Okay, you're going to have to bear with us on this one, here, because we're actually not entirely sure how to proceed. See, we want to mention a certain application and the circumstances surrounding it and what wound up happening to it, but there are... issues. You know about this thing called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, right? It's the law that makes it possible for Really Bad Things to happen to people who, among other things, circumvent copy protection systems. You may recall that there was a huge flap a few years ago when some guy figured out how to unscramble DVDs and a judge ruled that reproducing a certain snippet of his source code in any way was apparently against the law. Stick this code on a t-shirt, go to jail-- that sort of thing.

Now, we should mention (for the benefit of any "special guests" tuning in) that we here at the AtAT compound are Fine, Upstanding Citizens who never duplicate copyrighted material, even under the terms of Fair Use, and in fact we try to make up for the moral failings of our less ethical fellow human beings every chance we get. Some folks download songs for free; we buy three copies of all our music from the iTunes Music Store and then order the CD, too, just in case. Other people with TiVos skip commercials; to balance that heinous act, we use ours to watch all commercials at least twice, and keep detailed lists of all advertised products so we know what to buy immediately after the show is over. To counteract the selfish folks who download entire first-run movies and burn them to disc, we buy tickets at the local cinema and then skip the movie entirely. We register all of our shareware, too, and floss after every meal. That's just the sort of Fine, Upstanding Citizens we happen to be. (Insert righteous grin with pinging tooth-glint here.)

So given our impeccable moral fiber (and the fact that we're far too pretty for prison), we're unsure how we should incorporate a plot thread about a certain application that bypasses Apple's FairPlay Digital Rights Management system, which is what makes iTMS songs playable on only three registered computers at a time. We think we recall web sites getting smacked down under the DMCA just for linking to other web sites who had posted that illegal DVD-cracking code. So while it's presumably okay to tell you that Apple recently used the DMCA as leverage to get this FairPlay-disabling software pulled from its previous home, would we be breaking the law by telling you the address of the Indian site to where it moved? And what if we tell you the software's name-- is that facilitating access and opening us up to prosecution?

What about charades? Because we don't want to start in with "two words, first word, one syllable, sounds like 'yay'" if jack-booted thugs are going to come busting in here with Tasers and a branding iron. That would be unpleasant.

So here's what we're going to do: we're going to direct you to a story over at The Register, in hopes that linking to an offshore public news article that then in turn links to the Evil Software in question removes us enough from Ground Zero to eliminate our liability. Oh, and we'll mention that we got that article from faithful viewer Mike Scherer, so if we go down for this, we can take him with us. See? Now everyone's happy!