Pop-up ads that pop through the pop-up blocker! That song you paid for but can't stream to the living room stereo! The DVDs you bought in Paris that won't play here! At times it seems technology's favorite theme is that Beatles oldie legally unavailable online: "You Can't Do That."
But with the right stuff (some of dubious legality), users bent on defeating annoyances like these may be able to sing the Sammy Davis Jr. anthem "Yes I Can" -- at least until somebody notices.
Thus begins a back-and-forth escalation like Mad magazine's "Spy vs. Spy" epics, where the good guys and the bad are hard to tell apart. Black hat or white? Are you trying to break somebody's copy protection or merely keep some creep from sending you spyware?
Blame the do-anything flexibility of the personal computer for this unending war of measure and countermeasure. In its early years, when duplicating software was a matter of shoving a floppy disk into drive A and copying its contents to a disk in drive B, vendors came up with various clever stratagems to prevent piracy.
In doing so they created immense headaches for legitimate users backing up their software. In the end, after copy-protection became a negative selling point for software, few products kept it.
Fast-forward to the age of the Internet and new rounds of piracy and antipiracy schemes. Microsoft in 2000 introduces an online "activation" scheme for products like Windows XP and Office: Without it the software won't run. Hacks quickly turn up; Microsoft develops techniques to circumvent them.
The latest wrinkle: Along with the usual critical security fixes, Microsoft's Automatic Update delivers a piece of software with the Orwellian title "Microsoft Genuine Advantage Notifications."
The software checks to make sure your copy of Windows XP is legitimate. If not, you can be locked out of some of the company's download sites but not, so far, out of the critical security updates. The problem? It can sometimes report your machine as unclean when it's not.
If you're careful, you can avoid installing the new tool, but you may have to repeatedly refuse it. Brace yourself. Microsoft is building an even more draconian version of the tool into the forthcoming Windows Vista operating system.
You have to feel sorry for the ailing music industry, whose unprotected compact disc format is all too easily pirated. Thanks to fast CD drives in PCs, the discs can be copied quickly, with perfect accuracy, or converted into compact files perfect for portable devices. Result: lots of copied CDs and lots of MP3 files perfect for online "sharing."
Copyright owners retaliated in ways that were either ineffective or extremely annoying to legitimate consumers. Witness Sony's humiliating experience in 2005 with software that installed a pernicious "rootkit" on customers' hard drives.
The swift result: a recall and a class suit that offered infected users a new unprotected disc, album downloads and cash.
Yet despite the nearly complete failure of copy protection in music CDs, digital music you buy online generally comes with restrictions on what you can do with it. Songs bought from Apple's iTunes Store typically can play on a maximum of five computers at once.
That's hardly an onerous restriction, but if you want to play them on non-Apple portables or Linux PCs, the only kosher method is to burn a CD of the music, then rip a new version from that -- with a loss of track information and audio quality.
Let the spy wars begin! Software called Hymn arrives to strip the restrictions from Apple's music files; Apple revises iTunes to shut out Hymn. A variant called jHymn appears; Apple eventually counters it. In recent weeks a program called QTFairUse6 (running, amusingly, only on Windows machines) could perform the crack. The latest version of iTunes disabled that, too, until the developer upgraded it.
A similar story is playing out in the world of Windows Media, used for both audio and video files. WM's copy-protection scheme was hacked long ago, then quickly reclaimed. Last month an arrival called Fairuse4WM was able to put many copy-protected Windows Media files in the clear.
Microsoft fought back on two fronts. It produced defensive changes to Windows Media that Windows-allied vendors such as Napster could use. Microsoft also filed a John Doe lawsuit against the pseudonymous developer who goes by the name of "Viodentia" and sent cease-and-desist letters to the providers who hosted his code. A few days later a new hack was up on the Web.
This may be a big deal to vendors and copyright holders, but for normal consumers keeping up with which spy is on top is more trouble than it's worth. If the copy protectors get in your way, there's a simple solution: Buy unprotected music on CD or from sources like Magnatune and eMusic that supply songs in open formats like MP3.
DVDs were supposed to be a different story. The movie industry enforced an encryption system designed to protect its crown jewels from pilferers of intellectual property. But it went beyond copy protection into a market-segmenting scheme.
Hollywood sometimes wants to release a DVD in Europe or Asia at a different time or price from the release in the U.S. To keep viewers from straying across national boundaries, the movie studios invented region coding. With help from manufacturers of DVD players, the studios often make one disc that works only on players commonly available in the U.S. and Canada, another mostly for Europe and others for additional venues.
But wait. You're no thief. You've paid 20 euros or whatever for your movie, perhaps because it's a film not yet distributed in the U.S. or available here only in an irksome dubbed version. Why should you be prevented from watching it?
A solution evolved. Some DVD players could be hacked to make their electronics region-free. Today you can find universal players in venues as common as Amazon.com for less than $70. But inevitably, some determined watchers of obscure foreign art-house films will avail themselves of a different countermeasure: Copy the blocked disc onto a blank DVD, stripping out the region coding in the process.
Copying, of course, was supposed to be impossible, thanks to something called the Content Scramble System. But the hackers quickly figured it out, and an outfit called 321 Studios commercialized their mole work. Its DVD X Copy made it easy to copy protected DVDs to recordable discs -- and the product was quickly killed in a legal victory by the Motion Picture Association of America.
But numerous variants remain freely available on the Web. After a brief search I was able to download a free suite of programs that remove a DVD's encryption, shrink it to fit on a single-layer disc and burn it onto a blank DVD.
There's plenty of software that can copy DVD content to iPods or PlayStation Portables. And, yes, in the process (unless you specify otherwise) region coding is usually removed. So is the software that keeps you from skipping past the antipiracy messages and, sometimes, movie previews. A caution here: There's no honor among thieves. The copying software may be larded with spyware. You take your chances.
The entertainment industry has high hopes for its new high-definition discs, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Both have elaborate new antipiracy schemes; Blu-Ray, but not yet HD-DVD, has region-coding. About the only sop to users is a not-yet-approved idea called "managed copy," which would let content be copied to home servers. The black and the white hats are girding for battle once again.
Annoying advertisements are another nuisance that users willingly avoid, as a phalanx of TiVo fans can testify. But few DVR devices come with the handy 30-second forward-skip button pioneered by ReplayTV.
Fortunately, devotees quickly figured out how to program a key on the remote to do the job, a process that can take 30 seconds once you find the instructions on the Web. Just Google "30 second skip" and your DVR's model number.
For Web ads, pop-up blockers built into browsers or added as plug-ins have ratcheted down the irritation factor first launched into mass consciousness by X10's intrusive campaign. But there are still plenty of annoying ads out there, including my personal peeve, the ones that play audio while you're trying to get some work done.
If you're truly ad-phobic, there are ways to decrease the Web volume. Security suites like Norton Internet Security include optional ad-blocking features. Antispyware software like Spybot Search & Destroy lets you use a "hosts file" that effectively prevents communication with some of the most egregious ad sites, particularly those that use tracking techniques to see where you've been.
The result in both cases: Instead of an ad, you'll simply see a blank hole on the page. But this can occasionally cause problems when, say, entering a site requires you to click through a "gateway" ad served by a blocked site.
If that's not strict enough for you, a program called NoScript can block the kinds of "script" software that do things like run animated gerbils across the page before you can read it. It works as an extension for the Firefox browser, but it's a bit geeky to use.
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