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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.
Too see how things have changed ;) here are some DVD ripping under Linux guides.. http://dvdripping-guid.berlios.de
DVD Ripping, Divx, VCD, SVCD under Linux
Jon Johansen is an evil h4x0r that in one fell swoop allowed socialist Linux and *BSD hippies to watch DVDs on their computers.
If there is any justice, he will be hung from a tall tree in the morning.
Yours truly,
Jack Valenti
Trolling is a art,
I sure feel safer with the deck stacked.
Yes. I realize this is off-topic. Soon it won't be.
Um, maybe because the trial isn't held in the U.S.? Just because something can't be done in the U.S. legal system doesn't mean it can't be done in another country.
While I find the idea of being able to change charges in mid-stream a little. .
Here is a short event log of how things happened.
What the Norvegian prosecutor is doing is claiming that Jon broke the protection on the DVD keyblock. He didn't.
In fact it was a real professional cryptographer Frank Stevenson that demonstrated how to (a) defeat CSS without a key and (b) how to recover all the keys from the keyblock.
And yet the brave Norvegian prosecutor is going after a kid ... His ancestors must be turning wildly in their graves ..
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
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.
The way I remember it, Jon was arrested in Norway because the MPAA told the Norwegians he was being a bad boy. Was that a DMCA thing or before that? If it's a DMCA thing, why the fuck is he being tried in Norway, with Norwegian attornies and Judge, for breaking a US law outside the borders of the US?
Jon didn't even give anyone the finger by showing up in the US to deliver a talk about DeCSS, unlike Skylarov and his piece of code.
If the Norwegians caved in because the MPAA threatened them, here's how the conversation should have gone:
MPAA: we want you to prosecute Jon for breaking CSS.
Norway: Fuck off!
MPAA: we'll embargo DVD shipments to Norway!
Norway: Fuck off! We've got diplomats and tourist all over the world that can ship us DVDs.
MPAA:But they won't work in your region coded players!
Norway: Fuck off! We've got Jon-boy and DeCSS...
I mean, if the prosecution has been fiddling and adjusting the charges this much it pretty much says either that
- they don't feel they have precisely focussed their case,
- 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.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
From:
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/FrankStevenson
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.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
In danger of maybe repeating earlier posts, I thought I'd add a link to Håkon Wium Lie's (CTO in Opera Software and the guy behind Cascading Style Sheets) view on the current DVD trial case. He sees clear analogies between the movie business' wish to decide how the content of a DVD should be played, and the wishes of Microsoft and the likes who among other things want to use proprietary and possibly encrypted formats on the Web.
Anyway, you can change details in the indictment, but only details to make it more precise. The defence can protest, in case you would have to start the whole trial all over. First, the defence objected strongly, but then, they probably just went "WTF, whatever, either the judges have allready got the clue, that the prosecutor is a dirty, rotten corrumpted maniac, which she has made abundantly clear during this trial, in which case it doesn't matter, or they haven't grasped it yet, and then there's the appeal, so lets just get it over with."
The article says: The trial this week has been dominated by the prosecution's painstaking attempts to argue that Johansen deliberately contributed to the removal of copy protection of DVD films leading to their free distribution on the Internet.
But as far as I know, you don't need to decrypt a DVD in order to pirate it. You can just copy the encrypted data, optionally post it on the internet for your friends to copy, then burn the encrypted data onto a blank DVD. Isn't that right?
If that's true, then the prosecution case is considerably weakened. You only need deCSS if you want to convert the video to another, more convenient format.
Doug Moen
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
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.
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"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller