Jon Johansen Trial Continues 164
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.
Wait til Ashcroft get his hands on this! (Score:5, Insightful)
I sure feel safer with the deck stacked.
Yes. I realize this is off-topic. Soon it won't be.
I'm sick of this story. (Score:3, Insightful)
Give it a rest, and mention it at least every other 2 weeks. There isn't any room for discussion left. Everything has been said 300 times before.
Mod away!
What's up with the defense? (Score:3, Insightful)
Throughout the proceeding [defense counsel] Manshaus has been extremely brief, trying to get the prosecution to concentrate on what he feels are the actual charges and presenting his counter-arguments far more quickly.
What, has he got a hot date? What's the rush here? I hope in his haste he's not missing anything that could exonerate his client.
I guess lawyers in Norway aren't paid by the hour.
Re:I'm sick of this story. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What's up with the defense? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Subtle Sounds of Desperation (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The *real* reason why CSS broke! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:In Soviet Russia (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How it happened .. (almost) [Addendum] (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Don't need deCSS to pirate DVDs? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, in fact DeCSS is a crap way to pirate DVD's.
If that's true, then the prosecution case is considerably weakened.
You have confused "law" and "justice"; there is no connection between the two.
TWW
Anticapitalist laws (Score:4, Insightful)
The same is true of region coding: it is a method of creating artificial scarcity, i.e. of anticompetitive market manipulation.
And this, in the end, is what most of the wrangling decried on Slashdot is about -- companies that were formerly highly competitive using their success to suppress competition that might lead to their downfall. Unfortunately, so accustomed are "capitalists" to admiring gigantic corporations that they can, without blinking, swallow the notion that anticompetitive behavior is a form of competition. It is indeed, but only in a political sense, not a market sense, and market competition is what capitalism is about.
Major media oblivious (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: The *real* reason why CSS broke! (Score:1, Insightful)
But only one key was discovered by reverse engineering. The protocol allows for key revocation (sort of) by pressing new discs without the compromised key.
The algorithm was analyzed, as the parent post explains, and it was found that a brute force approach could find the master key for any disc.
So the _real_ weakness is not due to the trusted client aspect. It simply does not matter when the algorithm itself can be broken with a brute force approach in a matter of minutes or seconds on a modern PC.
This reminds me of drugs trials (Score:3, Insightful)
And we all know how successful it was, don't we. Drugs were stamped out completely. The CIA and the Marines eliminated all drugs from Asia and South America, and the State of Florida obtained its entire GSP from tourism and orange juice.It was just as successful as Prohibition.
Yes, I know this is a rant. I'm pissed off because moronic Norwegian prosecutors are sending, as usual, the wrong message to the kids. Adults are stupid, technically crass, and misuse their power. And they suck up to the people with lots of cash.
Just the message to send the next generation.
Re:How it happened .. (almost) [Addendum] (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh come on! He is 15 years old! I bet there isn't a single
One of the nice things about a lack of maturity is that it is often outgrown. We should keep this in mind before branding this fellow a "liar".