Even though I have warned her about DRM multiple times, my wife loves purchasing her music on iTunes and did so quite extensively for at least the past two years.  A week ago she calls me for help, as one her favorite's artist music cannot be read on her iTunes or iPod anymore.  Each times she tries, it ask for her iTunes music account password, seems to say that it validates it and then ask for her password again!

I try it a few times with her and quickly come to the conclusion that she should contact the iTunes support as something definitely looks wrong.  The first reply comes back quite quickly, asking her to follow the steps described on http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306424, which we follow scrupulously to no positive result.

New email to the support and reply which inform us that my wife seems to have two accounts on the store, one with her official email address, another one with 'Crker_IN_X@hotmail.com'.  I can't believe that iTunes support sent her such a reply.  Do I need to tell you that my wife only ever used her official email address and no other?  Am I the only one to notice the word "Cracker" in her supposedly second email address?  I went and checked again the music files she cannot use anymore as well as a sample of the others and, not very surprisingly, her official email address is the only email address we can find in her whole library.

I just wrote a reply to the support suggesting that, maybe, seeing such an email address should have tipped them off that there might be a slight possibility that the iTunes store suffered an SQL injection or some other attack that would have for effect to re-attribute my wife's music to someone else...  I don't think they'll ever admit it if it is the case, but I do hope that they won't let her down and fix their database quickly.

I'll keep you posted on an eventual reply, but obviously, here is another example of why DRM are toxic by nature, if we needed another one...

[update June 11th 2008]

After some research, it looks like like her account has been brute forced in April 2007.  Apple support is finally trying to help and starts to understand the issue, but at this point, my wife still has no solution to music she legally purchased. 

[update July 9th 2008]

After about a month of negociation with support, and she's had to rise her voice a few times, Apple finaly agreed to reset her cracked account password so that she can now access her music again. No word was given on how the cracking has occurred or measures that will be taken to prevent this in the future...