Mattel sues Victoria man for cracking screening software

Photo: Sean White "I've always been interested in secrets and secrecy", says Matthew Skala, who is being sued by Mattel for distributing a method for kids to get around a screening program that blocks access to certain Web sites.

VICTORIA -- Matthew Skala, who describes himself as a "youth rights advocate", is being sued by Mattel Inc. because he and a colleague are distributing a computer program that lets children override the toymaker's Internet screening software.

Mattel and a subsidiary, Framingham, Mass.-based Microsystems Software Inc., launched a copyright violation lawsuit against the 23-year-old Victoria graduate student and his Swedish cyber-buddy, Eddy Jansson, in the United States District Court for Massachusetts.

Mattel is seeking an injunction barring the two programmers from distributing their software, which in effect renders its Cyber Patrol software worthless.

In court documents, the company said it has suffered more than $75,000 in damages.

Cyber Patrol is pitched as a program that enables parents to prevent their children from stumbling across pornography, hate literature, bomb-making instructions, and other worrying material on the web.

Mr. Skala and Mr. Jansson have developed a free program called "cphack" that, among other things, reveals the passwords parents use in setting up Cyber Patrol. Passwords in hand, children can bypass the program's blocks and view the forbidden material.

In an interview yesterday, Mr. Skala said he and Mr. Jansson wanted to study the program's contents to see whether the programming code was written effectively.

"Parents have a right to know what they're getting, and without our work they wouldn't know. I believe people should be able to take things apart and see how they work", he said.

Studying the way a computer program is written is no different from criticizing the writing in a novel, he said.

Mr. Skala said the programmers who wrote Cyber Patrol's code might have thought it was crackproof, but he discovered that any university undergraduate should be able to figure it out. He said it took him three weekends.

In the lawsuit, Microsystems and Mattel say Mr. Skala and Mr. Jansson illegally accessed Microsystems' computer code "with the purpose to destroy its usefulness and cause irreparable harm to Microsystems".

Mr. Jansson, 24, lives in the town of Eskilstuna, about 100 kilometres from Stockholm. In an e-mail sent to Mr. Skala, he said: "I describe myself as your typical nerd. I've seen some reports calling us ... hackers, but I would never call myself that -- the title must be deserved."

Mr. Skala said he has contacted a San Francisco-based lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to discuss his legal options.

Mr. Skala, whose father is a teacher in Victoria, was schooled at home. At age 14, he obtained a diploma in electronics from a correspondence school. He received an undergraduate degree in math and computer science at the University of Victoria, and has worked as a computer programmer in both the private and public sector. He started working on his master's degree last September.

"I've always been interested in secrets and secrecy", he said. "I'm very interested in all types of mathematics, but I'm especially interested in issues like cryptography, where very pure mathematics becomes of critical interest to humans in practical applications."

While Mr. Skala said he supports the private development of some software for profit, he is also a strong supporter of the open source movement, which advocates distributing software free of charge. He is secretary of the Victoria Linux Users Group, a local organization that promotes the use of the Linux operating system, which is freely distributed on the Internet.