In brief: Dell today rolled out the , available online, is DVD extractor for Mac OS X that removes CSS encryption, Macrovision protection, sets the disc's region code to '0' for region-free by default, and is capable of removing RCE region protection as well. [updated]
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BOOOOOOOOOOO! to Macrovision for threatening MacTheRipper.
ITS BACK!!!!!! but its site is different now.
One of the big problems for people who move country is that the DVD's you purchased where you used to live no longer work in off the shelf DVD players in your new home. This either forces to pay twice or use software like this to extract your movies and reburn them. I would gladly stop doing this is the movie studios would make a system where I could send them my old DVD's and they would send me new ones with the right region code or just stop using this crazy system all together. Like all copy protection schemes, it only hurts honest users. Dishonest ones will use a product like this, remove the encryption, reburn the discs and sell the pirate copies anyway.
If anything regions and the other forms of encryption on DVDs promote rather than inhibit piracy.
According to the product blurb "DJ Ditty delivers high-quality, hard-drive based audio".
It's information *economy* - not *information* economy. Too many people put the emphasis on 'information' and not on 'economy.'
If you put the emphasis on 'information', you get the vaguely Renaissance notion that information would tend to spread and disperse itself like a bad smell - because, as they say, 'information wants to be free.' In other words, information has a natural tendency to travel - like gossip. This idea suggests that if you can make all information available everywhere to everyone, the interconnectedness of knowledge will result in great leaps forward in human technology and culture.
However, if you put the emphasis on 'economy,' you'll find that in fact, information wants to be tightly restricted and controlled. You can't have an economy of information, unless you give information the status of real estate. Fixing chunks of information into measurable plots is a prerequisite to economy. Thus, we do not want information to be free, we want to locked down. We need to cage it, like a circus freak and sell tickets to the spectacle. We need to stop it's flow. If it is to move at all, it should be in short regular bursts from distributor to consumer - but that's it! By the time it reaches the consumer, it should be fixed in concrete, un-malleable, static, and ultimately disposable.
Products like MacTheRipper disrupt the natural, god-given hierarchy of information distribution and consumption and jeopardize our ideal of an information economy. Good riddance. The sooner consumers are prevented from manipulating or distributing information, the quicker we can get this economy on the road. (Granted, this entire information economy rests on the specious assumption that digital data can be 'locked down' but hey, there's an entire economy of perpetual royalties at stake.)
Haha!! That last post was hilarious! Um, it was meant to be funny right MuppetFloss?
If anyone is able to track the actual number of mac users who also have Netflix accounts... if indeed MacTheRipper were to be gone for good, watch a good chunk of those Netflix accounts to go inactive hehe.
I myself do not really care to dupe movies... I just re-que a movie I want to see and it comes in a week or less from Netflix. That is why Netflix is cool, we do not need to buy every movie we want to have.
MuppetFloss's post absolutely frightens me as that is the exact take some people have on information. It should be free. I should not know more or less than anyone else around me, that's been my lifelong belief. That's why I charge next to nothing if I do outside consultation. It appauls me what my salary is, and that I am just barely comfortable living as a single man with it... our society has overgrown itself in consumerism and freeing information is the first step to ridding ourselves of status by money. I agree with the above poster: If I buy 500 DVDs in the USA I'd best be able to play them in Canada or Mexico on a stand alone unit, and since I can't... I bring a DVD player with me, or rip and reburn (losing quality). I should not have to replace my media because my company moved me across the globe.
"Go ahead, flick my Bick...um, I mean, my DJ Ditty."
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Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Sep 2001
mac the ripper
gone, but not forgotten, nor i suspect really gone. much like its namesake i suspect that countless others will spring up to fill the gap. this is a losing battle for the RI/MPAA et. al. until quantum cryptography becomes a viable solution. hopefully by then the antiquated nature of content creation and delivery will have broken off the shackles of centralized, money grubbing execs. there are certainly signs that this is beginning to take place.
as a side note to the morons at the MP/RIAA and friends. i am one of your best customers, i have hundreds upon hundreds of CDs, DVDs and even laser discs. i want to be able to use the media as i see fit. i don't want to make thousands of copies and sell them on the streets of moscow. i don't want to edit pieces of them together for use in my own work. i simply want to store and watch the material i purchased in the manner of my choosing. try harder to stop me, make the process so difficult that i have little choice but to resort to pirated versions - then you'll not get one red cent from me.