Bloggy

I realized that even after all these years of having one web prescence or another, that I don’t have a page that people can look at and say, “Oh, that’s his email address”. I’ve rectified that, which should be especially useful for my family members who read this and share my propensity for not remembering to record important email addresses. ;-)

I think the reason I have left it go for so long is that I’m afraid spammers will find the address and force me to finally setup SpamAssassin or something. That’s right, I still don’t have spam filtering software setup. :-)

To pre-emptively counteract the threat, I have encoded the address using HTML entities instead of just typing it out. I also broke up the mailto: link using JavaScript (the e-mail address will still show if JavaScript is disabled though). So here’s hoping that the spammer’s email address harvesting tools are not standards-compliant. ;-)

Computer-related things have been slower for myself recently, for a few reasons (Coding fatigue, my Nintendo fatigue going away, etc.). I’m kinda depressed about it because one of the bugs I’ve been trying to fix keeps evading me. It’s bug 116181 in case anyone is interested, apparently we don’t know how to use the KHTML library. Odd thing is that this worked in KDE 3.4, and it briefly worked in KDE 3.5, and now I can’t figure out why it crashes for some people and it doesn’t for others.

Anyways, time to spend more time away from the computer. One of the bigger Steelers games in recent memory is happening tonight. Can they defeat the juggernaut, the “unstoppable” Colts?

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Did well on the last test (which was the last non-final exam). I actually scored above my average, which is nice since my study hours have been slowly decreasing while the difficulty has been ramping up, so I haven’t scored above my average for about 5 straight tests. Although I haven’t been doing poorly either.

If you have been listening to CDs from Sony (which owns BMG Records among other labels) on your Windows computer, and the CD is from within about the last year, your computer is probably infected with a rather nasty rootkit.

A rootkit is software that takes control of the very inner portions of your operating system, and is pretty much always an insidious event. In this case, the rootkit is used to prevent Windows from running different applications, which could possibly be used to copy the CD. It is also used to hide the fact that it is present and installed on the system. Attempting to remove the rootkit by yourself is likely to break your system.

I’m not sure how Sony had the audacity to actually do this though. If I were to infect 500,000 computers with this rootkit, my tail would probably be getting hauled off right this instant to the nearest Federal “Don’t drop the soap!” prison.

In case you’re interested in how this was discovered, this is a good source of information: http://www.boingboing.net/2005/11/14/sony_anticustomer_te.html. Also good is this writeup by LWN (subscription required): http://lwn.net/Articles/160023/.

The ironic thing? The software in question is designed to try and prevent copyright infringement, but it contains at least 3 different libraries/programs in violation of their license. Seems like the pot calling the kettle black.

Even better is this quote by a high-ranking officer at Sony: “Most people, I think, don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?” — Thomas Hesse, SonyBMG Manager.

By the same reasoning, it would be OK for me to infect your system using a buffer overflow, but only if you don’t know what a buffer overflow is. I don’t buy that reasoning, and neither do the courts.

In funnier news, this comic, describing the software design process is pretty hilarious.

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