique characteristics to a specific iTunes user account or, as EFF put it, information about an iTunes Library. iTunes Plus is still in it’s infant stages, so Apple reactions this early may not occur; however, if it’s your cup of coffee, you may want to hold out on sharing music with friends until the heavyweight technology labs analyze what kind of information Apple encoded into the new songs, if anything person is there at all. On the other side of the coin, those who aren’t sharing music probably have nothing to fear. Apple is always trying out new ways to predict what the consumer will want next, and taking a look at an iTunes library would be a good way to establish personal preferences. However, this story is still very early in development, so PaulTech will report on developments as they occur. Related Posts:Spiral Frog Free Online Music Spiral Frog will be launching in December and is promising to be an absolutely free music service. How will... Walmart Launches DRM Free Online Music Walmart has a penchant for crushing the competition. Let's see if they can do the same in the online music... PaulTech P.S.A.: iTunes Bitrate Heads-Up Welcome to the Saturday edition of PaulTech. To any big iTunes Store users out there, Apple revealed in a press... ITunes DRM Hack It seems that a collaboration between multiple programmers has produced a linux interface for Itunes that can download unprotected songs.... Cyber Liberty I wanted to get to something that has had me thinking for a while now...hence the title. I am... Comments1 Comment so far |
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cat and mouse. this one will go one forever.