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.

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: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.

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.