Let’s see there are a couple more notes to pass along on Sony DRM rootkit news. This story could go on for some time, it’s already had legs for about a week or more and just when things started to wind down a bit, there’s a bit more. First up, the EFF has a writeup on the EULA that Sony sends along with it’s DRM-ified Cds. Among other things it obliges you to wipe any copies of songs of your pc if you’re cd is lost or stolen, it cannot be played on a work computer, you can’t take it with you if you leave the country, you MUST install any and all updates to their software or the content is forfeit, SONY-BMG reserves the right to install backdoors or other means to protect their content, SONY will only be liable for a maximum of $5, if you declare bankrupcy you must forfeit all the music on your pc, no derivitave works, (photo albums for family/friends, mash-ups, or sampling), music on the pc may NOT be transfered even if the cd accompanies the transfer.
Month: November 2005
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Sony BMG suspends pressing DRM protected cds
It looks as though Sony has decided to suspend pressing cds with the XCP copy protection software. Numerous sources are reporting on the “capitulation” of Sony on the matter. It seems as though this is a temporary stop, from what I read they will likely pursue other means of DRM.
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Opendocument format getting more support
There is support building for the opendocument format, it seems. The format is designed to prevent document lockin to proprietary formats and the group promoting it would like to see it supported by all office suites. (Currently OpenOffice.org 2 and Staroffice support the format, koffice 1.4.2 partially supports it (1.5 due for release after the new year should fully support the format. IBM Workplace (based on openoffice) also partially supports the new format.)
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Realplayer has issued a critical patch for a couple vulnerabilities
Incidents.org is reporting that realplayer has issued a patch in response to two vulnerabilities discovered by eEye. The first involves a skin file which could be loaded through the browser without permission and the second, a specially made .rm file which could allow code execution.
Update 11/11 – The security fix has further coverage
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Bad capacitors causing strange system behavior
This is, in fact something I’ve been getting ready to do an article on soon. I had a system that had very strange and random problems that I’ve visited and tried many of the typical fixes for, in fact I think I saw it a couple times a week and either couldn’t reproduce the errors on demand, or could only get an error once, do something and not see it again, then hear about something similar the next day…
Anyway, ultimately the system has been replaced (and it’s twin…) on inspecting the motherboard post-pull, there were some interesting issues with the capacitors, yellowish crusty leaked electrolyte… uh-huh, that explains everything…
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Mozilla Firefox RC2 released…
We’re inching yet closer to a new official release of the Mozilla Firefox browser. Yesterday was the 1st anniversary of the 1.0 release and today see’s the release of the second Release Candidate for 1.5 If you’ve already got a pre-release version of 1.5 it should automatically update. There may still be bugs, so… you might want to wait for the final release if you’re bug-averse….
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Looks as though the FTC has broken up a spyware ring
A bit of good news on the spyware front, the FTC has announced that it’s frozen the assets of a spyware ring. Apparently they spread spyware through a network of sites and blogs that pushed ringtones, lyrics, and pictures. Good to see some progress made against spyware pushers….
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Sony BMG is still having a bad week….
Unfortunately a LOT of people that have bought Sony-BMG cds (or borrowed, whatever…) are going to have some headaches too. By stock in Tylenol or Aleve or something…. anyway… here’s todays roundup of Sony Rootkit news. Including a virus borrowing the gift of SONY…
First up is some “backstory” that reminds us of Sony’s attitudes in the past on the issue of piracy and what should be done about it, along with the precient “I think most people don’t know what a rootkit is” satatement.
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How to create a redirect page, or creating a redirect page has been updated
Just a note to mention that I’ve updated a page that I published a good while back. It’s kind of a funny story. I skimmed through the logs and saw that someone got here on a search for how to create redirect pages, and had forgotten about the post, I looked to see what it was. I was redirected in about 5 seconds to a google search. (Firefox uses text in the address bar to the default search provider….) Ummmm… ok something’s not right, so…
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MS05-053 Microsoft Windows Image Viewing Vulnerability
Two notes on the Windows vulnerability patched day before yesterday. There is a trojan in the wild exploiting it and Symantec’s AV definition to detect such an exploit is a bit too paranoid and flags lot’s of emf files as having an exploit for the same. The workaround is to disable emf files from virus scans.