Frack!

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Hehe — Prairie and I just finished watching Season One of Battlestar Galactica. I’d seen it before (on my ‘puter via BitTorrent), ’twas the first time for her.

She’s hooked.

We may end up taking some time to watch what there is so far of Season Two (which is sitting on my ‘puter, again thanks to BitTorrent) so she can catch up to where we are before they start broadcasting new episodes in January.

Sony’s rootkit

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In one of the (many) stories that have been flying by my radar without being remarked on over the past few weeks, it recently came to light that Sony has been using some incredibly nasty “copy protection” schemes on many of its audio CDs — surreptitiously installing software on Windows-based PCs that cloaks itself, sends customer data back to Sony via the ‘net, leaves a ‘backdoor’ wide open for malicious hackers to take advantage of, and is incredibly difficult to remove (to the point of requiring a re-install of Windows). Sony initially tried to claim that they’d done nothing wrong, and it was only through constant investigation and hammering, first by tech-centric weblogs and then by more mainstream media, before they finally backed down.

Wired News has an excellent rundown of the situation that’s worth reading. This is how the major corporations are treating their customers these days. It’s not a pretty thing.

On Oct. 31, Mark Russinovich broke the story in his blog: Sony BMG Music Entertainment distributed a copy-protection scheme with music CDs that secretly installed a rootkit on computers. This software tool is run without your knowledge or consent — if it’s loaded on your computer with a CD, a hacker can gain and maintain access to your system and you wouldn’t know it.

The Sony code modifies Windows so you can’t tell it’s there, a process called “cloaking” in the hacker world. It acts as spyware, surreptitiously sending information about you to Sony. And it can’t be removed; trying to get rid of it damages Windows.

[…] The outcry was so great that on Nov. 11, Sony announced it was temporarily halting production of that copy-protection scheme. That still wasn’t enough — on Nov. 14 the company announced it was pulling copy-protected CDs from store shelves and offered to replace customers’ infected CDs for free.

[…] When its actions were first discovered, Sony offered a “fix” that didn’t remove the rootkit, just the cloaking.

[…] Sony claimed the rootkit didn’t phone home when it did. On Nov. 4, Thomas Hesse, Sony BMG’s president of global digital business, demonstrated the company’s disdain for its customers when he said, “Most people don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?” in an NPR interview. Even Sony’s apology only admits that its rootkit “includes a feature that may make a user’s computer susceptible to a virus written specifically to target the software.”

[…] Sony’s latest rootkit-removal tool actually leaves a gaping vulnerability. And Sony’s rootkit — designed to stop copyright infringement — itself may have infringed on copyright. As amazing as it might seem, the code seems to include an open-source MP3 encoder in violation of that library’s license agreement.

[…] The rootkit has even been found on computers run by the Department of Defense, to the Department of Homeland Security’s displeasure. While Sony could be prosecuted under U.S. cybercrime law, no one thinks it will be.

[…] Initial estimates are that more than half a million computers worldwide are infected with this Sony rootkit. Those are amazing infection numbers, making this one of the most serious internet epidemics of all time — on a par with worms like Blaster, Slammer, Code Red and Nimda.

Top Artists according to last.fm

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From Adriaan:

last.fm has nice charting tools, mapping out your listening trends. From data collected over the past year, this list appears to show my top artists.

Here’s my top eleven (rather than ten, simply because these are also all the artists with more than 50 plays):

My top artists

The only slight surprise is that Pink Floyd is that high in the list. Not that I’m not a fan, but I’m not a huge fan…I do, however, have a lot of PF in my collection (thanks to picking up a box set some time ago), so their songs percolate through the random playlists fairly regularly.

Make it stop!

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Apparently, sound carries through the ventilation ducts in our apartment building.

The downstairs neighbor — on the other side of the building — has had “All I Want For Christmas is You” from the Love Actually soundtrack playing on repeat…

For.

Six.

Hours.

It’s most clear in our bathroom, but it can be heard throughout our apartment. I’m actually lucky that I had a three-hour training meeting tonight…Prairie’s actually been here all evening (hiding in the bedroom with all the connecting doors closed and watching TV has been saving her sanity).

I just called the landlords and let them know. “Oh, you’re kidding!” Heh. Our best guess (I tried knocking on their door) is that they’re not home, and left a clock radio alarm on or something.

Whatever it was, it looks like the landlords just got in — it finally stopped.

Six.

Hours.

Bless our landlords, for they make Christmas stop.

Reconnecting

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This is great.

Some time ago — back in April of ’04 — I came across an old Anchorage Press article talking about the “glory days” of the underground/punk/alternative music scene in Anchorage, from the late ’70’s up to the early ’90’s, which touched off my own post reminiscing about my days running around the local scene, from the ’90’s to the early 2000’s.

Touched off by a couple of random Google searches, over the past couple of weeks (starting in August, and really picking up steam in November), that post has become an impromptu meeting point and simple message board for quite a few of the Anchorage scenesters of the ’80’s. While I was just a few years younger and don’t know any of the people who’ve been posting, I have been having an absolute blast watching all the various comments come in as this group of old friends re-connect after twenty-odd years or so.

All I did was provide the right Google keywords and a comment form that these guys have been using to get back in touch…but it’s enough to get a grin on my face whenever I see another comment roll in.

Lots of Pictures

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I’ve spent much of the afternoon and evening continuing to work on scanning in old photos that I’ve had lying jumbled up in various boxes. Quite a few have been scanned in and uploaded to my Flickr account. They haven’t been done in any particular order — roughly chronological, but it’s been a bit hit-and-miss here and there as I come across mis-ordered sections — but to make things at least a little bit easier, I did end up creating a ‘Narcissism’ photoset that has all the pictures of me collected together and presented in chronological order.

Other bits that may be of interest to various people: Royce, who’s been in my life since fourth grade; City Lights, the first (though very short-lived) public DJ’ing gig I talked my way into; and The Lost Abbey (possibly NSFW, though not very), my first major (regular, longer than a couple months) DJ’ing gig.

More will come as I get time — I’ve only made it up to 1995, and I’ve got at least a few from ’96 and ’97, and that doesn’t even go into the three rolls from Gig’s that are sitting here too. For now, though, I need to do a little housework and get dinner in the oven before Prairie gets home and Hope and Peter show up to watch Lost.

Update: Prairie’s pointing out that when I said I needed to “get dinner in the oven”, I meant that literally — she’d actually made the dinner. I was just putting it in the oven so it would be ready in time for everyone to show up. It’s not like I’m actually cooking or anything here…. ;)