Squirt Me Again! Zune "3-Play" DRM Cracked

All of us here at the Castle just love Squirting! We'll squirt each other all day long, in fact. I sometimes think that my Squirting at Den Den and Tiny is the only thing that will pull them away from their Macs and Leopard. I'll Squirt a song at them, and they'll lap it up in all it's glory... but only three times. After that, it's all gone. Then we shower up and start the Squirting ritual all over again!

Well, now we can squirt each other indefinitely! Some smart hackers have found a way to cheat the "3 play" rule for Zune music sharing, allowing Zune users to send songs to each other for keeps!

For those unfamiliar, the original incarnation of Microsoft's Zune had a highly publicized, and subsequently highly criticized, feature called Squirting. When you Squirt someone, you send them a song wirelessly from one Zune to another, allowing you to share new music and artists with friends. Unfortunately, the song would be deleted after three plays or three days, after, of course, you were given the opportunity to purchase the song from the Zune store (nevermind the fact that the feature was of the highest appeal to indie artists that most likely were not available on the Zune store).

For the most recent firmware update, Microsoft eliminated the three day part of the rule, but kept in place the three play piece. It was a bit of give and take with the community. You can hang onto the songs for as long as you like, but after three plays, the song is gone or you need to buy it.

But that rule never applied to Podcasts, as you can't really buy those. So some entrepreneurial hackers went into properties of their songs in their PCs, changed the genre of all their songs from Rock or Pop or whatever to Podcast, and viola! Once changed, they can share songs without any limitations. What's more, you can backward sync the shared songs to your PC and change the genre back (but really, that's only important to people that search for their music by genre, and who does that?).

This seems to be a glaring oversight on Microsoft's part, and I'm sure that a patch will be out post haste to "fix" this bug. For anyone excited by this, I would advise against updating your firmware anytime soon. Now, it seems, there is a really good reason to make the switch to the Zune!

Zune Podcast Trick [Zunescene]
[via: Gizmodo]