By Gavin Clarke for The
Register
This article has been reproduced from The Register, with
permission.
Jon Lech Johansen has reverse engineered
a proprietary algorithm, which is used to wrap Media Player NSC
files and ostensibly protect them from hackers sniffing for the
media's source IP address, port or stream format. He has also made
a decoder available.
Johansen doesn't believe there is a good reason to keep the NSC
files encrypted, because once you open the file with Media Player
to start viewing the stream, the IP address and port can be
revealed by running the netstat network utility that is included
with most operating systems.
The hacker hopes his move will make content streamed to Media
Player more widely available to users of alternative players on
non-Windows platforms.
Johansen achieved notoriety when he was tried and re-tried in a
Norwegian court for creating a utility that enabled him to play
DVDs on his Linux PC. Prosecutors, acting in the interests of the
beloved US Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), argued he
had acted illegally by distributing his DeCSS tool to others via
the internet. This, the prosecution, claimed, made it easier to
pirate DVDs.
However, the court ruled in his favor, saying he had not broken
the law in bypassing DVD scrambling codes that had stopped him from
using his PC to play back DVDs.
Earlier this year Johansen developed a work around to bypass
digital rights management (DRM) technology in Apple Computer's
iTunes.
His latest hack was done to make Media Player content available
to the open source VideoLAN Client (VLC) streaming media player.
VLC is available for download to 12 different operating systems and
Linux distributions and has seen more than six million downloads to
Mac. Apple is even pre-loading VLC on some Macs destined for high
schools in Florida.
Johansen told The Register he'd acted following
requests for NSC support in VLC. One
developer is already hard at work integrating Johansen's
decoder into the VLC.
Johansen said: "Windows Media Player is not very good and
Windows and Mac users should not be forced to use it to view such
[NSC] streams."
The NSC file contains information about the stream, such as the
name and address of the stream server. When the file is opened in
Media Player, the file is decoded and then connected to the stream
server specified.
Johansen said claims made by companies like Cisco Systems, who
ship products with NSC support, that the encoding he cracked
protects the media don't make much sense. "It's more likely that
the purpose is to prevent competing media players from supporting
the NSC format," he observed.
© The Register
2005
