SDMI Cracked! Probably! (The Register)
Music & MP3
10/17/2000; 6:04:26 PM

'The Salon story as a whole however provides one of the two main indicators that SDMI's efforts may all be toast - it has too much detail in it for it to be plausible that someone, somewhere had just made the claims up. The other indicator, of course, is Chiariglione's bizarre insistence that nobody can possibly know until after November 10th - if he believes this, and is sure nothing will leak out beforehand, he's been around recording industry PRs for way too long. The author of the Salon piece, Janelle Brown, actually undermined this anyway in an earlier article published while the challenge was still running, on October 3rd. "One SDMI member" is quoted as saying: "From what we're hearing, it sounds like the technologies that have been broken so far are using fairly easy means, [like] audio software that's easily available for download. This isn't rocket science."

'That indicates that information on entries, as you might expect, has been available since they started coming in - contrary to Chiariglione's claims to Inside. These claims overall are somewhat difficult to credit.'

Please forgive me if you think I'm posting this too much... I'm just amused, and I feel for the poor SMDI techies that have been telling the execs for months that what they want isn't possible. Anybody who's ever been in the position of telling management that what they want isn't possible shouldn't find it hard to sympathize.