Jon Lech Johansen, and you can call him DVD Jon.
"If you can't beat them hire them" - This seems to be Apple's new motto. The reason being, it has hired DVD Jon. The very same Jon, who's broken into iTunes thrice giving them sleepless nights.
The first time he targeted iTunes was when he decrypted Apple Computer's wireless music streaming technology. He published the key that Apple's wireless hi-fi bridge, Airport Express, uses to protect music streams and also released another program along with the key and in effect contribute to making it possible for other software applications other than Apple iTunes to work with AirPort Express.
The second time around DVD Jon and two other programmers released software they call "PyMusique", that allows people to connect to Apple's iTunes music store and purchase songs without any copyright protection. They reportedly insisted that "PyMusique" is a "fair interface" for iTunes, aimed at allowing people who use the Linux operating system to purchase music from Apple's store.
Apple's patched the 'vulnerability'.
Just a few days after that they found their way back in spite of the patch. That was when Steve Jobs decided that he'd had enough. He has reportedly paid DVD Jon an undisclosed yet bizarrely huge amount of money to join Apple. DVD Jon has accepted the offer adding to the ever-growing list of hackers who bag security jobs (pun unintended) in big companies.
Picture is Copyright (C) 2004 Per Johan Johansen. All rights reserved.
More history about this great hacker:
November 1983: Born in Harstad, Norway to a Polish mother and Norwegian father
December 1983: First encounter with a home computer: father’s Sinclair ZX Spectrum (picture above is from 1986)
1998: Installed GNU/Linux for the first time: RedHat 5.0 (still have the CD)
September - October 1999: Co-authored DeCSS with two European programmers
January 2000: Received the Karoline award, which is awarded to high school students who have excellent grades and who have
achieved something noteworthy in the arena of sports, art or culture
June 2000: Quit high school after completing the first year with an average grade of 5.75 (best achievable grade being 6)
January 2001: Reverse engineered the jazPiper Win2000 device driver and authored a jazPiper Linux driver
April 2002: Accepted an EFF Pioneer Award which was awarded to the entire DeCSS team
November 2003: Authored QTFairUse, an AAC memory dumper patch for Apple QuickTime
December 2003 - January 2004: Reverse engineered Apple FairPlay v1 and authored an open source C implementation of FairPlay. The implementation found its way into several tools (m4p2mp4, playfair and hymn) and was most likely studied by RealNetworks to add FairPlay support to Harmony.
May 2004: Reverse engineered FairPlay v2 and updated the open source C implementation
April 2004: Authored DeDRMS, an open source C# implementation of FairPlay
July 2004: Reverse engineered the iTunes Music Store protocol for downloading FairPlay user keys and authored FairKeys
August 2004: Reverse engineered the Apple AirTunes protocol and authored JustePort
March 2005: Co-authored PyMusique (an open source iTMS shopping client) with two American programmers
March 2005: Reverse engineered the iTMS 4.7 protocol and updated PyMusique after Apple disabled support for older versions of the protocol in an attempt to shut out PyMusique
March 2005: Authored SharpMusique (a C# port of PyMusique) at the request of Miguel de Icaza
April 2005: Combined DeDRMS and FairKeys into JusteTune
August 2005: Reverse engineered the encoding used in Microsoft’s NSC format and authored a decoder
October 2005: Moved to San Diego, USA
June 2006: Moved to San Francisco and joined DoubleTwist Ventures.
At last, public his blog here:
http://nanocrew.net