[Clips] DVD Jon hacks Media Player file encryption

[R.A. Hettinga]

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 Delivered-To: clips at philodox.com
 Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2005 16:43:11 -0400
 To: Philodox Clips List <clips at philodox.com>
 From: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah at shipwright.com>
 Subject: [Clips] DVD Jon hacks Media Player file encryption
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 <http://www.theregister.com/2005/09/02/dvd_jon_mediaplayer/print.html>

 The Register

 Biting the hand that feeds IT
 The Register » Software » Developer »

 DVD Jon hacks Media Player file encryption
 By Gavin Clarke in San Francisco (gavin.clarke at theregister.co.uk)
 Published Friday 2nd September 2005 06:40 GMT

 Norway's best known IT export, DVD Jon, has hacked encryption coding in
 Microsoft's Windows Media Player, opening up content broadcast for the
 multimedia player to alternative devices on multiple platforms.

 Jon Lech Johansen has reverse engineered
 (http://nanocrew.net/index.php?s=microsoft) 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.

 Johansen doesn't believe there is a good reason to keep the NSC files
 encrypted, because once you open the file with Media Player to start
 viewing the stream, the IP address and port can be revealed by running the
 netstat network utility that is included with most operating systems.

 The hacker hopes his move will make content streamed to Media Player more
 widely available to users of alternative players on non-Windows platforms.

 Johansen achieved notoriety when he was tried and re-tried in a Norwegian
 court for creating a utility that enabled him to play DVDs on his Linux PC.
 Prosecutors, acting in the interests of the beloved US Motion Picture
 Association of America (MPAA), argued he had acted illegally by
 distributing his DeCSS tool to others via the internet. This, the
 prosecution, claimed, made it easier to pirate DVDs.

 However, the court ruled in his favor, saying he had not broken the law in
 bypassing DVD scrambling codes that had stopped him from using his PC to
 play back DVDs.

 Earlier this year Johansen developed a work around to bypass digital rights
 management (DRM) technology in Apple Computer's iTunes.

 His latest hack was done to make Media Player content available to the open
 source VideoLAN Client (VLC) streaming media player. VLC is available for
 download to 12 different operating systems and Linux distributions and has
 seen more than six million downloads to Mac. Apple is even pre-loading VLC
 on some Macs destined for high schools in Florida.

 Johansen told The Register he'd acted following requests for NSC support in
 VLC. One developer
 (http://sidequest.org/weblog/archives/2005/08/multicast_from.html) is
 already hard at work integrating Johansen's decoder into the VLC.

 Johansen said: "Windows Media Player is not very good and Windows and Mac
 users should not be forced to use it to view such [NSC] streams."

 The NSC file contains information about the stream, such as the name and
 address of the stream server. When the file is opened in Media Player, the
 file is decoded and then connected to the stream server specified.

 Johansen said claims made by companies like Cisco Systems, who ship
 products with NSC support, that the encoding he cracked protects the media
 don't make much sense. "It's more likely that the purpose is to prevent
 competing media players from supporting the NSC format," he observed.
 --
 -----------------
 R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
 The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
 "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
 [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
 experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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