Saturday, October 11, 2003

Alex Halderman: Scourge of the Personal Technology Industry

It's not every day that one of your good friends gets his name thrown about in the national media and causes a rather large company to lose $10 million. But that's what happened to my pal Alex. I couldn't be more proud.

For a few years now, Alex has been working one way or another with anti-copying technology for the music industry. Recently, he discovered that a highly-touted technology available from SunnComm Technologies can be bypassed by simply holding down the Shift key. SunnComm was among the first to introduce CDs that they claimed could not be copied. Alex found otherwise, and published his report on his site. Someone from Reuters found the report, published it, and before you know it Alex is on the front page of CNN.com, the company's stock goes down 36%, and lawsuits are threatened. It's fun to watch the progressions. Here's a few links for those who are curious:

Alex's report