The Null Device
2000/9/23
Hackish ingenuity: Not satisfied with the laggardly pace of open-source video players and the lack of popular media formats (which are, for the most, jealously guarded and/or patented), an enterprising hacker in Russia wrote a video player library for Linux which can play video in the latest popular formats. The ingenious part is that this library uses Windows codecs, containing code from Windows emulator projects (Wine and TWIN) to load the libraries and make use of them.
Heartening to see: A British website, hosted at veteran ISP Demon, posted the DeCSS source code. The MPAA sent a cease-and-desist notice, citing US law. Demon threatened to pull the customer's site, but decided not to take action, as British copyright law does not prohibit unlicensed decryption (as US and Australian law does). (via NtK)