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AirPort Express Reportedly Cracked
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I find this whole thread rather funny.....
First of all... this hack doesnt mean much....
And noone is going to be able to steal your music...
And even if they could capture the music being sent over a Aex... it isnt like they wouid be stealing it from you... i.e. you would still have it.
Second why would anyone(Apple included) care whether or not some other program could send music to the Aex.... I keep hearing people say they would like it because it would give them options...
Like what option.... iTunes is free already so why not just use it anyway instead of some other program
Second who really uses an Aex anyway...
I for one wouldnt... It seems like the silliest product to come out of Apple in years
I would prefer to use my 201 cd changer to play my music thru my stereo than to try to send it out of my computer.... And yes my stereo can do playlists too
First of all... this hack doesnt mean much....
And noone is going to be able to steal your music...
And even if they could capture the music being sent over a Aex... it isnt like they wouid be stealing it from you... i.e. you would still have it.
Second why would anyone(Apple included) care whether or not some other program could send music to the Aex.... I keep hearing people say they would like it because it would give them options...
Like what option.... iTunes is free already so why not just use it anyway instead of some other program
Second who really uses an Aex anyway...
I for one wouldnt... It seems like the silliest product to come out of Apple in years
I would prefer to use my 201 cd changer to play my music thru my stereo than to try to send it out of my computer.... And yes my stereo can do playlists too
KevanDual2.5 said:
depends on your definition of "random". if done wholly in software then i would agree with you that the "random" generator could be compromised. software is composed of algorithms; algorithms produce some output for a given input. that is to say there is a perfect knowledge of how a produces b on so on.
now i think your argument becomes murky with respect to hardware random generators. i mean technically you could figure out some way to reverse-engineer the chip that generates the random number, but the critical flaw is you can't "feed" the input for the hardware random number generator like you can with the software generators. maybe your input is the temperature of some chip, some voltage fluctuations or, to put it simply, some localized environmental condition that you can't control. this changes the whole ball game.
there have been online casinos that have been hacked because their random generators were done in software. idiots. but if you go down to vegas you can be guaranteed all "randomness" is done in hardware; keeping the algorithm a secret doesn't buy you anything. controlling the inputs does.
jaromSki
Your analogy is invalid. Try this one: Starbucks is in the business of selling coffee machines, you buy one of their coffee machines, and now Starbucks is telling you what type of coffee you're supposed to be using.Porchland said:
When I buy a product, I don't buy into anyone's vision except my own. I bought the product, and now it's mine to do with as *I* please.
amnesiac1984 said:no, not infeasible but unfeasible.
Infeasible and unfeasible essentially mean the exact same things actually, with "infeasible" being the more widely adopted and accepted term. So
back at ya... 
SandyL said:
I happen to really enjoy Starbucks coffee. So I purchased a Hot Press from them that brews Starbucks.
When it comes to the Airport Express, I will be using as designed. Don't have the technical expertise like others to make changes.
My wife wants one mainly so that she will get better reception for her 15" PB on the 1st floor.
I have two Airports one old one and the new Airport Extreme that I never use... Because I bought a Dlink that gets much better reception in my house...
Macrumors said:
<yawn..>
Boring! Wake me up when they crack the Private Key. I'm sure Apple has opted for at least 128bit encryption...which would take so much CPU power to crack that I don't think there's enough interest.
Futhermore, "cracked" is the wrong word. Most likely he dumped the contents of AE's ROM or firmware, dissassembled it, spent a few days analyzing the source to figure out where the public key was stored, then copied it straight out of memory. This is closer to reverse engineering or hacking than it is to cracking.
This like saying, "I cracked Steve Jobs email account because I found his public key!!" Come on--its probably listed on Apple's LDAP server! The whole point of a public key is that its generally made public.
~Shard~ said:Infeasible and unfeasible essentially mean the exact same things actually, with "infeasible" being the more widely adopted and accepted term. So
i have to say i stand corrected but I have never heard the word INfeasible used and it still sounds really stupid to me. maybe it's an Americanisation? And the fact is my UK dictionary on my OS X spell checker doesn't have infeasible in it.
edit, i guess we are both right
If he could extract the public key from firmware, then I'm sure he would've pulled the private key out as well. I don't know how he got the public key, but I would suspect that he took an audio file that was already encoded in Apple Lossless and then looked at the stream to figure out how it had been altered by encryption.savar said:
macsrus said:
I would use one if I had that kind of money to spend on those sort of things.
You'd need a 2001 cd changer to get as much music as I have on my mac, and besides it takes ages to make a playlist on one of those things, not quite drag and drop.
Sound quality is the only upside to a CD changer, but they tend to lack even that compared to a decent single disc player.
wdlove said:
I dont understand his comment. From personal experience, Linksys products are the worst possible router, netGear are much better. Almost look like a troll to me, after all why hasnt he sold the two routers on ebay? They are easy to sell and fetch a good amount of cash.
Anyways, Apple wireless routers are not the best for range (they are average) but they are the first for setup, maintenance and security setup. They are super reliable (my linksys dropped me serveral times) and dont interfere with applications (try MSN video chat with a old linksys and I would understand).
From the comment I have seen, it seems that the Airport Express is a very good product with a good range but be warned that you need OSX 10.3 to use it.
As you can see, I dont like the linksys offering. I would ratter go for Apple if you want the simplicity of setup and audio out, or with netGear who have the best range the last time I looked.
Mantat said:
Thank you for your timely comment Mantat. Your post makes a lot of sense to me. We are running OSX 10.3.5, so no problem there. Our current 2Wire doesn't work too well on the first floor. So she wants to purchase a Airport Express to alleviate the problem. Either way we should be all set. My thought has always been that an all Apple setup always works together more efficiently.
I'd also recommend against linksys. ****e reception and constant problems. I'm on my second one after managing to return the first but this one has started exhibiting the same problems (randomly unable to connect for a day or so; or power light begins flashing for no reason, necessitating a hard reset and rom flash, etc...)
Mantat said:
I cant sell the other 2 because they were bought with Federal dollars and belong to Uncle SAM....
And I was just stating a fact that my DLINK(not linksys) router has much better range and works much better for me than either of the 2 Airports I mentioned earlier.
Sorry if this was already mentioned, but I read through the thread and didn't see it.
You wouldn't want to use Airport Express for anything but music. Someone mentioned DVD's and someone else mentioned Halo, there's a delay of a second or 1/2 a second, games would suck and DVD's would look like they were dubbed from another language.
You wouldn't want to use Airport Express for anything but music. Someone mentioned DVD's and someone else mentioned Halo, there's a delay of a second or 1/2 a second, games would suck and DVD's would look like they were dubbed from another language.
weldon said:
He got almost certainly got the public key from iTunes. With his previous experience hacking iTunes he probably had quite a head-start figuring out where to look.
If finding a key was as simple as being able to compare the original with the encrypted version, encryption would be useless... (yes, I know that's how they did it in World War II, but the math has changed _a lot_ since then).
lou tsee said:I'm afraid, you won't be able to do so. streaming audio in this way
causes a latency (delay) of around 1 second. so your movie soundtrack
will be out of sync badly
I had the same idea i the first place though....
I'm really late to this conversation but I've been thinking of this and have noticed that with my AirportExpress/iTunes combo the song pointer in iTunes is correct with the stream. In other words, Apple has added the delay to the interface as well. If that is possible, they might be able to delay DVD video reading, since the tracks aren't merged on DVDs. In other, other words, I believe it's possible.
BTW, what got me thinking about this was the fact that Synergy showed the album floaters about three seconds before the previous song stopped (That and wondering if they rigged iTunes as they did
). I have it set to check with iTunes every three seconds so that's probably about a 1 second or so delay, as you stated.
natant said:
i couldn't get nicecast to load properly...
as for the lag, does it matter how far you are from the base station (are you running on b or g?). i hope apple can at least add the DVD player and quicktime (iChat?).
guess we'll see.
peace.