Category: Life

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.

This is the information taken from the GEO2165 Lab.

Core Sample Data:
Download Here [Microsoft Excel]
Download Here [PDF]

Core Sample Photos:
View Here [Link Removed]

PS. I just noticed I mispelt “Libya”…

We’ve all heard about the Sony rootkit. Sony released a “patch” in light of all the complaints. But to get it, you have to go to a specific website of theirs, submit your personal information, which will lead you to a download. You can’t uninstall it from your computer as it will disable your CD/DVD drives from ever working again. Sneaky. Best of all, the patch doesn’t actually remove the rootkit. It updates it, turning off the cloaking feature.

Now someone has developed a trojan which makes use of Sony’s rootkit. This is in the heals of someone else who used it to bypass Blizzard’s anti-cheating technology (a violation of the DMCA).

Sophos says that the Trojan known as Stinx-E uses the Sony DRM rootkit to make itself invisible through the file $sys$drv.exe. However, this does not mean that in not having the Sony DRM installed you are immune to infection.

The rootkit makes all files beginning with ‘$sys$’ invisible, and Sophos’ senior antivirus consultant Graham Cluley described it as ‘particularly troublesome’. He told us that antivirus software will detect the file when it is first run if it has already been updated to look out for it. But out of date antivirus software won’t detect the virus at that point, and once the virus is installed, won’t be able to see it at all. […]

Yep, record labels simply don’t get it. By DRMing their CDs, they only punish their consumer. I’ve yet to hear of a single instance where pirates were unable to copy the CD. And plus – when we buy a CD, is it ours? Do we own the CD? Then why the hell can’t we turn the CD into MP3s so that we may listen it on our pocket player?

Record labels assume that people only use CD-Players to listen to music. That simply is not the case, and to make a business dynamic that does not reflect that only punishes those who legitimately buy the CD.

TOPEKA, Kan. – Risking the kind of nationwide ridicule it faced six years ago, the Kansas Board of Education approved new public-school science standards Tuesday that cast doubt on the theory of evolution.

The 6-4 vote was a victory for “intelligent design” advocates who helped draft the standards. Intelligent design holds that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by a higher power.

Supporters of the new standards said they would promote academic freedom.

“This is a great day for education. This is one of the best things that we can do,” said board chairman Steve Abrams. Another board member who voted in favor of the standards, John Bacon, said the move “gets rid of a lot of dogma that’s being taught in the classroom today.”

John Calvert, a retired attorney who helped found the Intelligent Design Network, said changes probably would come to classrooms gradually, with some teachers feeling freer to discuss criticisms of evolution. “These changes are not targeted at changing the hearts and minds of the Darwin fundamentalists,” Calvert said.

What is Science. Science is a methodology. It is to prove things, using a problem, hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion. It is not THE answer to things, but rather a likely answer. It is expected to change with time, to adopt new theories in face of new evidence. That is the nature of science.

Evolution is an extremely solid theory as far as theories go, mostly because it can actually be seen in motion everywhere. Beyond fossological records, we can see it act in bacteria, in cancerous cells, in butterflies in the UK, birds in remote south pacific islands.

The Kansas board’s action is part of a national debate. In Pennsylvania, a judge is expected to rule soon in a lawsuit against the Dover school board’s policy of requiring high school students to learn about intelligent design in biology class. In August, President Bush endorsed teaching intelligent design alongside evolution.

The thing is I have nothing against Creationism per se. But it does not belong in a biology class. Intelligent design cannot be proven, it has no evidence, and therefore to teach such an unprovable hypothesis alongside Evolution in a science class would be unscientific and misleading. If you want to dispute Evolution, by all means go ahead: the scientific way is to do so with ample proof of an alternate theory.

The supporters of Intelligent Design claim its all about “choice”. But I ask: what is there to choose? A theory with no evidence of any kind over one with plenty? Might as well make students “choose” that the “World is flat”… Wait – don’t answer that.