iTunes users, the days of tyranny are over, and your emancipator is named DVD Jon! Really! I don't necessarily understand the particulars of this great event — it has something to do with Apple Computers cock-blocking the masses and just generally being bad sharers — but I'll do my best to correctly paraphrase some articles written by people who do.
Whether you knew it or not, all of the music you have been downloading from the iTunes store is compatible with only one model of portable MP3 player: the massively ubiquitous iPod, which is also an Apple product. This is thanks to a witchy little program, or maybe a "bug" or something, called FairPlay. So in essence, if you wanted to carry your legally downloaded iTunes music away from your computer — and 88% of online digital music purchases are through iTunes — you would need an iPod. This is the type of arrangement that was just itching for a bypass of the fuck-the-man kind.
DVD Jon, properly known as Jon Lech Johansen, is a 22-year-old Norwegian national who first made waves among computer nerds when he reverse-engineered something about DVDs so he could play them on his Linux system. He was 15 when he did that. The Scandinavian computer whisperer is confident that his FairPlay bypass is legal and is exploring ways to make it commercially available. Eventually, the workaround could be licensed to companies that manufacture digital music players so they can take advantage of iTunes.
