Entries from November 2005The Posts You Asked For

On this blog and in my USA Today column from last week, I wrote about how Sony was selling CDs infected with a nasty program that installs all sorts of software on your PC — software that opens up a variety of security holes. (Read the column for the full story.)
Now it turns out there’s [...]

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(Via Superfrankenstein.)

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There’s a terrific interview with my favorite author, Terry Pratchett, over at Science Fiction Weekly.
I’m fascinated with steam engines, and the telegraph, and intricate mechanisms. I think technology was at its very best just before the electronic age, because what you could use electricity for was just turning motors. By the time telephony replaced telegraphy, [...]

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I have an interesting story in The Roanoke Times about Andrew Knight — stop me if you’ve heard this — a guy who has filed a patent for a plot. Read it here.

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From MSNBC.com:
Intelligent design taught … as mythology
University of Kansas course explores flip side of science controversy
LAWRENCE, Kan. – Creationism and intelligent design are going to be studied at the University of Kansas, but not in the way advocated by opponents of the theory of evolution.
A course being offered next semester by the university religious [...]

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My wife discovered the following while peeling sweet potatoes (or were they yams?) for Thanksgiving dinner:
(Click for larger.)

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I don’t know if this goes anywhere, but I’ll toss it out.
I was thinking about Internet advertising — banner ads, text ads (like those on this site), flash animations, pop-ups — and I realize that I tune them out. They usually aren’t annoying; they’re simply part of the landscape that I ignore or scroll past.
Like [...]

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Amazon is not only doing what the title says — offering its customers a full refund, even on open CDs infected with the Sony rootkit — but it’s sending those customers e-mail to that effect.
Contrast Sony which, when news of what it had done spread, made a rootkit uninstaller available, but didn’t tell anyone [...]

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Last month, the Government Accountability Office quietly released a finding — a detailed report (the GAO being a government body and thus incapable of brevity) saying there were in fact problems with the voting in Ohio in 2004.
Having friends there who told me first-hand about the problems — Democratic districts not having enough machines, for [...]

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Additions to my column on the Sony rootkit fiasco are in the USA Today section.

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More resources on the Sony rootkit nightmare.

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Take a guess: In the third quarter of 2005 — that’s three months — how many complaints about indecency do you think the FCC received?
The answer: five. 1-2-3-4-5.
Oh, plus an additional 23,542 from the Parents Television Council, a right-wing Christian group. Translation: Americans aren’t offended by what’s on TV, only the PTC is.

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If you’re planning to kill your wife and dump her body in the river, it’s probably best not to Google terms like “neck,” and “snap.”
From a WRAL story about the trial of one Robert Petrick:
DURHAM, N.C. — Robert Petrick searched for the words “neck,” “snap,” “break” and “hold” on an Internet search engine [...]

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Some more info about eePire.

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Via Wonkette:

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I’m a huge fan of citizen journalism. I think that incorporating what private citizens see and hear into the mainstream news is important for a variety of reasons.
Also for a variety of reasons, photos and videos are the biggest part of that, from the video of the Rodney King beating to images of the London [...]

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So Sony’s content-protection system is backfiring in a big way. The company put software on its music CDs that hides itself in your PC (see my original post here).
Now it turns out that the company has opened the door to viruses, not theoretically, but in reality. (PDF here.)
Here come the lawsuits.

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It’s all about priorities.

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“Higher Percentage of Americans Using Work Internet for Personal Use than Home Internet for Work According to the latest survey of adults”
(from a Simmons Market Research, spring 2005 study)

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This is in the comments of my entry about the danger posed to Kansas schoolkids by the state’s “science” curriculum, but I liked it so much I wanted to put it on the main blog.
Joseph Chiaravalloti has a great list of suggestions for the state to incorporate into its new “science” classes. (You might recall [...]

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