You get the ankles and I'll get the wrists
Anybody here ever watch the Oblongs? It was this very funny animated show on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim a couple of years ago. It was a pretty good concept of a show that seemed like it had promise (aka, could have been done better). The biggest kick to me was that will ferrel did one of the voices...took me a while to catch why I knew his voice (from SNL obviously).
I've placed it lovingly next to me ATHF box set and have high hopes of getting her drunk enough to watch it soon :)
Moving on...
Let's talk about the whole Sony DRM CD craptacular that's been going on. We both just realized that we have 3 of those damn things in the house, but none of our computers were affected because we have autorun disabled. So thank god for that, but I ran across probably what is the best, simple explanation of this whole mess in a thread on Fark:
Sony's DRM mechanism uses what's called a "rootkit". It modifies the underlying functions of the operating system to make itself completely invisible. Can't "find files", doesn't show up in process list, etc. Even third party applications can't see it because they all rely on the operating system's basic functions to do the searching - and the rootkit has modified those functions.
Sony's is particularly bad because the method it uses can easily corrupt the operating system and cause loss of data. For inexperienced computer users, that means it can turn your PC into a paperweight.
Since Sony's DRM simply hides any files that are named $sys$*, and is next to impossible to remove, people are starting to use it to hide viruses and the like.
Imagine a computer virus that is, by definition, impossible* to detect. That's scary.
=Smidge= I think that pretty much sum's it up. Of course the person who discovered all this is still keeping tabs on the whole situation: For those readers that are coming up to speed with the story, here’s a summary of important developments so far: The DRM software Sony has been shipping on many CDs since April is cloaked with rootkit technology: - Sony denies that the rootkit poses a security or reliability threat despite the obvious risks of both
- Sony claims that users don’t care about rootkits because they don’t know what a rootkit is
- The installation provides no way to safely uninstall the software
- Without obtaining consent from the user Sony’s player informs Sony every time it plays a “protected” CD
I've placed it lovingly next to me ATHF box set and have high hopes of getting her drunk enough to watch it soon :)
Moving on...
Let's talk about the whole Sony DRM CD craptacular that's been going on. We both just realized that we have 3 of those damn things in the house, but none of our computers were affected because we have autorun disabled. So thank god for that, but I ran across probably what is the best, simple explanation of this whole mess in a thread on Fark:
Sony's DRM mechanism uses what's called a "rootkit". It modifies the underlying functions of the operating system to make itself completely invisible. Can't "find files", doesn't show up in process list, etc. Even third party applications can't see it because they all rely on the operating system's basic functions to do the searching - and the rootkit has modified those functions.
Sony's is particularly bad because the method it uses can easily corrupt the operating system and cause loss of data. For inexperienced computer users, that means it can turn your PC into a paperweight.
Since Sony's DRM simply hides any files that are named $sys$*, and is next to impossible to remove, people are starting to use it to hide viruses and the like.
Imagine a computer virus that is, by definition, impossible* to detect. That's scary.=Smidge= I think that pretty much sum's it up. Of course the person who discovered all this is still keeping tabs on the whole situation: For those readers that are coming up to speed with the story, here’s a summary of important developments so far: The DRM software Sony has been shipping on many CDs since April is cloaked with rootkit technology: - Sony denies that the rootkit poses a security or reliability threat despite the obvious risks of both
- Sony claims that users don’t care about rootkits because they don’t know what a rootkit is
- The installation provides no way to safely uninstall the software
- Without obtaining consent from the user Sony’s player informs Sony every time it plays a “protected” CD