Norwegian online music store beat.no easy to hack

beat.no, a Norwegian online music store, has put up a "under maintenance" front page as it was discovered that their HTML5 streaming music solution allowed users to download their music by simply viewing the source of the page.

beat.no usually charges about 10 Norwegian kroner (1.7 USD) for each downloaded song, but allows paid accounts to stream their music as much as they like for free.

beat.no, unlike other music streaming services like Spotify uses a HTML5 based interface to allow users to stream the music using nothing but a browser. Unfortunately, this opens the door for downloading the music you are streaming with very little effort, and no need for external programs.

How they intend to solve this issue remains to be seen. There really is no good way of preventing this while still running the streaming service in the browser.