Hacker hero hired by digital music startup

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, October 22, 2005

The Norwegian who became a hacker hero at age 15 will have to adjust to warmer winters.

Jon Lech Johansen, also known as “DVD Jon” for his work with software to crack copy-protection in DVDs, began work in San Diego this week at MP3tunes, the digital music service started in February by Michael Robertson, an iconoclast in his own right.

As a teenager, Johansen developed and posted software called DeCSS to unlock the Content Scrambling System, or CSS, the film industry used on DVD movies to prevent illegal copying. After the film industry complained, Norwegian authorities charged him with data break-in, but Johansen was acquitted at trial and on appeal.

He has since posted programs that circumvent the copy-protection technologies on Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes music software.

Johansen, 21, is working on a project at MP3tunes dubbed Oboe, which “will bring digital music into the 21st century,” Robertson wrote on his Web site.

Google makes amends to China: Google Inc.’s popular online mapping service has become entangled in a long-running territorial dispute between mainland China and Taiwan.

Until recently, Google’s maps described Taiwan as a “province of China.” That sparked protests from Taiwan’s government, which has considered its island an independent state since ending a civil war with China more than a half-century ago.

Shortly after Taiwan’s foreign ministry formally complained, the China reference abruptly disappeared from Google’s Taiwan map last week.

That, in turn, has provoked cries of dismay in China and talk of a possible boycott of Google’s service in that country, according to Chinese media.

The change doesn’t reflect Google’s political opinion on the dispute, according to company spokeswoman Debbie Frost. She said Google wanted to enlarge its map images to make them easier for users to see, so it removed all text from the left corner of the Web page.

Although initially disappointed with the change, the Chinese government now understands it’s part of a product upgrade after discussing the issue with Google, a spokesman for China’s San Francisco consulate said Wednesday. “We continue to think it’s important to recognize Taiwan is part of China,” Qiang Wang said.

Taking blogs to the next level: Bloggers live or die by their wits – and that especially includes those who try to make a business of it.

No one is as acutely aware of that as Mike Masnick, chief executive of Techdirt Inc., a 12-person corporate intelligence service best known for its no-holds-barred public Web journal, or blog, that comments continuously on tech industry developments.

Masnick’s 5-year-old enterprise, which grew out of an idea he developed while a student at Cornell in the 1990s, distills and interprets tech news for such corporate customers as Volkswagen AG and VeriSign Inc.

Now, the company has a new customized service that Masnick dubbed InfoAdvisor because it delivers tailored Web feeds from news outlets and blogs pertinent to a customer’s interest.

The key: Masnick’s stable of geeks – journalists, analysts and engineers – edit those feeds and provide expert commentary, telling you who and what to trust. Traditional media mostly had a lock on that market before the Internet let loose an information flood.

One of those wiki moments: An eye-gouging fight between American Airlines and Southwest Airlines over air service in northern Texas has spilled over to an online encyclopedia.

Wikipedia lets users create, change and even erase articles on any topic, regardless of their expertise.

Supporters say its open, collaborative nature leads to a more complete, bias-free reference source, though when the topic is controversial the wiki entry can resemble a battlefield.

Last week, someone using a computer with an Internet address assigned to American Airlines edited Wikipedia to describe Southwest Airlines Co. as “a notoriously litigious company constantly seeking to change laws to gain an advantage.” For a time, the site also said Dallas-based Southwest is “known for its PR machine and litigious nature.”

Wikipedia volunteers deleted the phrases within hours.

Wiki pioneer moves on: The inventor of the online collaboration tools known as wikis has left software giant Microsoft Corp. to join the Eclipse Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to open source technologies.

In 1995, Ward Cunningham created the first wiki, an information-sharing Web site that lets visitors contribute, edit and delete any item they see.

The best known is Wikipedia, where volunteers contribute to a free online encyclopedia that now boasts hundreds of thousands of entries in many languages.

Cunningham worked in Microsoft’s technical “patterns and practices” group. At Eclipse, he’ll support communities of developers on various projects.

Spam not spoken here: A trade group for marketers is requiring its members to adopt a spam-fighting technology that could help improve the chances of their legitimate pitches getting through.

Businesses have been increasingly frustrated that overzealous spam filters are blocking newsletters, coupons and other e-mail requested by customers. Some estimates say that as many as one in four legitimate marketing messages get mistakenly rejected.

Separate authentication technologies pushed by Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. would help an Internet service provider verify that a message’s sender is accurate and authorized. Spammers often use fake e-mail addresses, so those messages would fail authentication tests.

The Direct Marketing Association, in approving the requirement this week, did not say which system its members must use.