Rupert Neethling
Reverse engineering is a digital hot potato. Geeks love it because it lets them study how programming code is put together. Movie moguls hate it because the geeks went and cracked the code that keeps customers from playing Digital Video Discs wherever and on whatever platform they want.
The final straw came when 16-year-old Norwegian Jon Johansen put something called DeCSS on his homepage. DeCSS enables users of the Linux operating system to play DVDs on their computers, which they weren’t able to do before. That’s when entertainment giants like Disney, Sony, MGM, Paramount, Fox, Universal Studios and Warner Bros decided to get tough, since DeCSS supposedly paves the way for illegal copying.
So they had a few words with the Norwegian authorities. Who promptly raided Johansen’s home, seized his hardware and took him downtown for seven hours of questioning. He was indicted along with his dad, who owns the Web domain on which his homepage resided. This, even though Jon hadn’t created the original code that went into DeCSS – his crime was to make it easier to use and to publish it.
Johansen’s is just one of the more recent in a long list of indictments that began last year. Hundreds of people have been nabbed, including those who merely placed links on their sites to the DeCSS code on Jon’s homepage.
Clearly, the Web is being scrutinised by forces vast and unsympathetic. But they have a problem: files called DeCSS.zip and DeCSS.tar.gz are swarming and multiplying all over the Internet, and a lot of them are decoys. The genius behind this plot is called Mr Bad, editor of the nefarious Pigdog Journal (www.pigdog.org). He developed a harmless program that has nothing to do with DVD, gave it the same name as Jon’s code, and then encouraged people to spread it around, sowing confusion amongst the enemy.
This new guerrilla tactic has been dubbed Whack-a-Mole. The question now is who’s going to get tired first – the whackers or the moles?