| Google advises against using DVD Jon's Patch |
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| Written by Administrator | |
| Friday, 01 July 2005 | |
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The Norwegian teenaged hacker Jon Lech Johansen has
released a patch which will allow users to watch
Google's Video Viewer without the Search Leader's own
software. The patch was published Tuesday in a weblog
posting, little more than a few hours after Video
Viewer was actually released.
Known as DVD Jon, Johansen cracked the encryption
mechanism used by DVDs back in 2001 and was prosecuted
under Norwegian law in 2002.
He was acquitted of the charges when a Norwegian court found no evidence that Johansen, who was 15 at the time he wrote the software, had used his code to produce or watch illegal copies of DVDs. Video Viewer is a modified version of the open source VLC (VideoLAN Client) software - it can only play videos hosted on Google's servers. Launched in January, Google Video then returned excerpts of subtitle transcripts of television programs, still images from broadcasts and other programming information. It didn't return actual video clips that users could watch. Google began soliciting uploads of video content to its web site last April, and with the release of this Video Player it has developed the service to let users view videos from its index. The search engine leader declined to say whether or not it approved of Johansen's modifications to its open source software, but it is not encouraging anyone to download the patch. Nathan Tyler, a Google spokesman said, "We strongly advise users not to download this modification. It could result in security vulnerabilities in their computer and may disrupt their computer's ability to access Google video. We've designed our player to work well for our service," Tyler said in an e-mail message. "Once the player has been modified we can't guarantee whether it will work well with our service." Johansen is something of a celebrity in the Linux community because his DVD decryption software let Linux users run DVDs on their PCs. The software also cracked the CSS (Content Scrambling System) copy protection mechanism used by DVDs. Reuben Dunn |
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| Last Updated ( Friday, 01 July 2005 ) |
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