New Yorker Unbound

Okay, so last week I promised a longer diatribe, and I swear that I haven’t forgotten about it; it needs to be edited down a bit, but it does exist, and I’ve also actually written a bunch of code to prove that my idea is at least viable. But…well, something happened this weekend that means it’s been bumped, probably until mid-week.

Almost twenty years ago, I bought a copy of The Complete New Yorker. This was a very interesting collection of DVDs that contained every copy of The New Yorker from 1925 until 2005. Spread across 8 DVDs, it had a proprietary viewing system locked down with DRM, but it was still quite a fun thing to have. The main problem was that the Mac version of the software was compiled for 68k Macs. This suddenly became a big issue when Apple switched off 68k Rosetta support; instead of 8 DVDs filled with decades of print, the collection ended up being a brick. Even the Windows software eventually bitrotted, and the collection has just been hanging out on my bookshelves waiting for the DVDs to fail.

Over the past decade, I have probably searched once or twice a year to see if anybody has cracked the DRM encryption. The closest I’ve ever got was this user over on GitHub, who cracked equivalent versions for Rolling Stone and Playboy. Hints were dropped that the New Yorker collection would soon follow, but that was two years ago, and things have been silent. But it did suggest there was some hope.

Enter Claude.

Claude Opus spent an afternoon this Saturday with the NSA’s Ghirda reverse engineering framework and comprehensively cracked the DRM. NewYorkerUnbound hosts little more than a simple Python script (with in-line dependencies, even!) that will take any file from the DVD set and produce an uncracked DJVU file, with an optional PDF export if you have the right support on your Linux box.

After almost 15 years of them sitting idle, I have 80 years of the New Yorker available again. Hurrah!

(I was so very excited that I didn’t do anything that I had actually planned to do this Saturday, which was probably a mistake…)