Show HN: DeCSS
And lastly, in the spirit of April Fools’ Day, here’s a story of a digital rebellion that started 25 years ago.
It all started in 1999, when a 15 year old Norwegian reverse engineered Hollywood’s unbreakable DVD encryption (the Content Scramble System) and wrote a tiny program called DeCSS. His goal? Simply to play DVDs on Linux. Hollywood’s reaction? Full blown panic. Studios sued under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), demanding DeCSS be erased from the internet. But what followed wasn’t just a legal battle - it was a circus of absurdity.
If an executable code - as ruled by a US judge - can be taken down, then what about... A t-shirt? A haiku? A sculpture? The code soon morphed in all imaginable ways, and hackers and activists were releasing it all around the world. It was even encoded as a prime number. An illegal prime number! But my personal favorites remain a rock song and a dramatic interpretation of the code released as an audiobook reading. Meanwhile, the lawyers, completely lost in the irony, at one point even sent a takedown notice to a cat.
Stay mischievous.
EDIT: an obvious omission was not including the link to the gallery of CSS descramblers: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/