Sometimes, however, the things Johansen tries to improve were made a certain way for a reason. When he was 15, Johansen got frustrated when his DVDs didn’t work the way he wanted them to. “I was fed up with not being able to play a movie the way I wanted to play it,” that is, on a PC that ran Linux.
To fix the problem, he and two hackers he met online wrote a program called DeCSS, which removed the encryption that limits what devices can play the discs. That meant the movies could be played on any machine, but also that they could be copied. After the program was posted online, Johansen received an award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation – and a visit from Norwegian police.
Johansen, now 22 and widely known as “DVD Jon” for his exploits, has also figured out how Apple’s iPod-iTunes system works. And he’s using that knowledge to start a business that is going to drive Steve Jobs crazy.
A disruptor
If you want to be specific – and for legal reasons, he does – Johansen has reverse-engineered FairPlay, the encryption technology Apple (Charts) uses to make the iPod a closed system. Right now, thanks to FairPlay, the songs Apple sells at its iTunes store cannot easily be played on other devices, and copy-protected songs purchased from other sites will not play on the iPod. (The iPod will play MP3 files, which do not have any copy protection, but major labels don’t sell music in that format.)
Monthly Archives: October 2006
Doonesbury’s War
It’s hard to know what to say to a grievously injured person, and it’s easy to be wrong . You could do what I did, for example. Scrounging for the positive, I cheerfully informed a young man who had lost both legs and his left forearm that at least he’s lucky he’s a righty. Then he wordlessly showed me his right hand, which is missing fingertips and has limited motion — an articulated claw. That shut things right up, for both of us, and it would have stayed that way, except the cartoonist showed up.
Garry Trudeau, the creator of “Doonesbury,” hunkered right down in front of the soldier, eye to eye, introduced himself and proceeded to ignore every single diplomatic nicety.
“So, when were you hit?” he asked.
“October 23.”
Trudeau pivoted his body. “So you took the blast on, what . . . this side?”
Steadman’s “The Joke’s Over”
Perhaps you can picture the work of Roald Dahl without the illustrations of Quentin Blake, or of Charles Dickens without the cartoons of Phiz. In a part of my mind, when reading Anthony Powell, I retain the images of the characters furnished by the imperishable Mark Boxer. Would we really have appreciated Alice in Wonderland without the drawings of Tenniel? However these questions may be decided, it is a certainty that the noir contribution of Ralph Steadman (who also produced a brilliantly illustrated Alice Through the Looking Glass) is as inseparable from the output of Hunter S Thompson as Marks from Spencer, or Engels from Marx.
This is not to say that the two men were exactly made for each other. Starting with their first joint assignment, which was to lampoon the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan’s magazine in 1970, Steadman was made to appreciate that he was yoked to a volatile and often dangerous manic-depressive. To describe the subsequent partnership as addictive would be disconcertingly accurate, although “disconcerting” would be the weakest way of expressing Steadman’s alarm at the properties of a small yellow pill that his friend so thoughtfully gave him on a later bad trip — if you will excuse the expression — to the America’s Cup in Rhode Island. The ensuing near-death experience is described without either rancour or self-pity, and, indeed, Steadman cannot claim not to have been warned.
The Information Factories
This change is as momentous as the industrial-age shift from craft production to mass manufacture, from individual workers in separate shops turning out finished products step by step to massive factories that break up production into thousands of parts and perform them simultaneously. No single computer could update millions of auctions in real time, as eBay does, and no one machine could track thousands of stock portfolios made up of offerings on all the world’s exchanges, as Yahoo does. And those are, at most, terascale tasks. Page and Brin understood that with clever software, scores of thousands of cheap computers working in parallel could perform petascale tasks – like searching everything Yahoo, eBay, Amazon.com, and anyone else could shovel onto the Net. Google appears to have attained one of the holy grails of computer science: a scalable massively parallel architecture that can readily accommodate diverse software.
Google’s core activity remains Web search. Having built a petascale search machine, though, the question naturally arose: What else could it do? Google’s answer: just about anything. Thus the company’s expanding portfolio of Web services: delivering ads (AdSense, AdWords), maps (Google Maps), videos (Google Video), scheduling (Google Calendar), transactions (Google Checkout), email (Gmail), and productivity software (Writely). The other heavyweights have followed suit.
How HP Kept Tabs on a Wall Street Journal Reporter
Unbeknownst to my family and me, someone was scoping out our trash earlier this year — someone hired by Hewlett-Packard Co.
The trash study was carried out in January by Security Outsourcing Solutions Inc., a Needham, Mass., investigative firm that H-P employed, according to a briefing H-P officials gave me yesterday. Whether the sleuths ever encountered my toddler’s dirty diapers, H-P said it doesn’t know.
I learned this — and more — as I sat in a conference room at H-P’s outside law firm yesterday in San Francisco, where attorney John Schultz ran through a litany of snooping tactics H-P’s agents used against me as part of its effort to identify which of its directors might be leaking news to the press. For around a year, Mr. Schultz told me, H-P collected information about me. H-P’s investigators tried at least five times, he said, to get access to my home-phone, cellphone and office-phone records. In several instances, they succeeded: H-P now has lists of calls I made to people such as my editors, my husband, my insurance company and a reporting source employed by one H-P rival.
H-P’s agents had my photo and reviewed videotaped footage of me, said Mr. Schultz, of the law firm of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. They conducted “surveillance” by looking for me at certain events to see if I would show up to meet an H-P director. (I didn’t.) They also carried out “pre-trash inspections” at my suburban home early this year, Mr. Schultz said.
A Lesson from Europe on Healthcare
A few weeks ago, I wrote a column arguing that this country’s increased medical spending over the last half-century has, on the whole, been overwhelmingly worth it. Thanks to new treatments for everything from premature births to heart attacks, human life has continued to lengthen — defying expectations — even without major improvements in public health. Yet, strangely, we talk about medical spending as if it were nothing more than a drag on the economy, rather than an investment in the most important thing of all: our well-being.
I received about 500 e-mail responses from readers, and the most common reaction was a version of a simple question. “Why do Americans spend so much more than folks in most other developed countries while getting worse results?” as Sumati Eberstadt of East Greenwich, R.I., wrote.
In Greece, the government and individuals combine to spend about $2,300 per capita on health care each year, and the average life expectancy is 79 years. Canada, where the hospitals are probably cleaner, spends about $3,300, and people live to about 80. Here in the United States, we spend more than $6,000, yet life expectancy is just below 78.
Leisure Suits on the Way Back?
Well worth reading.
The Politics of Electronic Rights
echWorld (a UK publication) has an article about a “leaked” letter from the Initiative for Software Choice (ISC) (apparently MSFT funded) about, as the article puts it, the “potentially dire effects if too much encouragement was given to open source software development.”
Nothing weird there. What is weird is, first, that such a letter has to be “leaked” (aren’t submissions to the EC a matter of public record?), and, second, the way in which the letter is made available on the TechWorld website. TechWorld gives you a link to the letter. The link states: “You can view the entire letter here.” And indeed, the link means what it says. You can ONLY view the letter. The PDF is locked so that it can’t be printed.
Sustainability workshop, Akumal, Mex, Nov. 6 -12
Centro Ecológico Akumal (CEA) will offer a sustainability workshop, November 6 – 12, in Akumal, Mexico.
I began volunteering for CEA in 2000, and Akumal is as close to paradise as I’ve ever experienced. Located 60 miles south of Cancun, the shallow, crystal-clear water and sandy beach of Akumal Bay define tropical perfection. Shops for renting snorkel and dive gear are right on the beach. The small, but stunning, Tulum ruins hug the sea 10 minutes south of Akumal, and the jungles hide many, many small sites that you can visit on your own or with a guide. Additionally, local guides can lead exceptional nature walks, and CEA staff give entertaining and educational presentations nightly.
The course will cover alternative technologies for the production of energy, the treatment of wastewater, and the disposal of solid waste. The course will be taught in Spanish, though nearly all of the instructors and students will be bilingual. See more details at http://www.ceakumal.org/sustainability_workshop.html.
Contact Ed Blume (ed@ceakumal.org) for more details on Akumal and tips on how to get there as cheaply as possible.
Words With Jerry Brown
The most enduring and intriguing California politician of our generation is sitting in a sidewalk café, enjoying a balmy offshore breeze in this city’s upscale Belmont Shore district. Yet not a single passerby knows it’s him.
Laid-back shoppers stream past in linen sundresses and camouflage shorts. This decidedly un-hip man is slightly out of place in his conservative gray suit, fussy dress shirt and white Carroll O’Connor eyebrows. He’s not Arnold, instant traffic-stopper. Yet if anyone peered closely, they’d probably recognize the burning eyes of Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, the darkly handsome upstart governor of the 1970s, now a gray and balding 68-year-old.
He’s just emerged from a nearly invisible summer to launch a blatantly negative TV ad against his rival for attorney general of California, and he’s finally granting interviews — including one to me. Barring a brilliant turnaround by his lesser-known but respected competitor, Republican state Sen. Charles Poochigian of Fresno, Mr. Brown will be the next California attorney general.
I voted for Jerry once, in the 1992 Presidential Primary.