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Confirmed: You Can Keep Your iTunes Movie Rentals Forever

gizmodo.com — Movie rentals from iTunes 7.6? Awesome. That pesky 24-hour viewing window once you've started the film? Not so much. What if you need just a little bit more time? Or maybe a whole lot more time? We'd heard you could extend the doomsday clock by toying around with your system's date/time. We tested it and it's true.

Who dugg this? Made popular Jan 17, 2008

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  • blakeley, on 01/17/2008, -4/+530By announcing it to the world clearly they will fix this... which kinda defeats the point no?
  • chrisaug18, on 01/17/2008, -15/+336www.thepiratebay.org lets you keep any movie you want forever...it even provides some handy software for burning movies to a dvd
  • totorototoro, on 01/17/2008, -9/+225I value my computer having the right time and date much more than I do keeping some rental movie a few days longer :p
  • Del129, on 01/17/2008, -6/+210Be careful not to accidentally create a time paradox that destroys the universe as we know it...
  • SomethingNew71, on 01/17/2008, -16/+146STOP DIGGING THIS NO ONE CAN FIND OUT
  • debuggercll, on 01/17/2008, -2/+81Time is an illusion. Lunch time doubly so.
  • DreKor, on 01/17/2008, -2/+55If Winzip was able to close this hole in 1995, for it's 30 day free trials, why didn't Apple catch it 2007? I've always wanted this exploit to work in something, I just didn't expect it to happen here.
  • RikkiTikki, on 01/17/2008, -10/+57I'll stick with Netflix.
  • IEatHamburgers, on 01/17/2008, -0/+46Oh *****! EVERYBODY OUT OF THE UNIVERSE!
  • truspect0r, on 01/17/2008, -9/+45bt > *
  • HeL1ves1nYou, on 01/17/2008, -2/+34Yeah, I had this movie on iTunes 2 years before they even started thinking about making it
  • y3rt, on 01/17/2008, -1/+33This isn't a problem.
    001100010010011110100001101101110011
  • xXGeechXx, on 01/17/2008, -3/+33I doubt this lasts too long....
  • hexydes, on 01/17/2008, -2/+31I'm digging this on the premise that you were being ironic and/or sarcastic. However, should that not be the case, I would like you to please return my digg. I'm trusting you to be honest.
  • colincornaby, on 01/17/2008, -14/+41I doubt they will. The secret is that Apple honestly doesn't care about DRM. They put it in there to make the media companies happy, and then past that they really don't care about security holes until the media companies whine about them. The iTunes Music Store has (or had) another funny security hole. iTunes Songs aren't actually DRM'd by the iTunes Server. iTunes sends you an un-drm'd version of the song, and your computer locally drm's the track. For a while there was an unofficial Linux iTunes Store client, and it of course would skip the step of applying the DRM locally, meaning you could download the entire iTunes Music Store Library without DRM. According to this page ( http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/2A ... ) as of February of last year, DRM was still being applied locally on your machine. In other words, there is a security hole that could allow you to download all of iTunes without DRM, and Apple doesn't care.
  • ricksite, on 01/17/2008, -5/+30You can make this hack last longer by setting your clock back.
  • RealmDown, on 01/17/2008, -2/+25excel
  • AlienMushroom, on 02/21/2008, -0/+21I just heard that we are all gonna live until 800 years old. Let's change the time to 01/01/2999 before you place the order just in case you live too long.
  • wolfzombie, on 01/17/2008, -4/+24wait, so Apple is only going to give you 24 hours to view a rented movie? Blockbuster gives you a week. I sometimes don't have time to finish a movie in one day, or something comes up while watching a movie. 24 hours is kind of lame here, especially when they can still rent out another copy before yours expires.
  • Speed, on 01/17/2008, -4/+22Now I have two reasons to bury this (Gizmodo, and revealing a useful exploit)
  • murraj2, on 01/17/2008, -0/+17I set my clock forward so that I could download movies before they come out on DVD.
  • ocularist, on 01/17/2008, -0/+17great.... now lets not update iTunes anymore.....
  • trumsey2005, on 01/17/2008, -0/+17Has anyone tried to open a terminal and simply use the touch command to change the date/time stamp of the video file to current?
  • lovedunks, on 01/17/2008, -4/+19Hooray for fair use!

    The timer shouldn't start if you accidentally click start. You should have to watch like 10 minutes of the movie or something and that begins the timer.
  • loryann00, on 01/17/2008, -1/+15Wait until the first 30 days is over also ... I'm sure they have a server side verification in place. Don't forget that they know exactly who downloaded what and when. I wouldn't be surprise if the next iTunes update don't let you log in the store if you don't have the right date.
  • MxM111, on 01/17/2008, -1/+15>The secret is that Apple honestly doesn't care about DRM.
    May be this is true, but the studios do care and will force Apple to fix it.
  • EvilAnimator, on 01/17/2008, -37/+50Hooray for theft!!!
  • flashboy131, on 01/17/2008, -1/+14/sarcasm
    there fixed.
  • TuxedoMax, on 01/17/2008, -2/+15buried for secrecy
  • tgc1, on 01/17/2008, -10/+23It's more of an extended borrowing period.
  • madk, on 01/17/2008, -5/+17I'd normally bury comments like this...but hell if you are going to pirate it..you might as well pirate it.
  • DJNewStyle, on 01/17/2008, -0/+12WinZip's shareware never expired... they just switched the buttons around each time you ran it so you might accidentally click "purchase full version" and become paying customer #2. It was Paintshop Pro 5.0 and higher that did.
  • hexydes, on 01/17/2008, -0/+12I live in a singularity. I have all the time I want (it's pretty cramped in here though).
  • soapko, on 01/17/2008, -1/+12unless you buy the DRM-free songs, of course.
  • falafelkiosken, on 01/17/2008, -1/+12they should have predicted this
  • thomas040, on 01/17/2008, -0/+10but isn't it easier to just torrent the movie if you wanna keep it, than fiddle around with the time settings constantly?
  • sgoogle, on 01/17/2008, -4/+14OpenOffice.org
  • MindTrigger, on 01/17/2008, -1/+9Trying to hide the fact is equally as futile as expecting this exploit to last very long.
  • egrefen, on 01/17/2008, -1/+9BINARY SOLO!
  • Bootes, on 01/17/2008, -3/+11While, I agree that Apple doesn't really like DRM. I don't think they're doing this on purpose, not the music, and especially not the movie rentals.
  • Frost9999, on 01/17/2008, -0/+8Also, this is just mucking about the system for the fun of it. If the people at Gizmodo were really after 'extended rentals' for free they could save the heart-ache and visit The Pirate Bay.
  • MxM111, on 01/17/2008, -0/+7You probably did not watch futurama. What are you doing on digg then?
  • ShouldBeStudyin, on 01/17/2008, -0/+7Anyone know if you can copy the rented movie before it's been played to a backup drive and then, whenever you want to watch the movie, copy the unplayed version to the iTunes library? My guess is it would still expire after 30 days, but you might be able to watch it as often as you wanted during that 30-day period. Any thoughts on this method?
  • shmatt, on 01/17/2008, -1/+8So jobs writes an open letter saying drm is bad, emi releases its catalog drm-free, and those tracks play on any device... therefore somehow I can only play them on an ipod? Sorry, I don'tfollow....
  • nimbusnacho, on 01/17/2008, -1/+8buried because the more people know about this the sooner it will be fixed :)
  • paidhima, on 01/17/2008, -0/+7Not if you go to the right Restaurant.
  • moonaust, on 01/17/2008, -1/+7Dugg for being the worst kept secret ever.....I can also do this with my copy of Adobe Photoshop 4.
    I am sending this from 1995.
  • inactive, on 01/17/2008, -0/+6Just like Adobes Illustrator back in the day lol, Stupid Hacks FTW!!!!!!!
  • lovedunks, on 01/17/2008, -1/+7It's not too bad because the 24 hour timer only starts once you begin the movie. You can keep it on your drive for like 30 days or something unplayed. The second you start the video, it self destructs in 24 hours.

    The service they are offering isn't really much different than other services out there. I can order movies on demand in HD over Comcast. I believe Amazon unbox is similar, but I've never used it. Apple doesn't let non-Apple TV users download HD content -- really dumb.
  • inactive, on 01/17/2008, -7/+13Good one, Apple.
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