Luigi Auriemma

Introduction
MagicISO and PowerISO are two chinese CD/DVD burners that in the last years have gained a certain (negative) fame due to the usage of two proprietary CD/DVD image formats which are "casually" (noticing the irony) enough used on the bittorrent networks.

*EDIT* 15 nov 2008: after additional research on the recent 110 version of the daa format and some new "strange" daa files on the torrent network I can finally proove that the shameful marketing strategy of MagicISO is used by PowerISO too.
I have also removed the conclusion section because useless.

The proliferation of these two useless formats started in the 2006 and is still continuing.
In short the authors of these two programs (probably helped by other people) download the torrents of ISO images (software, games, music and so on), pack them in the UIF or DAA formats and re-release them on bittorrent.
Lately it's increased also the "mania" of collecting the material downloaded from various torrents and archiving them using these proprietary formats, for example this is what happens to the images containing ebooks.
Logically there is no reason to use a CD image for distribuiting some ebooks (moreover with the bittorrent protocol which supports multiple files) except if you want to force the selling of your own program which reads the proprietary format.

The reason why this is made is very simple: the users who download these torrents are forced to buy the two programs (MagicISO for the UIF or PowerISO for the DAA files) which naturally are not free, in fact you must buy them for handling the files with a size major than 300 mega and "casually" all the uncompressed UIF/DAA files (because 300 mb is referred to the size of the ISO, so a UIF of 1 mega can't be handled if it generates an ISO of 301 mb) on bittorrent have ever a size bigger than this limit.

In their homepages these two programs state that their formats are good because offer better performances than the classical uncompressed ISO format (they are only a zipped ISO, nothing else), but naturally this is totally false and this has been fully demonstrated in the latest versions of my uif2iso and daa2iso tools which are able to read these formats.

In origin they were simple compressed ISO images (zlib algorithm) but recently, after the increasing of the diffusion of my free alternative tools, the developers have started to add various types of encryptions and obfuscation to these formats... all things that have NOTHING to do with the enhancements of the formats or better compression, they have made this only to discourage the usage of alternatives (otherwise the users are not forced to buy their programs).

shame on MagicISO
MagicISO is without doubts the worst and most paltry program which has confirmed, with tons of proofs, the fact that just the same developers force the releasing of copyrighted contents in UIF format via bittorrent and that they have even "stolen" my code.
First, the images created by this program are INVALIDs, this is ever true with NRG files (in fact Nero which is the creator of this format can't open them and the same is valid for Daemon tools and various other programs) and lately this is true for some ISO images too.
Then recently on bittorrent have started to circulate some UIF files with a new version and they have nothing new, they are only the original format encrypted with some fixed keys... a clear way to avoid their extraction through my tools, but this was completely useless.
The last move was the releasing of other new UIF files with other additional encrypted/encoded contents...
But this is not all, in fact the developers of MagicISO are also good to copy the open source GPL code of other people: the latest version released at the end of July "magically" supports to the DAA format and after a quick look to the assembly code is easy to find that it's just the exact code of my daa2iso:

http://aluigi.org/misc/magiciso_gpl_violation.txt

shame on PowerISO
PowerISO uses the same "marketing/advertising" way of MagicISO and recently has released a new version which adds the LZMA compression and the usage of bitstreams (luckily the function about I referred in the daa2iso.c source is only x86_Convert of the LZMA SDK and not an obfuscation one, thanx to Joe Lowe for the info).
Anyway this new version of the daa format contains also various ways for complicating the handling of these files to avoid that external programs (like my daa2iso) are able to read them.
These "obfuscations" includes the XORing of the numbers returned by the functions which read the bits in the index table, an encoding of the index table and a parameter which swaps the decompression functions in the inflate algorithm.
Also this program has recently added support to the proprietary format of its concurrent but luckily no specific code from mine was used.

Wow. Good information Luigi, and great work investigating.

I always thought they just used another format, but I had no idea...

this is why i use isohunt with bittorent ^-^ both very free

the isohunt website indexes uif and daa torrents too so I don't understand about what you refer

I have edited the first post adding some details about some obfuscation instructions used in poweriso which have been introduced lately to avoid the reading of the daa files from other alternative programs... shameful

additionally I have seen a new (well not much new since it's dated 2007) burner called gBurner which uses another format called GBI.
well this is nothing more or less than the same PowerISO, not only the website is identical but also (and moreover) the program which has been created for sure from the same source code of PowerISO (so the author is the same).

little note about the GBI files:
- the real GBI files are identical to the DAA files except for a couple of micro modifications made to avoid compatibility with them (for example a field is XORed with 1 without a real useful reason)
- the GBI files visible online (read "torrents") are DAA files! yes DAA files with the extension changed to GBI
- just recently my daa2iso has been updated to support also the real GBI files (not much useful since for those on torrent have never existed problems because as already said they are renamed DAA and so readable also by the previous versions of daa2iso)

this thing of gburner is completely senseless because if the author already has poweriso why he has also this other program which is the same?
and yes the fact that there were GBI files on the torrent network which in reality are just DAA files smells a bit.

anyway no problem, daa2iso can read both the formats, both real and renamed ih ih ih :)

You're on the front page of Reddit! Congrats! The word is definitely getting out more: http://i27.tinypic.com/xpuik9.jpg

wow I have also just noticed that there is a new version of MagicISO released 2 weeks ago and "casually" (yes, I'm hironical) in the changelog is reported that has been added support for the GBI files... wow "casually" my latest version of daa2iso has added support for the GBI files too, what "coincidence"!!!

I guess it's useless to analyze the code of magic(stealmycode)iso for finding that the violation is continued so I save my time.

and there is also another "coincidence" (that luckily doesn't touch my stuff), everytime that it's released a new version of magiciso it's released also a new version of poweriso some days before or after it.
now we know that the authors of these two programs are not the same person (otherwise there was no reason for magiciso to steal my code) but I don't understand why the releases of new versions of these programs are made ever in the same moment... weird.

I have read some comments (I will read them better later) in the reddit post and the discussion about the term "extorsionware" (referred to magiciso) is interesting because at a first time it doesn't seem a good term but after all the marketing strategy adopted by magiciso/poweriso/gburner is exactly this one: "if you want to use the (illegal) iso you downloaded, you must pay me" (so maybe it's partially extorsionware? anyway not a so completely wrong term imho).

and I find that also the term "stealing" is appropriate (as you can see I use it too) because the act of stealing means that someone gets something and someone else lose something.
if you download an mp3 from p2p you are not stealing because:
- the name of the author (credits) and the song remains intact, so the author doesn't lose the "paternity" of his work
- there is just no loose at all (that claimed by the major is an abstract virtual monetary loss which means nothing because is based on nothing)

while in the open source code you have that someone (magiciso) is gaining money with the code and the work made by someone else (me) who has lost also any credit (name and philosophy since the GPL is based on the "sharing with the world" concept) from it... that's stealing without doubts.

thanx for the link SomaFM :)
oh and thanx to the guy who posted the fact on reddit so that more people will be aware of it

naaa it's not a real loss, it's a virtual hypothetic and unprovable loss for various reasons:

differently to any other "commercial product" the music is something which is already transmitted plus or less completely in radio, tv, dj sets and other media so the consumer already has it, the difference betweeen that and the mp3/cda/flac sometimes is mainly in the quality (but talking about commercial stuff the "quality factor" doesn't exist).

I don't know how is the situation in the other countries, but here in Italy we pay a tax on each cd/dvd/tape and other recording supports which is considered as a "compensation" for this so called piracy, that's why the cost of these supports is so incredibly high here and at the same time this is an incentive to the piracy for obvious logical reasons like "if I need to pay these idiots I want their stuff".

then the abstract loss about you talk depends ever by the user, because there are some types of people that would never buy that stuff they downloaded even if p2p didn't exist but they did just because they had nothing else to do or for listening that song and then trashing it.

so saying that they lose money is wrong because their financial situation remains untouched and the horrible wasting of money performed by these so called "stars" (stars of what? of the idiocy? of the ignorance?) is the proof.
and as already said they don't lose credits because they are recognized as authors of the song, in reality this can be even seen as a way to increase their popularity.

instead sometimes I see that the consumer has a loss from the legal buys:
imagine the anti-piracy video before the movie at cinema and dvd... are they idiot or what? I have paid so I don't want to see these idiocies.
or bad dvd localizations, for example I have read comments about the italian dvds of Battlestar Galactica that make me guess if who made the release for this country has mental problems or is having fun of the customers and that's the same situation also for other series/movies.
or microsoft which make contracts with computer vendors for bundling its windows with each computer obligating the user to own multiple license for the same version of the operating system or to spend time and patience trying to explain to who sold the computer that it's possible to be repaid of the cost of the operating system if you don't want it and have not accepted the contract showed at the boot.

so yeah piracy is bad, evil and so on but exists an abuse from both the sides (vendors and customers).
arghhh another long post and I guess to have gone off topic and off-off-topic in some points (for example talking about something which is not directly inherent the "stealing") but well it's late here :)

It's sort of funny: if you Google the phrase "magiciso", the reddit article is on the first page :P

Yea not on my front page anymore either.