Another reason why i’ll use anything NOT Apple..
Then you are not understanding this case. . . and what the engineer actually testified to. Read the article entirely. He was closing vulnerabilities in the OS and iTunes. It was the way the questions were asked by the Attorney Plaintiffs and the misleading headline that results in people thinking his assignment was solely to block competition.
The part of Apple's integration that under scrutiny are two security measures that were rolled out a year apart in iTunes and Apple's iPod software. One verifies the iTunes library, whereas the other verifies what's known as the keybag on iPod - basically a set of digital keys to unlock songs that have DRM. Once activated, these security measures did a number of things, from keeping iPods from playing songs that had DRM that had been tampered with, to keeping third-parties from changing the database of songs with jukebox software apps. . .What actually was going on was that RealNetwork had HACKED into iTunes and the iPod and inserted their own DRM (red tampering with the DRM) and inserted their own "jukebox app" into the iPod software. This was actually an illegal act under the Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, but whose looking. Apple made major changes to iTunes including new abilities."i was told that third-party players were corrupting [Apple's] database, so I was told to authenticate the third-party player and keep them from syncing," Schultz said. That became a feature in iTunes, and later right on the iPod, though Schultz - who left the company in 2008 to go build DRM technology for Adobe - said he hadn't worked on the version that went onto the iPod."
The Attorney Plaintiffs (order intentional) are focussing on iTunes 7.0 and 7.4, both of which ushered in major functionality increases. Cover-flow, iPod games, gapless playback, and ALBUMS were added to the abilities with iTunes 7.0 on September 12, 2006 and all of those increased abilities overwrote any RealNetwork's Codec installed and the vulnerability that may have existed in iTunes 6.x. Then here's a biggie. On September 7, 2007, Apple updated iTunes 7.4 for the iPod TOUCH. . . the most major upgrade since the iPod was originally released. . . introducing support for a TOUCH SCREEN interface!
When these updates were installed, the RealNetwork's hacks were overwritten by the new software Apple had created for their products. The Real "song title".ra files with their proprietary Harmony DRM would no longer play because the hacked codec was no longer present nor was the hacked "jukebox" software that HAD NO BUSINESS to be on the iPod in the first place.
The vulnerability that allowed RealNetwork's hackers to get in and insert their hacked codec and jukebox software could also have been used by malicious hackers to install DRM breakers, which under Apple's contracts with the music companies would have resulted in the publishers PULLING all of the iTunes store's music if Apple had NOT closed those vulnerabilities. It was required by their contract that they close the vulnerabilities in a specified number of days.
By contrast, Sony MP3 players are acoustically far superior to the iPod, and they accept any format that can be converted to an MP3 file, which is basically anything, but they lack the storage capacity of an IPod. Other MP3 players I've used in the past, some of which do store amounts comparable to an iPod, like the Zune, do not have the file organization qualities nor the sound quality of the IPod or the Sony devices.