this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023

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Need help breaking honto.jp's DRM (self.piracy)

submitted 1 year ago by razrabotka to c/[email protected]

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I purchased an ebook (two of them, actually) from some Japanese site called honto, but of course, stupid old me didn't realise that Digital Restrictions Management was going to make my life a living hell. Has anyone had any luck with cracking them, or did I just spend 730 Yen on a nothingburger?

Link

Apparently, there are some local files on my phone from "doenloading" the ebook, but they won't load. In the browser I had a little more luck, but the images are scrambled when I attempt to "inspect element".

What do I do? I really want to get this to work...

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Have you made sure it can't be gotten from Anna's Archive before you go the bother of cracking this?

Probably, but just checking.

[–] razrabotka 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Doesn't look like it. The book is quite recent (2020)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Alright. Good luck with the DRM!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Looks like it's a proprietary encrypted file format that nobody ever bothered to crack, unfortunately

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

if you can provide some of the images it would probably help, a good idea is to simply firstly look at the image in a hex editor to see if there are any notifiers of file type. but sharing the files you got would be a good idea

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What kind of file did it download?

[–] razrabotka 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are a couple of files, actually.

This is the root directory.

Then, I go to the epub directory.

META-INF contains these files...

...and item has these files.

image and xhtml folders have the same amount of files (137), but the former has them in the jpg format, while the latter has them in the xhtml format.

Sorry for haphazardly explaining it like this, I'm on mobile.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I would try zipping up the epub dir and changing the extension to .epub

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

This should work, but this looks like an EPUB with DRM (since there's an encryption.xml file), so you might need to remove the DRM using something like Calibre.

[–] MomoTimeToDie 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Digital Restrictions Management

Isn't it "digital rights management"?

[–] razrabotka 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What "rights" are there in the first place? This measure hurts the customer in the long run

[–] MomoTimeToDie 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Copyright. I'm not making some statement of value. I fucking hate it as much as the next person here, just pointing out the proper acronym.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Stallman was the one who proposed calling it that: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/opposing-drm.html

[–] MomoTimeToDie -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That kind of shit is just annoying. Changing the terms because you don't like what they refer to is just lazy virtue signaling. It's the equivalent of injecting some variant of "penis" into someone's name because you don't like them. The context of the conversation should be sufficient enough to establish your opinion on the topic without it. For instance, making a post asking about how to remove drm.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah righto MomoPenis

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yes, well, they want to spin it that way but realistically speaking DRM has always been about restrictions. Or, if you prefer rights, it's their rights not yours.

[–] jws_shadotak 2 points 1 year ago

These files appear as images but they could be zip files that get combined in memory and decompressed into the file. Try finagling the filetypes and see what you find

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

did you ever figure this out? i'm kinda in a similar situation, though i ended up just using a downloader for the clip studio online reader they provide

[–] razrabotka 2 points 10 months ago

I found an excruciatingly manual method of extracting comics which I purchased, but it works well

To make it a lot simpler, a Discord user made a script (with the help of AI) which takes the scrambled .jpg image and the tag (e.g. 3,4,7,14,0,13,12,11,6,10,2,8,15,5,1,9) and then uses ImageMagick to unscramble that image. Then I may have to edit the image manually (the edges for example are not scrambled so I have to edit those in)

I'd love to share the script with those who use Honto and would benefit from it, just gotta know if it's alright with this community