Microsoft fixes potential antipiracy hole
Microsoft said Tuesday that Japanese hackers had discovered a potential weakness in its copy protection technology but that the software company fixed the flaw before it was widely used.
The Redmond, Wash., giant on Tuesday introduced an update to its Windows Media Player, which included changes aimed at blocking the Japanese hackers' work, as well as a security update. The copy protection changes mark the first time in nearly four years that Microsoft's digital rights management (DRM) protections have been publicly broken, even if largely in theory. As in an earlier case, the company says it was able to update its software before the flaws advanced much beyond the theoretical stage.
"No DRM is perfect," said David Caulton, group product manager in the Windows Media division. "This is another example of somebody finding a way around the technology that we didn't think about. We hear about it, and we effectively get a fix out to users before there's a widely distributed tool for removing digital rights management from files."
