Nice, hate cracking ebooks. The world needs more of this
that’s one smart cat
I feel like a lot of what he attributes to malice or obfuscation is rather his unfamiliarity with the technical side of things.
Mapping numbers to non-sequential glyphs is exactly what happens in PDF, and PostScript before it. So is text positioning by Cartesian coordinates rather than in reading order.
Ligatures and multiple font variations have been around since fonts existed. Fonts that render incorrectly unless you use them in one specific way are legion (turns out font designers often have very little technical understanding, or just don’t care).
The only thing that sounds like obfuscation to me is changing the font encoding on every call. And if that is indeed its purpose, it’s a very poor attempt.
What is evil is that this type of cracking is probably illegal through contract law (simply using the product).
DRM’s ever present weakness, if you can view it you will be able to crack it.
https://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt
In DRM, the attacker is also the recipient. It’s not Alice and Bob and Carol, it’s just Alice and Bob. Alice sells Bob a DVD. She sells Bob a DVD player. The DVD has a movie on it—say, Pirates of the Caribbean—and it’s enciphered with an algorithm called CSS—Content Scrambling System. The DVD player has a CSS un-scrambler.
…
… Alice wants Bob to buy Pirates of the Caribbean from her. Bob will only buy Pirates of the Caribbean if he can descramble the CSS-encrypted VOB—video object—on his DVD player. Otherwise, the disc is only useful to Bob as a drinks-coaster. So Alice has to provide Bob—the attacker—with the key, the cipher and the ciphertext.
