Jon Johansen Trial Continues

An anonymous reader writes "The Norwegian prosecution has been allowed to change the indictment in their case against "DVD-Jon" Johansen. There is an English language article on Friday's trial proceedings now available." VG.nett is also covering the trial.

Comments

Wait til Ashcroft get his hands on this!

[teamhasnoi]

Not only can we have secret trials, but we can change the charges around until we get the outcome we want! Now we can be the subject of surviellience with out a warrant, arrested for a classified reason, not get to see a lawyer or contact anyone, held for an indefinite amount of time, be termed as a 'enemy combatant' with no constitutional rights, be tried by a secret military tribunal, and if the charges don't stick, we can change them mid-trial.

I sure feel safer with the deck stacked.

Yes. I realize this is off-topic. Soon it won't be.

I'm sick of this story.

[cioxx]

Seriously. There aren't any major developments to warrant a story on the front page every 12 hours.

Give it a rest, and mention it at least every other 2 weeks. There isn't any room for discussion left. Everything has been said 300 times before.

Mod away!

Re:I'm sick of this story.

[Anonymous Coward]

You call changing the charges after a trial has started, minor? Maybe you'll think differently when it happens to you.

What's up with the defense?

[szquirrel]

From the article:

Throughout the proceeding [defense counsel] Manshaus has been extremely brief, trying to get the prosecution to concentrate on what he feels are the actual charges and presenting his counter-arguments far more quickly.

What, has he got a hot date? What's the rush here? I hope in his haste he's not missing anything that could exonerate his client.

I guess lawyers in Norway aren't paid by the hour.

Re:What's up with the defense?

[Guppie]

Actually, he was trying to cut down on the Signal/Noise factor in the courtroom. The prosecutor grilled Johansen for hours about "The hacker OS" Linux, what IRC chats he had with the group cracking deCSS, if he had pirated software at home, and so on and so on -not at all realated to the charge.

Manshaus was short and to the point, trying to convey that the court is about one simple thing: Is descrambling your DVD a computer break-in or not? All the hacker-hype from the prosecutor is only there to confuse the judges, by his reasoning.

Subtle Sounds of Desperation

[4of12]

I mean, if the prosecution has been fiddling and adjusting the charges this much it pretty much says either that

1. they don't feel they have precisely focussed their case,
2. they didn't understand the technology and are constantly learning more about it

but in either event, their competence is called into question at the very least, or else the motivation for bringing up the charges was not done under the same rigorous way that Norwegian citizens could hope to expect.

I hope the jury gets the same sense of shoddiness in the prosecutions case that I'm getting.

The *real* reason why CSS broke!

[AftanGustur]

From:
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/FrankStevenson/ analysis.html

CSS was designed with a 40 bit keylength to comply with US government export regulation, and as such it easily compromised through brute force attacks ( such are the intentions of export control ).
Moreover the 40 bits have not been put to good use, as the ciphers succumb to attacks with much lower computational work than which is permitted in the export control rules.
Whether CSS is a serious cryptographic cipher is debatable. It has been clearly been demonstrated that its strength does not match the keylength. If the cipher was intended to get security by remaining secret, this is yet another testament to the fact that security through obscurity is an unworkable principle.

Re: The *real* reason why CSS broke!

[Anonymous Coward]

The keys are in every single player. Trusted client problem.

But only one key was discovered by reverse engineering. The protocol allows for key revocation (sort of) by pressing new discs without the compromised key.

The algorithm was analyzed, as the parent post explains, and it was found that a brute force approach could find the master key for any disc.

So the _real_ weakness is not due to the trusted client aspect. It simply does not matter when the algorithm itself can be broken with a brute force approach in a matter of minutes or seconds on a modern PC.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[Capt. DrunkenBum]

Yeah,and in Americia they are beginning to realize that it is no longer a joke.

Re:How it happened .. (almost) [Addendum]

[AntiFreeze]

There's a nice synopsis about Jon's lies and the "truth" behind DeCSS here. Not what you're talking about, but a very nice corollary.

Re:Don't need deCSS to pirate DVDs?

[nagora]

Isn't that right?

Yes, in fact DeCSS is a crap way to pirate DVD's.

If that's true, then the prosecution case is considerably weakened.

You have confused "law" and "justice"; there is no connection between the two.

TWW

Anticapitalist laws

[Angst Badger]

The thing that has struck me as absurd about the whole DRM mess, and its DVD-specific issues, is that the proponents of such laws, who undoubtedly think of themselves as capitalists, are acting in a markedly anticapitalist fashion. The end result in this case is a young man being tried for breaking through an informal anticompetitive arrangement between the MPAA on one hand and Microsoft and Apple on the other.

The same is true of region coding: it is a method of creating artificial scarcity, i.e. of anticompetitive market manipulation.

And this, in the end, is what most of the wrangling decried on Slashdot is about -- companies that were formerly highly competitive using their success to suppress competition that might lead to their downfall. Unfortunately, so accustomed are "capitalists" to admiring gigantic corporations that they can, without blinking, swallow the notion that anticompetitive behavior is a form of competition. It is indeed, but only in a political sense, not a market sense, and market competition is what capitalism is about.

Major media oblivious

[porkface]

Why is this trial not being recognized by any of the major news outlets? It's of fairly great significance to big media as well as people involved with new technology, and yet I can't find mention of it on TV or even at the greatest depths of any of the major news agency websites. I can see why Disney might want to keep it quiet, but as for the rest of the world, I'm at a loss for understanding on this one.

This reminds me of drugs trials

[panurge]

In the 1970s. Some unfortunate hippy got arrested with a couple of grams of cannabis and the police decided to make an example of this one. So the prosecutor went on and on about the end of civilisation, stoned maniacs raping chickens and biting the heads off sheep, anything that would conceal from the press and the public that some unfortunate middle class kid was being made a scapegoat. Then the judge would hand down some remarks about the need to stop this sort of thing, set an example, and send the hippy to prison for ten years or so, while a few of the police continued to collect the weekly brown envelopes from the dealers.

And we all know how successful it was, don't we. Drugs were stamped out completely. The CIA and the Marines eliminated all drugs from Asia and South America, and the State of Florida obtained its entire GSP from tourism and orange juice.It was just as successful as Prohibition.

Yes, I know this is a rant. I'm pissed off because moronic Norwegian prosecutors are sending, as usual, the wrong message to the kids. Adults are stupid, technically crass, and misuse their power. And they suck up to the people with lots of cash.
Just the message to send the next generation.

Re:How it happened .. (almost) [Addendum]

[TarPitt]

after all he has a very bad attitude.

Oh come on! He is 15 years old! I bet there isn't a single /. poster who did not have a bad attitude at that age. Ditto with his comments about Linux and his use of the GPL. Has no-one here ever made an ill considered post?

One of the nice things about a lack of maturity is that it is often outgrown. We should keep this in mind before branding this fellow a "liar".