you can thank the usual suspects
Open source advocate
Bruce Perens bought two DVDs on a trip to London and found -- when he returned home -- that they wouldn't work play in his
region-coded DVD player. Perens figured out how to
hack a DVD player to play them and --
in a brazen act of civil disobedience -- plans to demonstrate the hack during
his talk at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention tomorrow.
If you're scratching your head at the "civil disobedience" part, that's because you're not familiar enough with
the DMCA, which provides
criminal penalties of
up to $500,000 and 5 years in jail for giving the sort of presentation Perens plans to. (
Xeni Jardin claims to have locked up
freebruceperens.org, just in case...).
And if you're wondering how we ended up in a world where explaining how to soup up a DVD player is a crime, well, you can thank
the usual suspects.
