As many of you know, I’m a big fan of IP Expert. I used InternetworkExpert to get my CCIE R&S last fall, but IP Experts products are truly amazing, and their instructors are second to none. However, they have one “feature” that kept me from buying from them, and sticking to their competitors – until now.

First, some back story on DRM.

Digital Rights Management, usually referred to by its acronym “DRM” has been a thorn in the side of… well.. everybody, ever since some corporate bigwig somewhere decided that the best way to stop people from stealing their content was to make it so painfully annoying to use, it just wasn’t worth the trouble. Of course, anyone with any level of Internet savvy knows this is complete nonsense, and the simple fact is that DRM does zero, besides inconvenience paying customers, and create support issues. Thieves will steal, no matter what, so while “the suits” think their DRM is doing its job, it is in fact not saving them a dime. But enough about that…

IP Expert has been using a 3rd party plug-in for their CCIE workbooks, called FileOpen. This is a plug-in for Adobe’s Acrobat Reader, and therefore requires an IP Expert user to have both Acrobat Reader and the FileOpen plug-in installed to use their workbooks. Even in OS X, which has native PDF support, Acrobat is required. Silly? Absolutely. The kicker is that now with the iPad hitting the market, people are becoming more and more upset at the inability to view their workbooks on their iPads. This is clearly bad for business for IP Expert, but they seem to simply not care – and still believe their DRM outweighs the potential complaints from the iPad users.

For those who don’t know, FileOpen is the company that at one point sued the pants off a company called Elcomsoft, the makers of Advanced PDF Password Recovery, a tool which up until the lawsuit (around version 1.3 of APPR) was able to crack the FileOpen plug-in. Click here for a statement about the lawsuit from the FileOpen CEO. Proponents of DRM danced in the streets.

Enter a brilliant coder who goes by the name Tetrachroma. He has managed to reverse engineer the plug-in, and is able to remove the DRM from files tainted by FileOpen.

Fileopen PDF Security Handler Reverse Engineering

I have personally tried using his software, and can confirm it works. In fact, a Twitter friend @packetslave has not only used this software to rip out the DRM from the files he paid a lot of money for, but has uploaded them to his iPad!

IP Expert Workbook PDF on an iPad

Hooray!

Now, it appears Tetrachroma does not link to his code on his website, due to “DMCA concerns”, but I will. So here you go.  It’s very easy to get running, just simply follow the instructions in the comments of the script. The only snag I ran into is that PyWin has a version that is too new for Python 2.7 – so make sure you grab the one specifically for Python 2.7.

I’d say to be smart about using this script, to not steal, redistribute DRM-free versions of your PDFs, etc – but you already knew those things since you wanted nothing more than to be able to use the PDF documents you spent your hard earned money on in any way you wish. Enjoy!

UPDATE!
After speaking with the owner of IP Expert, pleading our case and explaining that not only does DRM not work, but that their content is/has been freely available on torrent sites for years, and having a very negative reaction towards the possibility of moving in a new direction regarding their copy protection, I have decided that I’m not going to link to the script any longer. I was hoping that having their DRM so easily cracked might persuade them to change their minds, but since that clearly won’t happen, there’s no sense in ruining a good thing while it lasts.

Filed under: Certification, Cisco by Chris Jones on August 22, 2010
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