DVD Jon gets job, moves Stateside

Written by Wil Harris

October 19, 2005 | 23:00

Tags: #copyright #dvd #dvd-jon #johansen #jon #linspire #wired

The world's favourite Norwegian is moving to warmer climes, it seems. You see, DVD Jon has gotten himself a job in sunny San-Diego. "Who with?", I here you cry. Mike 'Linspire' Robertson, that's who - and it looks as if the new project that the two of them will be reverse eng... sorry, developing will have a musical bent. Various DRM systems will be cowering in fear, no doubt...

"SAN FRANCISCO -- Jon Lech Johansen, the 21-year-old Norwegian media hacker nicknamed DVD Jon, is moving to San Diego to work for maverick tech entrepreneur Michael Robertson in what can only be described as the most portentous team-up since Butch met Sundance.

"I have no idea what I'll be doing, but I know it will be reverse engineering, and I'm sure it will be interesting," Johansen told Wired News during a Friday stopover in San Francisco.

A world-famous reverse engineer by the time he was 16, the soft-spoken tinkerer outraged the motion picture industry in 1999 for his work on DeCSS, a successful project to crack the encryption on DVDs that led to Hollywood's first lawsuits under the United States' controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Since then, Johansen's hacks for Apple Computer's iTunes software and Microsoft's Media Player have made headlines, and his blog -- titled "So Sue Me" -- has become must-see surfing for digital media geeks and, one suspects, entertainment company lawyers.

In a posting to his website late Tuesday, Robertson said he'd snapped up Johansen to work on a "significant new project" called Obeo at his digital music company MP3tunes. Obeo will "bring digital music into the 21st century," Robertson wrote."


More from Wired here.

So, he's been consulting with the EFF lawyers then? Must mean that whatever Oboe is, it's going to tread on someone's toes... And DRM cracking is Jon's speciality, given his track record. I guess, as Serenity fans might say, Jon 'Aims to misbehave'...

Discuss Jon's gainfull employment and Oboe in our news forum. Just remember, you can't stop cracking the DRM signal!
Discuss this in the forums
YouTube logo
MSI MPG Velox 100R Chassis Review

October 14 2021 | 15:04

TOP STORIES

SUGGESTED FOR YOU