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How do you get rid of an insane level of copyright protection on a standard music CD?

You make session 2 (which contains data in this case) unreadable, leaving Session 1 (contains audio in this case) unadulterated. With just the audio session, the disc behaves as a normal CD on computers, letting people *gasp* turn them into something playable for their iPods.

Session 2 is on the outer part of the disc, and can be made unreadable by a single piece of sticky tape. Or a marker. But the people who discovered this easy way of bypassing Sony’s horrible DRM scheme, preferred tape.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go laugh for half-an-hour.

Rogers, my ISP and cellphone carrier, will drop its Newsgroup servers. This is a sad day for those, such as myself, that came to love the medium for all its worth. Oh how I downloaded so much from thee 😀

That said, Newsgroups is beyond the realm of understanding of many. Just bring up the topic with any computer novice, or even the computer science students of today, and you’ll receive blank stares.

It was only a matter of time really. Most of Roger’s user base does not know what Usenet is; and so why pay any money to support it? But for those of us who do use it, this day is a sad one indeed.

Full story can be found here.

Sony uses rootkits.
Sony’s rootkit screws up your system.
Sony’s rootkits have been exploited
by game cheaters and virus coders.
Sony’s “patch” is even worse, opening
users up to an even bigger vulnerability.
But through all of this, the rootkit is
uninstallable… under threat of OS damage.

But now…

Sony is using GPL’ed code.
Sony is violating GPL lisence.
Sony is in deep hot water.

That’s what you get for angering geeks.
More info here.

On another note:
I received the free shirt from 2600 today, for having been published. It’s from the H2K2 (Hackers on Planet Earth) con that was held in New York City in 2002.