From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Sat Jul 28 2001 - 01:15:38 MDT
Harvey Newstrom wrote:
>
> Samantha Atkins wrote,
> > What do you mean by "contravene"? He simply wrote papers and
> > produced a program to back up his papers on how broken the
> > protection schemes are.
>
> Actually, it is not quite so simple. Dmitry Sklyarov works for a Russian
> company called ElcomSoft Co. Ltd. of Moscow <http://ElcomSoft.com>. They
> They sell commercial software that recovers passwords or breaks encryption
> <http://ElcomSoft.com/prs.html>. Their software is purportedly intended for
> people who have lost their passwords, but could be used by anybody to break
> into for which they never had a password. They sell programs that can crack
> into just about anything: Compressed files, Microsoft Office products, AOL,
> ICQ, Quicken, QuickBooks, Lotus products, Adobe products, Borland/Corel
> products, Symantec products, etc. They also sell password generators,
> brute-force password crackers, and other tools that hackers often use to
> break into other people's files. Their site is written in English and gives
> all prices in U.S. dollars.
>
Pardon me, but this has nothing to do with the charges against
him. Many of those pasword cracking products are bought by
"law enforcement" organizations like the self-same FBI that
nabbed him and refuses to release him even after Adobe dropped
their complaint and asked that he be released.
If we have a beef with the company he works for in general then
we should take that up with the company instead of locking away
one of its employees on trumped up charges.
Lastly, do not call people who do cyber breaking and enterning
"hackers".
> Their latest product is this program which breaks the encryption for Adobe
> Systems Inc. PDF (Portable Document Format) files and e-books
This "encryption" is so asinine and childish that a 12 year old
could break it without hardly trying.
>without having
> the decryption key. This cracking program was not just written as an
> exercise or as a demo. It was published as commercial software and is
> offered for sale over the Internet <http://elcomsoft.com/apdfpr.html>. They
It is also offered in conformance with "fair use" which Adobe
e-books and other closed systems today would deny by enforcing a
different set of common law in the code itself which everyone is
then forbiddent to reverse-engineer or contravene. This is a
huge threat to all of us.
> even have a free demo version of the program available for download that
> will let people crack any Adobe e-book for 30 days.
>
Good for them!
- samantha
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