iTunes Users – Beware of BIOS Updates

This weekend I went and downloaded a BIOS update for my computer and discovered a nasty little side effect – all of my iTunes songs that I had purchased required re-authorization. Apparently, iTunes uses your computer’s BIOS (or a hash of it, or something) to uniquely identify your computer. So, if you update your BIOS, it’s as if you had transferred all your iTunes songs to a new computer. And since you only get 5 transfers per song… well you always want to minimize the number of transfers.

Just a nasty little secret of iTunes (and DRM – digital rights management) that I discovered and wanted to share. Beware!

Published
Categorized as tech

By Keith Survell

Geek, professional programmer, amateur photographer, crazy rabbit guy, only slightly obsessed with cute things.

3 comments

Comments are closed.

To respond on your own website, enter the URL of your response which should contain a link to this post's permalink URL. Your response will then appear (possibly after moderation) on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post's URL again. (Find out more about Webmentions.)