Daily Archives: October 23, 2006

Find Out of Congress is a Family Business

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The ever useful Sunlight Foundation:

Rep. Richard Pombo ☼ did it with his wife and his brother. In his 2004 presidential campaign, Sen. Joseph Lieberman ☼ did it with his children. Former Majority Leader Tom DeLay did it with his wife and daughter. All have hired relatives to work on their campaigns, paying them salaries out of special interest contributions. Our system of campaign finance is often called “legalized bribery,” in which special interests donate tens of thousands of dollars to a member’s campaign committee in the hopes of advancing their own issues. Some members of Congress, by hiring their spouses, in effect use their campaign treasury to supplement their own bank accounts. The practice is legal, disclosed in obscure corners of campaign finance reports, and rarely mentioned by those who cover campaigns. And now citizen journalists can investigate it!

I’m proud to announce that the Sunlight Foundation is launching a new distributed research and reporting project that will enable citizen journalists to find out how many members of the House of Representatives have their spouses on the payroll. Our simple, user-friendly six step tool (developed by our ultra-cool Sunlight Labs division) lets users investigate and record their results in just three minutes.

Unlocking the iPod – Great Fair Use Article

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Robert Levine:

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.)