Just a day after its
release, Google's VideoLAN-based Google Video Viewer
has been cracked, by none other than "DVD Jon" Johansen, the infamous developer behind PyMusique and DeCSS. Google Video Viewer included code to prevent it from being used to play non-Google hosted videos. Jon's patch disables that, allowing the player to be used with any videos. Given that
VideoLAN is open source, all I can say is, what was Google thinking? When you take an open source tool and try to make it proprietary, you're inviting a fight, and it's fitting that Jon was the one to take the fight to Google.
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