Famed Norwegian hacker Jon Lech Johansen, better known as DVD Jon, has taken the open source nature of Google’s newly launched, browser-based video player to heart evidently.
DVD Jon’s rise to fame stems from his work on hacking DVD security encryption codes. For quite some time, Jon has understandably been a thorn in the side of the movie industry because of his hacking ability. Now it appears as if Google, or at least their open source video player, is the latest utility to be altered by DVD Jon.
According to Yahoo News, the 21-year old DVD Jon hacked into Google’s video viewer in order to disable a Google-added modification that would only allow the player to view videos stored on Google’s video search server. Jon’s hack was completed and posted as a patch on his So Sue Me blog in less than 24 hours.
Jon’s downloadable patch removes Google’s restriction, allowing the player to playback video files that aren’t stored in Google’s massive farm of servers. In order to successfully run the patch, Jon indicates users must be in a .Net runtime environment.
There has been no public response from Google or their team of developers responsible for the player. However, considering the open source nature and Google’s invitation for others to alter the player however they saw fit, perhaps the search engine will turn a blind eye to DVD Jon’s latest exploit.
However, a quick glance at the Google Code projects page finds the source code to their video viewer noticeably absent. Perhaps they removed when Jon’s work was released, or they may have forgot to post it to begin with. I personally didn’t look to see if the code was available when the viewer first launched. Can anyone verify whether or not the source code was actually posted? If so, drop me an email.
If you are interested in learning what DVD Jon did to circumvent the Google Video Viewer restriction, visit his blog to see what was removed and/or altered.
Chris Richardson is a search engine writer and editor for murdok. Visit murdok for the latest search news.
