EDIT: The only reason why I still had it at this point was because I could use it with other apps. However, now that my Spotify Subscription is cancelled, it doesn’t work with anything. It’s mildly infuriating because today, I can’t still use it with other apps like I was able to yesterday.
Please don’t make the same mistake I made. No one should buy this.
I just tossed my headphone plug to cassette adapter for my truck because i recently updated my phone and nothing has headphone sockets anymore. luckily the bluetooth to FM transmitters have come a long way as well.
lol My wife and daughter recently got excited about vinyl and bought the new Taylor swift album, so I had to get Back In Black to balance things out. We are constantly trying to “declutter” and I fear the collection will keep growing.
you can appreciate her cracking skills and still hate her for everything else she does, like running a cult and refusing to tell anyone else how to crack denuvo, even though she literally makes zero money off it so she’s literally just keeping it secret for clout (presumably to fuel the whole telegram cult thing)
Well I’m not a member of this cult, but I believe admiration for cracking skills always existed before her, now it’s different because she is more socially open than a average cracking group. The scene on the denuvo part is basically her so It’s easy to build a cult, as you said she keeps a monopoly.
Lmao if skip the real simps most people are there for drama only and ig she is the only cracker close to a community rest don’t respond directly to general audience. Though i feel her drama is over the top and waste of time.
Yes. My personal belief is they want account-bound services normalized by the time self-driving cars become viable. They would HATE for us to have the ability to lend our cars out to other people throughout the day without giving them more money
We are in the era that other than games, the companies have not yet caught up with anti-cracking techniques. I crack shit as a hobby and everything is fun and challenging until you start to mess with games. It’s insanely difficult, a CONSTANT cat n mouse run and sooooo damn time consuming
ok so first of all you need to know programming. nothing crazy but you should definitely know what a “function” “loop” or “variable” is and some basic HTTP knowledge (what is an HTTP reuest, what’s a header, etc.).
now, your target is to bypass the license check. there are many ways to go about that:
the web way: intercept the traffic between the app and the server. maybe the app tells the server “am i licensed” and the server responds “no” and if you just change that you’re golden. to intercept traffic the golden standard is “burp proxy”
the exported function way: I’m sure that you’ve seen that all the apps that you install come with various dlls. these are “libraries” which means that they’re a bunch of functions in a package. most times they also include the name of their functions and more often than not you’ll find a “is_user_licensed” that returns a 0 or a 1. hooking that to return 1 will hand you a win
the exe exported function way: same as the above but the function lives inside the exe. BTW exes are exactly the same as a DLL (and you can actually execute a dll or import functions from an exe!)
you can find any function that gets called and has a name (the names are called “symbols”) using frida-trace
afterwards you can write a frida script (javascript) that either replaces the entire function or append/prepend code to it. most times you want to append code that just returns a value as to not mess with the programs internals
if you have a .net app though the whole process is WAY easier as you can read all the code of the app using a decompiler - dnspyex is the gold standard
of course not all apps are that easy to crack. it’s more of a time/mind game and less of a skill one. sure, you get much more efficient and the solutions start to “smell”, but trying to crack an app that has stripped symbols (no function names) and everything is statically compiled (all the dlls are shoved into the exe to make it harder for us) can make your life much more difficult
since this is a “starter guide” i’m gonna leave anti-reverse, anti-debug and obfuscation completely out of the discussion. unless you get a moderately good grasp what the above terms mean, don’t bother
I also didn’t talk about actual reversing with a debugger/decompiler/disassembler as I think that it’s better to find out about them as-you-go. don’t start from that. it’s intimidating
Don’t get intimidated. You’ve got it. Remember that it’s not about skill (ok don’t go cracking IDA Pro or denuvo), it’s about patience and methodology As the hacker say: Try harder and happy hacking 🙂
NOTE0: ALWAYS ask chatGPT stuff. if it refuses to answer put the question in the context of “malware research” NOTE1: I think that someone somewhere may have told me that a very popular app owned by dickheads used in the 3d printing community is a very good starting point 😀 NOTE2: You’re more than welcome to ask anything - PMs or otherwise
EDIT: I forgot to mention reversing divas: since this is such a niche thing to do and you spend your life away from grass, some people involved are in the mindset of “this is not for everyone, you’re stupid and you can’t do it, etc”. Fuckem
I don’t use Spotify, but I selected a song on someone else’s phone recently. The first time opening it in years and it opens up to an ad saying “buy our tshirts”.
This type of shit is why I just want a vehicle with a CD player that can hold multiple discs. Then I could just burn my favorite music onto a few discs and not have to worry about not having paid to have access to the music I want and don’t have to worry about a song I dislike popping up randomly.
You might really enjoy Plex + Plexamp. You own the library and choose your media but you don’t burn CDs and can instead stream/pin (for offline) songs or playlists like you’d expect from a paid music service.
My car has a SD card slot that it will read music off of. The first week I had it, I loaded up a disc with as much music as I could. I haven’t switched it out in 3 years.
It has been quite nice. Until this post, I had almost forgotten where my music was coming from.
But an android head unit is more open and less susceptible to cloud companies stopping their service because its media player can work offline with local media, and you can still sideload apk into the unit even if play store no longer work on the unit.
You could buy portable DVD and CD players back in 2005 that would keep playing without a hitch even if you dropped them. Admittedly this was mostly down to them caching the content in RAM and spinning down to save battery power…
I haven’t used a CD deck in over a decade. I literally don’t know how CDs would even sound in my car’s deck, because it’s a dead technology. I genuinely cannot believe anyone in a developed nation would still purchase a CD.
The only reason to purchase a CD nowadays I think is memorabilia, or to support an artist/group… aside from that it’s pretty much as you say, physical media is a dying format.
Vinyl is an outlier, but even then modern vinyl players are noticeably worse than ones manufactured several decades ago
One that can take a USB storage device or an SD card would be much better. Same result, but no messing around with discs and it can hold way more music.
There’s a lot of better ways to do that like for me I typically ether just plug my phone into the line in port or if there isn’t one I just pair my phone and play mp3s off of my MP3 player app and if your car demands you use a service just get a Bluetooth radio transmitter so your car thinks it’s just listening to ordinary radio
I got an old beater with a tape player and discovered they make Bluetooth adapters just like the old fm adapters i used years ago. Combined with a gig hdd dedicated to music on my phone and it feels like the old days again of burned cds and pirate bay
I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not but they gave Joe Rogan a platform and pay him a lot of money for it. Probably other stuff too if they support that.
He’s the male Gwyneth Paltrow selling brain pills instead of Goop. He promotes alt-right and far-right conspiracies. He told people not to get the COVID vaccine. If he just interviewed people – even people from all sides – I’d be fine with it. Problem is he promotes dangerous conspiracies and usually ignores fact checking. He’s using his influence and authority to do harm. And worst of all, I think he just does it for the ratings.
Out of all the things that Spotify is shitty for that’s the least of my worries about them, and I fucking hate right-wing shitheads. People would rather see the artists they love starve if it gave them convenience to enjoy their art without actually paying for what they do.
It’s honestly kind of baffling to see people go up in arms enough to side with fucking Disney “in support of artists” because AI is supposedly stealing from them and the same people go on with their lives and put on Spotify and feel self-righteous. People fucking suck.
and the same people go on with their lives and put on Spotify and feel self-righteous
Yeah but consider that for me for example, I was previously giving exactly 0 to artists. Now I give whatever tiny amount my odd song played here or there pays out. Which is more than previously.
Is it a lot? No. Do I listen to a lot of music? Hell no. Did I buy any music before as a result? Fuck no. And now I sometimes listen to some. Plus the music I listen to I couldn’t buy in physical anyways (low-fi or synth background noise while coding), and wouldn’t know where to buy digital even if I wanted to. Previously I just used a noise generator, btw.
It’s probably not a good idea to assume that 100% of listeners on spotify would have invested that same amount of money into physical sales.
This thing that OP bought is a separate add-on to the car. As far as the car is concerned it doesn’t exist and it’s just plugged into a normal 3.5 mm aux device.
You literally can’t buy them anymore! Spotify quietly canned the project. Support pages are still up but I can’t find a purchase option anywhere.
I bought one pretty early into launch and even then they were already heavily discounted. It was a weird choice for a peripheral, but personally I really wish they had tried a bit harder instead of giving up outright
They never even came over to the uk and I really wanted one. Nobody else makes anything like it either. I don’t know why they canned it, I’ve only ever seen praise for it on YouTube and the like
Sometimes you don’t want to use your phone for everything. Plus car thing to me seemed much more interesting outside of the car. Like to use as a media control panel in the kitchen etc.
There’s a niche. I’ve only ever driven older cars with less than stellar stereo setups for phone play. The idea is getting a small-footprint and quick to navigate stereo interface without actually having to replace whole ass stereo, and I find it pretty appealing!
For me the problem was connectivity. I assumed the car thing would act as a go-between for my phone and stereo, and it would remain always connected to the car audio system. Instead it’s just another thing you’re connecting to. It actually slowed me down significantly more than it helped.
If it could send/receive audio and just used your phone as a source, that’d be ideal for me. Like a suped up bluetooth receiver with spotify connectivity.
I have a car thing, I use it at my desk for media controls. It is pretty great.
But the product description was pretty clear that you needed premium to use it. The same goes for using any third party Spotify client. Shouldn’t have expected otherwise.
Option 1: The hardware is free for as long as you use pay for the service. Then you must return it. You never own anything and your ecosystem is tied to a single company and subscription. No one is allowed to sell competitive goods that work across multiple services unless they themselves offer a service. This product, who many find valuable, no longer exists.
Option 2: You purchase a life-long subscription to the service when you purchase the physical goods. Startups offer competitive pricing for early adopters but cannot sustain the ongoing costs of growing/maintaining the service. New services are spun up frequently offering lifetime access, then going bankrupt after the investors make their profit. Eventually we settle into an industry landscape where each individual music label has their own subscription service the way that tv/movie studios do now.
Option 3: Everything is free. Nothing gets produced anymore because artists are busy hunting for meat.
Option 4: You pay for goods AND services and you read the product descriptions to decide if you really need a device that requires a subscription. like an adult. If you want a competitive alternative that doesn’t require a subscription… go get or make one.
edit: congrats hivemind, you just made internet modems and cell phones illegal. What you should actually be supporting is hardware that is user serviceable, root accessible, and capable of speaking standardized communications protocols. (ie, not hardware locked to proprietary only comms)
So what use is a consumer modem without an internet service? How would the law banning “all physical devices that require a subscription to be functional” differentiate between products that work with one or multiple services? It’s still a subscription to a service either way.
Phones, arguably, don’t perform their primary function without cell services. Where in this proposed law are we going to draw the line between ‘functional enough’ and ‘useless brick’? Come up with any line in the sand and it is trivially easy for a company to comply with the law while changing nothing about the actual functionality of the device. In many cases this would look like additional chips on the board that ‘work’ but don’t add any value to the device. Think 7/11 selling single roses in glass tubes… that just so happen to be the perfect dimensions of a meth pipe. It’s just a rose so it doesn’t need to comply with any drug paraphernalia laws, right? Well now it’s “Car Thing the Radio Mixer” (with optional spotify). Now there’s even more e-waste and nothing has changed. At best the law does nothing, at worst it actually makes the problem worse.
I totally agree with you about Car Thing being e-waste because of its software, that’s why I think it should be root-able, serviceable, and speak in standard open protocols so that you can point it to your own servers/service of choice. But poorly thought out legislation will only hurt consumers, the industry, and the planet. Blanket bans on buzzwords with no consideration for practical nuance is foolish.
Public companies obviously intentionally want to make everything as shitty as possible, just to extract money, but lets accept the hypothetical that subscriptions will actually be banned. Wouldn’t that be great?
You would basically be treated the same as Tier 1-3 ISP’s, pay for the cost of the routing to the company. That phone plan that costs ?? €/$ a month becomes “Pay as you use it”. Flat fee per gigabyte / message etc. These plans were at least here in Finland, and I think my phone bills were around 4-5 EUR a month and a cap that you cannot exceed that month, though smartphones and data plans weren’t a thing. Now everything is a subscription.
Now back to hardware vs software. You obviously pay for the software also when buying the hardware, but for whatever reason the user doesn’t own any kind of rights around it. This has obviously become much worse the past few years (TV’s have ads etc). I really don’t think that the issue is anything you listed, the issue is that greedy companies want to use the subscription model rather than play fair. Phones and modems are EOL at best in a year. I have a PFSense router that cost me less than a router from my ISP used and it’s EOL and security is something I don’t have to worry about.
Modems and routers have most of their features dedicated to home networking and are not usually made by the ISP. Them connecting to the internet is one of the smallest features they have. The other features are related to offline networking and tight security, you can actually just plug an ethernet cable to the wall and get connection from your ISP. Same as using a modem and putting it in “bridge mode”, which will completely bypass the features of the modem/router.
The issue here is that the companies don’t want to provide value, they just want to extract as much money as possible, which is wrong. Laws and regulations are desperately needed and even something as radical as banning subscription services for user devices would be a net positive. Renting Tier 1-3 operator infrastructure for your router/modem to work is completely different than “You have the device and the software, but we block you from using it, since you don’t pay”, which in my opinion is ransomware, not subscriptions.
For right to repair and owning these devices, I completely agree with you.
I actually totally agree with all of that. I think it even supports my sentiment. The issue I have is that to make the system work well like it does in Finland you need a ton of well thought legislation that all works towards those goals. What I am specifically opposing is half-measures that are easily subverted and poorly thought out. I’m actually totally fine with banning subscriptions, but that alone doesn’t guarantee neutral access to equal rates, or reasonable $/gig or even network mobility. You need a large suite of laws all designed to be pro consumer from the ground up. I like the sentiment of “ban devices that require subscriptions to function” but that just isn’t a well thought out or realistic idea. If that was all Finland did then solving our issues in America would be much much easier. We need to do a lot more.
So what use is a consumer modem without an internet service?
You can still use it to network with other computers over the telephone network. Heck you don’t even need to do that via the actual telephone service you can just run some wire.
But I think what was actually meant by OP is “tied to a specific subscription service” as well as “disables features that don’t need a subscription service when you aren’t subscribed”.
Phones, arguably, don’t perform their primary function without cell services.
You can use them as e.g. smart home remote. The cellular modem is going to go unused (at least apart from emergency services) but that’s only a small portion of the hardware, and modems were only ever locked to subscriptions (at least over here) if the phone is subsidised by that subscription. I don’t think they even do that any more, they replaced it with minimum contract durations. In any case even back in the days you could unlock it after some time or coughing up some money.
that’s why I think it should be root-able, serviceable, and speak in standard open protocols
Yep I wish rootability was included in the new EU regulations, it would solve so many issues at once. OTOH: It would solve the issue for people who are tech savvy enough to do such things, gotta be careful with our own elitism there. Enjoying consumer rights should not hinge on being a grease monkey.
Every single modem and cell phone I’ve ever owned have worked without a subscription to anything. My internet and ability to make cell calls were limited after my subscription ended, but the devices themselves were easily repurposed to other uses.
I too support the idea that devices should not be bound to a specific parent service. I do not support banning any device that requires one. Where we draw the line on functional/non-functional is arbitrary as long as the device has some function without a service. If they added a chip and antenna that let the Car Thing receive/play radio would that qualify it as functional? If not then how is a Modem still functional when the signals it is designed to receive are locked behind a service? It makes no sense to go down that legal and technical rabbit hole when you could simply legislate that devices be user configurable instead. There numerous industry standards that could function as the backbone of that law versus the useless feel-good sentiment of ‘ban everything I don’t like, even though I can’t rigorously define what that is’
I’d go a step further and say it should be capable of an industry standard communication protocol from the beginning and every device that has a ‘root’ or equivalent elevated access mode should be user recoverable (not easily necessarily, but there shouldn’t be any specific counter measures to prevent it). EOL unlocking would be a good first step towards that goal.
Tell me wise sage, how smart do I think I am? How smart am I? Gee I hope you say “very” so that I can feel good about myself. I hope I can remain one of the intellectual elite so that I can call out stupid ideas on the internet, since normal folk aren’t allowed to.
You misunderstand. I have no knowledge about how smart you are. You could easily be smarter than me. What im saying is you need to reassess your tone and delivery, because it, and your edit only shows me and others that you are arrogant and therefore unable to properly assess other points of view.
Address the possibility that i have a point on your own time, after your ego-required final comment to me. Whether you will address youself or remain as you are, it’s completely up to you.
But the point is that the description of the product clearly stated it needs a subscription to function. You literally buy it with that understanding. If you didn’t read the description then it’s 100% on you.
Whether it should be legal or not, or whether it’s ethical or not, is a different discussion. But the product wasn’t disingenuous about how it works, so complaining about how it works exactly as advertised is a bit silly.
Look out! Communists are coming for your toothbrush. Better vote for harsher penalties for modifying stuff you bought. The DMCA still allows throwing away or disconnecting the computer locking you out of your heated seats.
That’s so sad I really wanted one of these, shame man. I hope you can flip it or return it or something. Don’t listen to the people telling you it’s stupid, it’s a cool idea I had my eye on it as well. Thanks for the warning
in my 1998 car i just put in an Bluetooth capable radio with good speakers and a subwoofer and nobody can disable anything because it’s not connecting to anything except for a Bluetooth device. i’m never gonna by anything newer just because i can repair this cars myself and i really don’t want the mechanics in my area to fix it because i can’t trust them to fix it and not make it worse
Same but with a 1999, keep at it. You’ll never regret practicing at learning how things work. Some of the skills transfer even when you change what thing you’re troubleshooting.
Remarkably, I did the same, and still had something disabled…by Spotify.
The unit had Spotify compatibility (as in, an input mode where you also got access to liking a song by pressing the volume button).
Spotify dropped support for it in the app, so it’s not useful any more. It’s not really a problem, Bluetooth input and media controls still work, and I’ve disabled the Spotify input. But remarkable how possible it is for companies to ruin something!
yeah my pioneer radio also has a Spotify mode that dosen’t work anymore. i woud not use it anyway. and that’s why i don’t like electronics that need to connect to a server even if it doesn’t need to
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