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.
