Ruckus
From JhuWiki
Ruckus was a free ad-supported online music service available to students at all American colleges. The services of Ruckus are no longer available.
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[edit] Free music for college students
Ruckus announced that access to their music library, which was previously available only at schools with contractual agreements, can be accessed by any college student with a valid college (.edu) email account.
[edit] Hopkins and Ruckus?
It's rumored that Hopkins is considering getting a Ruckus server deployed on campus, which would mean that all Hopkins students would enjoy wicked fast downloads from the Ruckus network.
- There's technically a Ruckus server in the basement of Garland, and it theoretically even works - Ruckus just doesn't list it when the clients ask about servers to get things from. Ruckus stopped answering JHU's calls about fixing it, though, which is kinda lame...
- Even better, Ruckus is now dead, so the server is too!
[edit] Ruckus DRM
[edit] Microsoft PlaysForSure
The Ruckus music files are copy protected, which prevents them from being used with some of the most popular portable music devices such as the iPod and others. Ruckus works only with Microsoft PlaysForSure, a program with an uncertain long-term future following the release of Microsoft's new flagship Zune format, which is incompatible with PlaysForSure.
[edit] Removal Tools
Tools have been created to strip files of Windows Media DRM, such as FairUse4WM, a program released on August 19, 2006 written by Viodentia. This particular tool has the ability to strip DRM from files protected with WMDRM version 10 and 11. However, on August 28, 2006 Microsoft released a new version of the individualized blackbox component (IBX) to prevent FairUse4WM from working. Within 3 days, a new version of FairUse4WM was released circumventing this fix. Microsoft informed partners that they are working to fix this issue again and issued notices to web site owners. They soon followed up by filing lawsuits. As of October 16th, distributors using the Windows Media DRM protection such as Sky Anytime, are up and running using a patched codec. On April 6, 2007 Microsoft dropped the charges against Viodentia as they were unable to find him to serve him with court papers. On July 13, a new version of the tool, 1.3fix-2, was released by a user calling himself "Divine Tao" (an anagram of Viodentia.) The tool now supports Windows Vista as well as DRM removal from songs downloaded from the Zune Marketplace in addition to supporting the most recent version of the IBX components.
The latest version of FairUse4WM can be found on BitTorrent cataloging websites.
