Now, what do you suppose it is about Jon Lech Johansen that he just can't seem to leave Apple alone these days? For those of you unfamiliar with the name, Johansen is also known as "DVD Jon," because a few years back he was the lil' Norwegian fella who cracked the CSS encryption used on commercial DVDs, and he's been fending off the incessant legal attacks of endless Hollywood ninja lawyers ever since. However, the exuberance of youth is an irrepressible thing (Jon's only 20 years old now), so he still makes time to mess with copy protection systems whenever he can-- a fact which has boosted Rolaids consumption within the walls of One Infinite Loop by an impressive 13%.

See, in recent months, DVD Jon has turned his attention to the FairPlay digital rights management technology Apple uses in every song sold from the iTunes Music Store. Last November he published a wee bit o' code called QTFairUse that could strip the copy protection right out of iTMS songs, yielding the identical AAC file but with all that icky DRM stuff scrubbed off. While his code was rough, it was used as the basis of PlayFair, which was eventually renamed "hymn," and which, despite having been chased off of U.S. servers and forced to take refuge in India, continues to be a thorn in Apple's side to this day.

Well, the fun doesn't stop there. The latest from DVD Jon is a tool called "JustePort," which "lets you stream MPEG4 Apple Lossless files to your AirPort Express" (presumably sans iTunes, because otherwise it's not much of a trick). You may recall that when AirPort Express came out, Steve mentioned that, in order to keep the music labels happy, AirTunes encrypts the music stream between iTunes and the AirPort Express, presumably to prevent evildoers from intercepting the wireless signal inflight and committing the heinous act of (gasp!) listening to songs sent through the airwaves-- for free. (Of course, why they would drive up to your house with a wireless laptop to tap into your AirPort Express stream of Ace of Base's Greatest Hits instead of just turning on the radio is beyond us, but they have their reasons. They're evildoers, after all.)

But wait-- what's this? While the code used in hymn can certainly be used to distribute illegal copies of songs, this JustePort thingy seems to be more of a way to unlock the usefulness of the AirPort Express itself. See, as a side effect of that encrypted streaming that the record labels apparently insisted that Apple use, the Express can't stream sound from anything other than iTunes itself, which sort of limits the appeal of the device; what if you want to stream, say, your unfinished GarageBand song to your living room speakers while you're working on it? Or send the sound from your PowerBook's DVD Player to your bedroom's sound system while you're watching a movie in bed? Sure, there are workarounds to do this sort of thing now, but they're clunky and introduce a delay.

Well, now that Jon has extracted the public encryption key used in the Express, he's paved the way for third party developers to add AirTunes sound output to their applications, which actually strikes us as sort of a cool thing. Apple will almost certainly disagree; sure, it could mean increased AirPort Express sales, but technically, this isn't much different from Real opening up the iPod without Apple's consent-- and Apple didn't exactly jump and down with joy when that happened, either. We'll have to wait and see if Apple Legal springs into action. (Maybe they already have; at broadcast time, DVD Jon's website wasn't responding.)

What we've always hoped, actually, is that by the time Mac OS X Tiger finally ships, any local AirPort Express units will just show up as plain ol' audio outputs in the Sound panel of System Preferences. It seems like an obvious feature to us, but we'll see. In the meantime, we're curious to see what, if anything, comes out of this JustePort development-- even if it's just a news story about DVD Jon's mysterious disappearance in the night, the only clue a shuriken lodged in his bedpost...