Universe’s Tech Blog

Here’s something abandonware enthusiasts can be thankful for: the Library of Congress yesterday approved six exemptions to US copyright. The one most pertinent to gamers is that, for archival purposes, copy protection on software no longer being sold or supported by its copyright holder can be cracked.

What does this mean? Well, those retro games — classic or otherwise — that you can’t seem to find anywhere can now be preserved without fear of ramifications. Although it is still unlawful to distribute the old games, free or otherwise, rarely do any abandonware cases go to court. The ruling is more symbolic than anything, but a step in the right direction.

Other rulings involved the rights of consumers to crack cell phone software locks for use on other carriers, the rights of educators to make compilations of DVD scenes, and the rights of blind people to use third-party software in order to read copy-protected electronic books. These rulings come as clarifications of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). All new rules take effect on Monday and last for three years.

We knew it would be done sooner or later, and now that we have the mod to use your Zune as a portable hard drive, a method to bypass the Zune’s WiFi sharing DRM is finally here.

First, you need to enable hard drive mode using the instructions we posted before. Then, rename whatever files—MP3s, movies, programs—to have the extension “.jpg” in order to fool the Zune into thinking its an image. This hack works because Zune doesn’t apply DRM to images!

Then what?

Now, take your Zune and send the folder containing these files to your buddy along with a real photo. If you only send a fake photo, an error is thrown. The last step is to have your friend sync the Zune with their computer, open the “containing folder” where the files were downloaded, and rename the files back to their correct extension.

We tried doing this before with just the Zune software, without the storage hack, and Zune threw an error because it resizes the images down in order to conserve space, and our file wasn’t a real image.