Friday, March 14, 2008

And so the arms race begins

The empire strikes back: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7293988.stm

2 comments:

  1. Hi David,
    This fix was actually hacked again yesterday evening. The original iPlayer site for the iPhone (which is really poorly optimised for the device if you asked me) did a very basic check. This merely checked the user agent string of the browser. If it matched the iPhone's user agent, it served up the streaming MPG video, if it didn't it served up the streaming Flash content. Downloading the content was as easy as spoofing your user agent and downloading the movie, or you could automate it via a simple script.

    The latest fix simply added a few additional checks to the system which look for other oddities in the way the iPhone shows itself. The script that bypasses that ( http://po-ru.com/diary/bbc-iplayer-fix-hacked-again/ ) simply tells the iPlayer site this additional information, making it harder for the BBC to tell what is an iPhone and what is not...

    It will be interesting to see how/if they respond.

    Matt

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  2. Thanks for sharing Matt... and on it goes...

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