David Hanak Apple representatives presented several subscription services with which Apple intends to break through during the keynote yesterday. From the multimedia streaming Apple TV+, through the gaming Apple Arcade to the newspaper/magazine service Apple News +. It is the first available to selected users, so a large number of people were the first to try it. And almost immediately the first serious problem appeared.
Gallery
As pointed out on Twitter, Apple has not bundled electronic copies of magazines with any DRM protection. In addition, the magazines are distributed in classic .pdf format and, combined with the absence of any protection and the possibility of previewing individual issues, it is possible to access complete magazines even without paying a fee for Apple News+.
Apple allows you to create previews of all the magazines offered. However, these previews are full of metadata that can be used to download insecure files from Apple's servers. As such, the average layperson is unlikely to be able to handle this process. However, for a person with at least a little skill, it will not be a problem to create a tool that will download entire issues of magazines. From there it is only a small step to distribution via, for example, torrent servers.
It gets better! Even without a subscription, the magazine preview in Apple News downloads a manifest which happens to list all the pages. All of which, hosted in public, sans any protection. So it takes minutes to write a tool that downloads an entire magazine issue page by page pic.twitter.com/anh4BoGKN6
- Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) March 26, 2019
Apple is somewhat lax in terms of securing target files in this regard. We can also expect negative reactions from publishers who will not like their journals being publicly available in full quality. Most likely, this is a misunderstanding that Apple will resolve in the coming days. It is hard to imagine that it would be possible to share this exclusive (and hidden behind a pay-wall) content so easily on the web in the long term.
