Slashback: OpenDocument, Intelligent Design, More DRM

Slashback tonight brings a few corrections, clarifications and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including several updates to the Sony DRM rootkit fiasco, another school system's take on intelligent design, some of the first pictures of the much talked about avian flu virus, a sentencing that gives us the first torrent user to get jail time, Bernard Golden weighs in on the continuing Massachussetts OpenDocument debate, and one users commentary on recent announcements to start pay-per-download services for TV shows. Read on for the details.

Sony still not "getting it". c writes "Mark Russinovich continues his investigation of Sony's DRM as he tries out the official uninstaller. His verdict? 'I've analyzed virulent forms of spyware/adware that provide more straightforward means of uninstall.'" Relatedly Cronos1388 writes "According to the Inquirer an Italian group is also suing Sony over the rootkit." Also, an unexpected side effect of this technology is that script kiddies have been able to leverage Sony's tool to hide unauthorized cheat programs from the watchful eye of MMO creators.

Intelligent design supporters ousted. PMuse writes "The Register and others are reporting that all eight of the members of the Dover, PA school board that had required Intelligent Design to be taught alongside Evolution have been canned by voters in yesterday's election."

What does avian flu look like? DevL writes "Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson has managed to capture images of a H5N1 (bird flu) virus entering and taking control of a cell. While the text is in Swedish, the images speak for themselves."

Torrent user goes up the river. stinerman writes to tell us that the Hong Kong man who was recently arrested for making several movies available via BitTorrent has had his sentence handed down. Chan aka "Big Crook" uploaded Daredevil, Red Planet, and Miss Congeniality which landed him 3 months in jail.

Golden weighs in on OpenDocument debate. OSS_ilation writes "With so much FUD and anti-FUD flying in the face of Massachusetts' decision to go with OpenDocument, it's no surprise that open source advocate Bernard Golden weighs in with his take on current events."

User says new downloadable television just plain "sucks." Thomas Hawk writes "In the past few weeks the three major studios have all announced deals to begin offering downloadable television for consumers -- Apple/ABC, DirecTV/NBC, and Comcast/CBS. The problem with each of these respective offerings is that they largely suck. Apple sells expensive low res limited television from ABC. NBC's new service will only work on DirecTV DVRs (uh hello McFly, why pay money for this service when I can just record it for free). And CBS' downloadable programming could contain commercials."

Comments

Kansas welcoms new professor of Cryptozoology

[rastin]

Recent developments in Kansas have paved the way for the largest increase of "Science" class offerings to our next generation of young Americans. Take "CZO140: A field study of the behavior of Unicorns" for example. Students will learn how to make Unicorn calls, analyze a maidens purity through Unicorn reactions and extract faerie dust from Unicorn droppings. For years "Rational Science" has frowned upon the link between faerie dust and Unicorn dung, likening it to a futile study of plain old horse shit. But now that science is not limited to natural explanations of phenomena jobs in academia are readily available to anyone with a wild imagination and a fragile grasp on reality!

You Forgot to Mention the California Class Action

[Anonymous Coward]

detailed at Washingtonpost.com's Security fix blog.:

From the article: "A class-action lawsuit has been filed on behalf of California consumers who may have been harmed by anti-piracy software installed by some Sony music CDs. A second, nationwide class-action lawsuit is expected to be filed against Sony in a New York court on Wednesday seeking relief for all U.S. consumers who have purchased any of the 20 music CDs in question.

The suit alleges that Sony's software violates at least three California statutes, including the "Consumer Legal Remedies Act," which governs unfair and/or deceptive trade acts; and the "Consumer Protection against Computer Spyware Act," which prohibits -- among other things -- software that takes control over the user's computer or misrepresents the user's ability or right to uninstall the program. The suit also alleges that Sony's actions violate the California Unfair Competition law, which allows public prosecutors and private citizens to file lawsuits to protect businesses and consumers from unfair business practice."


The Post also has a PDF of the California filing and suggests another nationwide class action will be filed in New York shortly.

Sony DRM to be detected by antivirus programs

[tehanu]

On related news about the Sony DRM,

Antivirus companies are going to start detecting it as harmful software:

http://news.com.com/Antivirus+firms+target+Sony+co py+protection/2100-1029_3-5942265.html

The article also has claims from CA that the DRM damages the computer's ability to make rips of ANY CDs including non-copyrighted CDs.

According to Computer Associates, the Sony software makes itself a default media player on a computer after it is installed. The software then reports back the user's Internet address and identifies which CDs are played on that computer. Intentionally or not, the software also seems to damage a computer's ability to "rip" clean copies of MP3s from non-copy protected CDs, the security company said. "It will effectively insert pseudo-random noise into a file so that it becomes less listenable," said Sam Curry, a Computer Associates vice president. "What's disturbing about this is the lack of notice, the lack of consent, and the lack of an easy removal tool."

And the original patch has been replaced by one one third of the size. Mark Russinovich posted new info on the (smaller) patch on his blog showing it causes BSODs in Windows.

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.j html?articleID=173601122

Look guys: intelligent design is NOT SCIENCE

[Work Account]

I am so sick of this.

I am also a True Believer and attend a worship service every Sunday.

That said, ID is NOT true science. It is simply a score of men who wish to get nonsense into our textbooks.

We MUST stop ID!

Re:You Forgot to Mention the California Class Acti

[keraneuology]

seeking relief for all U.S. consumers who have purchased any of the 20 music CDs in question

In other words, the lawyers are lining up to ease the pain of the affected consumers by securing a $2 off coupon for the next DRM'ed CD while collecting $12 million for themselves.

Possible outcome

[Spy der Mann]

Since the Avian flu video couldn't be purchased online because it sucks, and the DVD's can't be purchased because they have a rootkit, the State of Massachussets proposed to download an Open Document version of it. Luckily, this became available for all, including intelligent design proponents in Kansas who realized someone very evil had to design those viruses, because they couldn't just simply evolve. In related news, a new torrent file of the Avian Flu virus was distributed in Hong Kong, but a misunderstanding led to the government think that the distributor was actually committing bioterrorism, so they got him arrested. In his defense, he said: "the Flying Spaguetti Monster made me do it."

You have liberated...

[Grog6]

... enough energy for your Entropy to equal infinity.

This does NOT make YOU God, however.

If the second coming ever happens, God is going to be so busy, with the troubles of his own flock, and of course, twits like you.

Me, I'm hoping there's enough of my corpse left for the Valkiries to carry me back to Valhalla, to spend Eternity drinking and whoring with Thor and that bunch; I'm sure Heaven would be fucking boring.

EFF's list of Sony DRM'd CDs

[davidwr]

Are You Infected by Sony-BMG's Rootkit? has a list of known infected CDs.

Here's the list as of this post:
==========
Trey Anastasio, Shine (Columbia)
Celine Dion, On ne Change Pas (Epic)
Neil Diamond, 12 Songs (Columbia)
Our Lady Peace, Healthy in Paranoid Times (Columbia)
Chris Botti, To Love Again (Columbia)
Van Zant, Get Right with the Man (Columbia)
Switchfoot, Nothing is Sound (Columbia)
The Coral, The Invisible Invasion (Columbia)
Acceptance, Phantoms (Columbia)
Susie Suh, Susie Suh (Epic)
Amerie, Touch (Columbia)
Life of Agony, Broken Valley (Epic)
Horace Silver Quintet, Silver's Blue (Epic Legacy)
Gerry Mulligan, Jeru (Columbia Legacy)
Dexter Gordon, Manhattan Symphonie (Columbia Legacy)
The Bad Plus, Suspicious Activity (Columbia)
The Dead 60s, The Dead 60s (Epic)
Dion, The Essential Dion (Columbia Legacy)
Natasha Bedingfield, Unwritten (Epic)
Ricky Martin, Life (Columbia) (labeled as XCP, but, oddly, our disc had no protection)

Several other Sony-BMG CDs are protected with a different copy-protection technology, sourced from SunnComm, including:

My Morning Jacket, Z
Santana, All That I Am
Sarah McLachlan, Bloom Remix Album
==========

Here is what I am telling Microssoft

[erikharrison]

I'm putting together a letter to Microsoft right now, regarding this Sony rootkit disaster. Basically, it asks MS to publically come out opposed to this sort of behavior. This is exactly the kind of programming that MS (claims, at least) gives Windows a bad name. MS consistently says that it is bad applications and bad drivers that cause stability problems, and that spyware and viruses are mostly Windows centric because Windows is the most dominanat desktop platform.

Yet when Sony installs a DRM rootkit, with now exposed security and stability issues, MS says nothing. Sony's DRM only works on Windows, thus giving a reason to move to Mac OS and Linux, and by not censuring this kind of behavior, MS effectively says "it's okay for vendors to cripple our OS and drive business to our competitors, it's okay for Sony to implicitly install a bad driver, it's okay for Sony to make a mockery of our OS, and to make public one of it's weaknesses".

It's embarassing for those folks who administer Windows machines to have to go into work, and be asked why they still run Window's boxen when the one big advantage of MS - support from a large company - is nowhere to be found when blackhat tactics like rootkits are used by a major vendor. Even a well written rootkit (which this is not) still will introduce bugs in other applications that must go through the same subsystem the kit is bound to - having this kind of tactic tacitly approved of by the software vendor only leads to a world where it's more dangerous to upgrade applications, for fear of conflict - the traditional Linux distro problem, now twice as bad in the Windows world.

I urge everyone to point these facts out to MS. Even if MS approves of this kind of user bait and switch, and over invasive DRM on principle, I believe these arguments will force MS into the position of having to publically disapprove. Which has the nice side effect of giving this invasion of consumer rights the attention in the media that it deserves.

It's Microsoft's license that is anti-business

[Stephen Samuel]

If you look at Microsoft's Office XML Reference Schema License, you will see that it has massive restrictions on what you can do with it. You are only allowed to read and write. Things like editing are not included (and even seem to be explicitly excluded. Microsoft may be able to deny the license for anybody for any non-governmental uses, and, in any event, they can make your whole license invalid by modifying the schema on the next iteration of Office (including, possibly even the first official release of office 12).

It may also be possible that they could force your customers to register for the right to use your software (so they know who to 'go after', in cutting off your air supply).

And, of course, if your company gets bought out, your license disappears.

I can see lenders and shareholders running screaming from any business that embarks on a major undertaking, having accepted these terms. You would have to be either foolish or desparate to do so unless you could recoup the full cost of your endeavor with your first contract (which could raise the cost of your contract, making you non-competetive).

Unlike the ODF, which (contrary to MS's FUD) does not place any restrictions on a company using it(*), Microsoft's XML license would leave any company accepting it at the abject mercy of a convicted monopolist.

Good luck. You'll need it.

(*)Unlike KOffice (which also implements ODF), Open Office is LGPL, which means that a company could legaly compile in proprietary extensions to OO without having to release their own code. That is, in fact, precisely what SUN does with StarOffice. This opens up opportunities for local vendors that would never be available under MS-Office.