Friday, November 18, 2005

More Sony DRM

Sony Yanks DRM Uninstaller - Because that was a security risk, too

Sony distributes DRM - Rootkit!

All the major players out there are trying to come up with the perfect DRM (Digital Rights Management) solution to stop all this CD/DVD pirating. So Sony starts shipping CDs with it's own flavour of DRM that auto-installs on your PC when you put the CDROM in. Only, they then try to hid the DRM software using XCP, which is basically a rootkit! XCP can be used to hide ANY process/file/folder/regkey that starts with "$sys$"! And it turns out it's also remotely exploitable! (Recieved a signature update for it just yesterday!).

Fortunatly the boys at Symantec have a free scanner/removal tool. So if you've recently bought a Sony Music published CD, you might want to give this app a run against any PC you've put it in.
Symantec Security Response - SecurityRisk.First4DRM

MS gets all leaky on us...

There's a bit of a bru-ha boiling on the net around some leaked emails/memos from Microsoft: Miguel de Icaza [memos can be found here]

Miguel and others point out that it's all a little bit suspicious and staged, which to my uneducated eyes appears true, though having seen some of the emails/memo/presentations that we get at my office... Sometimes the powers at be really believe (and write) this stuff.

Who knows, I have a love-hate relationship with Microsoft, I have to use their products (by-and-large) and they often do some really cool stuff, some of them are even relativly cheap. But when somethings not working, or you're trying to make that next logicial development step... they often start to fall short and the support isn't always helpful.

MS have learned a lot of lessions, through making a lot of mistakes, and the've come a long way, they and their products are definitly improving (and bloating unfortunatly), lets hope that things just keep getting better.

Thursday, November 03, 2005

VoIP phone Denial of Service!

Get lots of people to ring the same guy and shout "Boo"!

Field Notice: [Cisco] FN - 62121 - CP-7940G and CP-7960G May Reboot if Volume is Set to Maximum

Summary: The IP Phone may reboot if volume is set to maximum, a call is placed to it, and the caller makes a loud noise.

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Object based querying of data sources

Very informative video from the Channel 9 team over at MSDN.
Object based querying of any (more or less) data source: arrays, XML, DBS, etc.

Some of the comments below the vid are interesting, particularly the comment about FoxPro. I've never used FoxPro, but I'm sure Delphi had/has similar methods for data source access (considering that Anders is ex-Delphi...) and I have vague recollection of Oracle doing something similar with Pro-C? But that was years ago, no idea where it went.

Anders Hejlsberg - LINQ

Thursday, October 06, 2005

At last a justification for having a WinCE4.0 PDA...

OK, so I've got this Harrier PDA/Cellphone, which is all well and good, but what really can you do with it (other than make phone calls, TXTs, crappy pictures and Solitaire?
 
Here comes the answer... get a 256+meg SD card for it and load Quake3A!
 
That's right, this guy has ported the now open source code from Q3A to WinCE4.0!
 
Now all I need to do it persuade the boss to let me get an SD card...
 
[BTW I've previously tried to get the SANDisk 256MB+WiFi card working with my PDA... it don't....]