[LINK] AFR's naughty DRM

[Antony Barry]

Begin forwarded message:
>
> The attached message has been automatically discarded.
> From: Eric Scheid <eric at ironclad.com.au>
> Date: 6 February 2008 10:38:05 AM
> To: LINK <link at anu.edu.au>
> Subject: AFR's naughty DRM
>
>
> Laurel Papworth has blogged an encounter with AFR's text DRM:
> <http://silkcharm.blogspot.com/2008/02/australian-financial-review- 
> and-archa
> ic.html>
>
> You might notice that the AFR story is presented in a monotype  
> font, which
> looks a bit odd .. but is the basis for the DRM hack involved. All  
> they are
> doing is presenting every second character followed by a space, and  
> then
> slipping another html layer over the top of that with every other  
> character
> with spaces between.
>
> When you go to select and copy/paste you only grab one layer, and  
> what you
> get is this:
>
>      y p c  A s r l a  a  y s e d y  o c d  o  e e d  t  c a m
>      o  e  u t a i 's  o t  o u a  s c a  n t o k n  w b i e
>      o l w n  t e  e e s  o  s r e  d t  s o i g  a e o k  a
>      s o e  t e  e d.
>
> That is meant to be:
>
>     MySpace Australia was yesterday forced to defend its claim
>     to be Australia's most popular social networking website
>     following the release of survey data showing Facebook had
>     stolen the lead.
>
> Well ... apart from the sucky rudeness of that DRM, I must wonder  
> whether
> HREOC would take a dim view of this, given that it renders the text  
> content
> completely opaque to screen readers.
>
> (and of course someone somewhere will code up a quickie bit of  
> greasemonkey
> javascript to defeat this DRM)
>
> e.
>
>
> -- 
> Ironclad Networks
> Information Architecture
> http://www.ironclad.com.au/
>
> "Providing tactical IA services to web agencies"
>
>
>