What does iTunes Plus hide?

No sooner had the audience’s impressions of the long-awaited “release” of music in the iTunes Music Store online store, the picture was already overshadowed by the news about the strange features of all DRM-free files bought there. It turns out that each of them has a unique encrypted code and the name and mailing address of the person who downloaded the file, visible to the naked eye. Since Apple does not give any answers to questions about the purpose of these inserts, various theories have grown wildly on this basis.

Let me remind you that DRM-free music got into the iTunes directory by agreement with the recording company EMI. Such files were supposed to be deprived of any binding to the user, which would give him more freedom as to where and how he wishes to reproduce them. The files cost $ 1.29 instead of the usual $ 0.99 and are compressed with a 256 KB / s bit rate instead of the usual 128. The entire initiative is called iTunes Plus.

The fresh, conspiratorial, part of the story began with the fact that on May 30, journalists from the online publications Ars Technica and TUAW found that every track downloaded from iTunes Plus contains information about the user, more precisely, his login and email address, which he uses in the store. Apparently, Apple was not going to make any secret of this, since these records can be seen by simply viewing the files as text.

Immediately, the claims to the company were partially repulsed by the authors themselves. Like, the fact that Apple abandoned DRM does not mean that it began to support piracy. So if you wanted to buy music from Apple and then put it into P2P with impunity, then you know - it won't work.
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However, even more interesting details were revealed to attentive members of the Electonic Frontier Foundation. By simple manipulations, they found that any two copies of the same music track (which, if downloaded by one user, should be identical in principle) differ in size from each other, and sometimes very seriously. In their experiment, this difference reached 360 Kb!

In this case, the first guess about the presence of the so-called “watermarks” in the audio track itself was not confirmed, since the files converted into WAV completely coincide. Preliminary inspection (there are no results of detailed research yet) showed that a special structure can be traced in files, similar to tables with data different for each track. There was no obvious explanation for this fact, so we still have to learn the truth.

In any case, even if Apple puts these add-ons to music exclusively for "peaceful" purposes, its image of a fighter against DRM has once again been badly damaged. What is especially not please its offices in European countries, where the company has long and successfully dragging the courts for the monopolization of the market.