Sony has released software that removes the rootkit installed by one of their copy protection schemes. (Via Boing Boing) Updated to fix the link to the patch, and to note that the patch just removes the bits that hide the software Sony installs. The actual copy protection remains as it was. Also, read Ed Felten’s analysis of the patch.
Bad publicity for Sony’s DRM is busting out all over. First there was the post about Sony music CDs silently installing a rootkit when you insert them in your computer, and now we learn that Sony is using DRM to fight with Apple over opening the iPod. Of course the iPod works fine with unprotected audio files, Apple just doesn’t support competing DRM. I’m fine with that. (I don’t buy tracks from the iTunes Music Store.) ...
Lots of people seem to be talking about the attention crisis lately. There’s so much out there to pay attention to that nobody has enough time to pay attention to everything they’re interested in. The attention I pay to feeds I subscribe to waxes and wanes regularly. Sometimes I page through them hardly reading anything, other times I page through them sort of paying attention. I’ve never been one to carefully read much of anything, especially on the first pass. ...
I’m considering using Ruby on Rails for a big, important project. Today I was reading about the deployment options for Rails, and none of them sound all that promising. You can deploy on WEBrick, which is just a Ruby script. That works fine for development or for small internal sites, but isn’t appropriate for larger sites. The second option is to deploy on Apache 1.3 with FastCGI. The third option is to deploy on lighttpd, which at the time Agile Web Development with Rails was written, has “a number of major stability problems.” Obviously there are some big, popular applications written in Rails, but I don’t want to put the system administrator in a position where his pager is going off all night because of the deployment options forced upon us by choosing Rails as our development environment. ...
I am irritated by the fact that the Mac OS X 10.4.3 update today changed the behavior of the middle mouse button so that rather than opening links in my browser in a new tab, it opens the Dashboard application. Fortunately the change is easy to reverse in the System Preferences. Messing with basic user interface elements in a security update just seems inconsiderate.
Don’t miss Mark Russonovich’s post describing how he found malware on his computer that was installed when he tried to play a copy protected music CD. Not only does the post explains the degree to which music companies are willing to screw up your computer to try to keep you from copying music, but it is also a fascinating account of how one goes about finding and removing software installed maliciously. I find it absurd that companies are legally allowed to install such software when you try to play their CDs. (Via Adam Shostack) ...
I have to commend President Bush for picking a nominee for the Supreme Court who has a real judicial track record. Nobody has to wonder where he stands on the issues. Unfortunately for the country, where he stands is on the far right end of the political spectrum. Not only does this guy not want to legislate from the bench, he doesn’t want Congress to legislate either. Now we get to have a real fight. We’ll probably see very little of the tea leaf reading that has been a tradition with most Supreme Court nominations, and a lot of bare-knuckled brawling over the role of the judiciary, the federal government, and the future of the country. That sounds like a good fight to have to me, and it’s a debate that I’m eager to engage in. ...
For a few months I had enabled comments for every post, but I’m changing things again so that only posts that invite commentary actually have comments enabled. I’m not dissatisfied with the comments, but I think that restricting comments to particular posts will encourage more comments on those posts, since they’ll be special. This could also be seen as an admission that many of my posts really aren’t interesting enough to invite conversation, and that’s probably true. ...
If you read one item on the controversy over Wal-Mart weighing its options with regard to lowering their overall expenditure on health insurance for employees, make it R J Lehmann’s blog post on the subject.
Further correspondence with the system administrators at TextDrive reveals that slow queries were not the problem, but rather sheer volume of queries. Basically, the system adminstrator looked at the CPU utilization on the machine, then disabled my site and continued to watch it and the utilization went down. As he points out in his email message, I only have about 7000 entries and only a few hundred comments, so the size of the database isn’t a problem. ...