Back in 2007 I wrote about how DRM – digital rights management – was nothing but a pirate’s dream:
“Digital rights management is great news for video pirates, online and offline. Nothing is more likely to drive people to Bittorrent sites or back alleyways than the notion that a movie they legally pay for is impossible to copy to their portable video player, or worse, will ‘expire’ after a certain amount of time.”
Here we are, over a decade later, and we’re still forced to put up with this idiocy.
DRM means that people who have legally bought and paid for media are penalised from viewing it how they would like.
- Commercial DVDs are still crippled by DVD zone restrictions and encryption. There are a number of ways you can rip them, Handbrake is a good start, but you’ll need some additional plug-ins and tools to convert many of them.
- eBooks are still riddled with DRM and forced into specific proprietary formats. I like to listen to books while walking or driving via text-to-speech app Voice Dream Reader, but the Kindle kfx ones in particular take a good bit of hacking.
DRM – digital rights management – should have died out with the dinosaurs.
Since it didn’t, let’s continue to do everything we can to break it and circumvent it.
How to crack Kindle kfx files as of Feb 2018:
- Calibre is great for conversion, but you’ll need some plug-ins.
- Epubor worked for me in the past
- This Terminal command was the only method that worked for me recently:
sudo chmod -x /Applications/Kindle.app/Contents/MacOS/renderer-test
