Da_Taxman and tha_real_whizard used our newssubmit to tell us:
2 Computer science major's found a new way to remove the copy protection of DVD's. Their new program is written in Perl, and contains only 7 (!!) lines.
Their "qrpff" program is a more compact cousin of the DeCSS utility that eight movie studios successfully sued to remove from the website of 2600 Magazine. But unlike DeCSS, qrpff is abbreviated enough for critics of the Motion Picture Association of America to include in, for example, e-mail signature files -- and many already have. |
"I think there's some value in demonstrating how simple these things really are and how preposterous it is to try to restrict their distribution," says Winstein, a 19-year-old MIT sophomore computer science major.
Winstein says it's folly for MPAA and its allies to try to restrict a 526-character program that can be handed out on business cards. "I'm showing the humor in trying to call these seven lines on a piece of paper a device," he says.
The probable spread of qrpff on business cards, on T-shirts, and bumper stickers closely resembles the distribution of encryption code in signature files and T-shirts a few years ago. Such civil disobedience flouted U.S. export laws in a kind of global keep-away game.
Very nice, let's see if some else can do it in even less code
Source: Wired.com
