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Microsoft Windows Media Player Encryption Hacked

Posted by Zonk on from the he-sure-is-a-busy-fella dept.

NubKnacker writes "Here we go again. The Register has the story about the encryption in Windows Media Player being hacked by DVD Jon. From the article: 'Jon Lech Johansen has reverse engineered a proprietary algorithm, which is used to wrap Media Player NSC files and ostensibly protect them from hackers sniffing for the media's source IP address, port or stream format. He has also made a decoder available." This has been pending for some time now. Do you see a reason to install Windows/WMP just to be able to view a webcast?"

3 of 293 comments (clear)

  1. Bring on the MS shills. by Lellor · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If Microsoft, the MPAA, and other corporations don't want their systems hacked, they must make sure that there is a way to play the content on alternative systems easily. Vendor lock in is not acceptable and the people have spoken. Linux (and other non-MS OS) users should not be forced to run Windows to play DVDs or ASFs or whatever. That is all.

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  2. What a shameful tabloid-press like headline by flowerp · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A correct headline would have been:

    Proprietary encoding of Media Player Broadcast definition files successfully reverse engineered.

    The problem is, no one really makes use of NSC files anyway. Most streaming media is still done as simulcast, not as multicast.

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  3. Re:Cool but not super cool by Tackhead · · Score: 5, Insightful
    > So you can grab the stream without using the MS program and netstat.
    >
    > The utility is more like a utility like base64 decoders (this is not base64 though) than a circumventing tool.

    Something like it would, however, make a damn nice Firefox plugin.

    It's grown particularly galling during the Katrina disaster - if you're a TV station, and you're putting up a 2-minute clip of a news article or interview that you broadcast a few hours ago, why in God's name are you making us re-download it every time we want to view it?

    Your servers are half melted down due to Slashdotting, your bandwidth costs are through the roof. If you must use a proprietary video format (seriously, if you're scared people won't be able to get the XVID codec, what's wrong with good old MPEG?), at least let us download the damn thing.

    You stream live content. You download static content. Is the difference that hard to understand? Or is it that news broa-buffering-dcasters hav-buffering-e a strange sexual fetish for buf-buffering-fering?