Archive for April, 2004

My father recently bought a Nikon COOLSCAN V ED and has been scanning old pictures. He mailed me this one of me next to our Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

Picture is Copyright (C) 2004 Per Johan Johansen. All rights reserved.

This VLC fortune seems rather appropriate:

<bozo> you really shouldn’t have touched a computer when you were a little boy
<stef> _it_ came to me

Apple has succeeded in having playfair removed from sarovar.org. The cease and desist notice does not specify which paragraphs of the laws mentioned sarovar.org was supposedly violating. That’s not surprising. When the MPAA’s lawyer contacted me regarding DeCSS four years ago, he failed to specify paragraphs as well. Such is the nature of frivolous charges.

I’m not mirroring playfair for two reasons:

• playfair is licensed under the GPL, but links to mp4v2 which is licensed under the MPL. The MPL is not GPL compatible. The developer of playfair could easily rectify this by changing the license of his code to MPL. Update: I forgot that playfair also links to mp4ff which is licensed under the GPL. Thus my previous suggestion wouldn’t solve the problem.
• The playfair tarball is 0,5 MB. That’s way too much.

What’s a copyfighter to do in such circumstances? I give you DeDRMS. Tarball is 10 KB. 210 lines of code. Written in C# using MonoDevelop.

MD5(DeDRMS-0.1.tar.gz) = 934a471f20d6580d5aad759bf0d97ddc

I’m back from Brussels. Very nice city. Next time I will have to take the time to visit Liège, the software reverse engineering capital of the world.

Thanks to Laurence Vandewalle for having invited me and given me the opportunity to speak on a Fair Use panel in the European Parliament together with Yann Ménière, Gwen Hinze (EFF), Laurence Lebersorg (Test-Achat) and Andrea Glorioso.

Power to the Parliament!

SourceForge has deleted the playfair project after receiving a DMCA takedown notice from Apple. The project has now moved to sarovar.org. The server is located in India, which is not a party to the WIPO Copyright Treaty or the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty.

An anonymous developer has released a M4P decryptor called playfair. It uses the updated FAAD2 DRMS code I posted one week ago.

Note to the developer: Sam Hocevar’s entry is missing in the drms.c copyright header.