Ouch! Clever forum member pulletsforever wanted to be able to read MAKE on his iPad, and in the process of poking around, found a security vulnerability that lets anyone download complete PDF copies of the MAKE digital edition, for free! CoverLeaf (the company that hosts MAKE digital) techs tell us they’re working on a fix as we speak.
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First of all who would want to hack a zine that is all about hacking?
But the cheese on cat photo was worth it.
…you would draw admiring attention to a hack that (potentially) deprives you of magazine revenue! I am an avid reader of the blog down here in Australia, and if I ever bought a magazine it would be Make.
Great Job!
Between O’Reilly telling me to go to Coverleaf and Coverleaf telling me to go to O’Reilly, at least now after a year I might actually be able to get access to the online magazine I paid for!
Just like with any DRM, stealing it is about the only way to get it to function the way you paid for in the first place.
Oh, I thought that this was just a great feature.
When I signed up for my last renewal, it said I could access the back issues online. Never got that to work and the JPG resolution on the current issues I could access left me missing details on some of the diagrams. I stopped even trying to access it. It wasn’t an added bonus to the subscription at all.
But these PDF’s sure are nice.
Wish it was this way to begin with.
The fact that you post a link on your blog that details the way to obtain these PDFs for free, before a fix has been issued, allows me to respect Make as an organization even more. Especially since there’s a sense of humor about it.
There is no doubt that I will continue my subscription far into the future. You guys keep surprising me.
Keep up the good work!
Please consider making pdf or ereader formats available to subscribers, at least. I’d love to automatically download my subscription to my B&N Nook, but failing that I’d be happy to be able to download a .pdf and transfer it to the device.
I do most of my reading on airplanes, and this would let me bring Make along without the added bulk of the physical magazine.
The digital version of Make is DRM protected for profit reasons, yet Make is a huge proponent of the open source movement. Oil, meet water.
Just ask Cory Doctorow
After seeing this, I went back and renewed my lapsed subscription.
LOL, I love this and love that you posted it on your front page. Just confirms where your heart is. I agree with Mad Scientist, a free PDF download for existing magazine subscribers would be very handy. I could carry the entire Make: library on a USB keychain and have all the info in pocket, all the time.
Thanks for not just talking the talk, but walking the walk. I wish there were more publications, both digital and analog, that had the type of integrity and commitment to their mission statement that this post shows. Come to think of it, I wish more people would, too.
it’s all already written in the other comments
I subscribe to Make and have access to the backlog of issues. But it’s nice to have the option to download the PDFs so I don’t have to be connected to the internet to read the magazine. (perhaps I should say it would be nice to have this option because I’m sure it’s not available now
)
I originally paid the extra 10 or so a year to get access to it online, and largely haven’t used the online part because for the longest time you could not download the issues. It appears you can now. Upper right hand corner should be a download link after you log in to see the issue online.
Not so much a hack or “security vulnerability” as simply the discovery that CoverLeaf left unprotected content in a location that is publicly accessible.
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