#6 Phone Interview Tips

Phone Interview Tips

I have a phone interview coming up this Wednesday. It’s for a software developer internship at a large European company. Do you guys have any tips (expect for trying not to be too nervous)?

Johan Tibell
Monday, October 24, 2005

- Answer questions as succinctly and concisely as possible.
- If you don't know the answer, don't stammer and hem and haw, just say, "I don't know".Sassy

Monday, October 24, 2005

My experience: whatever your natural personality is will come across even more on the phone. So, if you are low-key, you'll come across as depressed or bored. If you are energetic, you'll come across as over-exuberant. So modulate.

In my case I'm low-key, so to keep the energy level up in the phone call I often walk around while talking (within a private area) and I make sure to smile while talking, as it does come across in the voice.

Typically the purpose of a phone interview is to check whether you are remotely a good fit. If there are technologies that they are using that you're very familiar with, drop in references that make that clear. For example, if they're using a technology that recently had an aggravating bug eliminated, don't just say "Yes, I have 5 years experience with X", say "Boy, working with X is sure easier now that we don't have to worry about the foo issue, huh?". A reminder that you and the interviewer are in the same trenches together. (This assumes a technical interviewer, of course.) Jacob

1) Make sure you're in a place you won't be interrupted
2) Have a pad for writing notes that you can refer back to
3) "Smile" over the phone, show some enthusiasm
4) If you're thinking about something while solving a problem or question, talk out loud. This way they "hear" what you're thinking instead of dead silence.
5) If you're at your home computer, have their web site and your resume up for quick review. QADude

[Sharpe, Swift & Satire's Gift] Noblesse Oblige

.../... the following struck me forcefully with its unerring similarity to the cadences and content of a Bush speech. The sentiment of course is an extremely diluted sense of noblesse oblige. On the prescience of satirists again...

A sermon delivered to the congregation of the Church of the Holy Monument in Boggington by the Chief Constable.

"I say unto you that unless we maintain the bonds of free enterprise and free endeavour we shall be bounden to do the Devil's work," he announced from the pulpit. "Our business in the world is to augment the goodness that is God's love with the fruition of free enterprise and to put aside those things which the Welfare State handed us on a plate and thus deprived us of the need to which we must pay homage. That need, dear brothers and sisters in God, is to take care of ourselves as individuals and so save the rest of the community doing it out of the taxpayer's pocket.

Only this week , I have been encouraged to see how many Watch Committees and Neigbourhood Watches have been set up to augment that splendid work being done by the Police everywhere and in particular by the men under my command. It is not often that I have a chance or, I might say, the opportunity to do the Lord's work in the way he would have me do, namely, like your goodselves, to encourage others to free themselves from the shackles of passivity and acceptance and to go forth into the world to bring the positive and active blessings of health, wealth and happiness to those less fortunate than ourselves.

This is not to say that we must bow the knee to social need or so-called deprivation. Instead we must make of ourselves and our gifts in business and in wealth whatsoever we can. As the Lord has told me, there are as many numerous spin-offs on the way to Heaven as there are handouts on the slippery road to Hell. It is one thing to give a penny to a beggar: it is another to beg oneself. And so I say to you dear friends, assist the police wherever you can in the prevention of crime and in the pursuit of justice but never forget that the way of righteousness is the way of self-service and not the other way around. And so let us pray."

Tom Sharpe - The Midden (1996)
===================

What is the difference between TV, radio, and newspapers?

Eventually, the gathering of basic documentary evidence won't be, in and of itself, a special act of citizen journalism. It will just be routine. With lots of eyes and ears on the ground, and a network to connect them, everyone -- first responders, journalists, and citizens alike -- will cope better with crises. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

...

AJAX || +Singularity @ Lambda

New Cheatsheet: What's Ajax?

By amy on ajax

Have I been workin' hard, or hardly workin'? It's a good question. Either way, I've been hacking away an Ajax chapter for the book. Ajax has been becoming one of my very favorite topics, if for no other reason that there is very little writing out there, so far, which makes it as simple as it really is. Plus it's just freakin' cool.
Cheatsheet

What's Ajax? (PDF) is my attempt to cut away as much of the Ajax smoke & pixie dust with a single page. As for the theme, I was inspired by the font (Big Bloke BB). Let me know what you think!
Ajax Interface Example

I've also created a little example movie of an Ajax interface I got to create at work for Ning. If you're working on adding some kind of in-line editing to your applications, you might find it useful. I should have typed less since it was a demo movie, but I was going for realism (translation: I wasn't thinking, and am too lazy to redo it).

Note: The techniques shown in the video are not the same as edit-in-place (EIP). The form is generated by hand-coded Javascript; edit-in-place is somewhat less fancy and it involves less custom work.
Downloads
What's Ajax? cheat sheet (PDF)
Ajax photo sharing app interface (MOV)
Links for Cheatsheet

added 10/30/05—thanks, Jamal
=============================
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/

An Overview of the Singularity Project

Singularity is a research project in Microsoft Research that started with the question: what would a software platform look like if it was designed from scratch with the primary goal of dependability? Singularity is working to answer this question by building on advances in programming languages and tools to develop a new system architecture and operating system (named Singularity), with the aim of producing a more robust and dependable software platform. Singularity demonstrates the practicality of new technologies and architectural decisions, which should lead to the construction of more robust and dependable systems...
Singularity... starts from a premise of language safety and builds a system architecture that supports and enhances the language guarantees.

An interesting overview of what sounds like an intersting project.

The choice of implementation language is also interesting:

Singularity is written in Sing#, which is an extension to the Spec# language developed in Microsoft Research. Spec# itself is an extension to Microsoft’s C# language that provides constructs (pre- and post-conditions and object invariants) for specifying program behavior. Specifications can be statically verified by the Boogie verifier or checked by compiler-inserted run-time tests. Sing# extends this language with support for channels and low-level constructs necessary for system code....integrating a feature into a language allows more aspects of a program to be verified. Singularity’s constructs allow communication to be statically verified.

An interesting aspect is the support for meta-programming, which is implemented in an unusal manner:

Compile-time reflection (CTR) is a partial substitute for the CLR’s full reflection capability. CTR is similar to techniques such as macros, binary code rewriting, aspects, meta-programming, and multi-stage languages. The basic idea is that programs may contain place-holder elements (classes, methods, fields, etc.) that are subsequently expanded by a generator.

Many other intersting design decisions are discussed in the paper (e.g., various DbC facilities), so do check it out.

By Ehud Lamm at 10/28/2005 - 14:54 | Cross language runtimes | Implementation | Meta-Programming | Parallel/Distributed | Software Engineering | 11 comments | other blogs

Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon, and other Alan J. Perlis epigrams

The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities. -- Edsger Dijkstra, How do we tell truths that might hurt?

...there is no agreement on what a programming language really is and what its main purpose is supposed to be. Is a programming language a tool for instructing machines? A means of communicating between programmers? A vehicle for expressing high-level designs? A notation for algorithms? A way of expressing relationships between concepts? A tool for experimentation? A means of controlling computerized devices? My view is that a general-purpose programming language must be all of those to serve its diverse set of users. The only thing a language cannot be – and survive – is a mere collection of ‘‘neat’’ features. -- Bjarne Stroustrup, The Design and Evolution of C++

I think that any language that aspires to mainstream use must provide a broad base for a variety of techniques -- including object-oriented programming (class hierarchies) and generic programming (parameterized types and algorithms). In particular, it must provide good facilities for composing programs out of separate parts (possibly writing in several different languages). I also think that exceptions are necessary for managing the complexity of error handling. A language that lacks such facilities forces its users to laboriously simulate them. -- Bjarne Stroustrup, LinuxWorld

There is a race between the increasing complexity of the systems we build and our ability to develop intellectual tools for understanding that complexity. If the race is won by our tools, then systems will eventually become easier to use and more reliable. If not, they will continue to become harder to use and less reliable for all but a relatively small set of common tasks. Given how hard thinking is, if those intellectual tools are to succeed, they will have to substitute calculation for thought. -- Leslie Lamport.

let me re-assert that the question of whether there are limitations in principle of what problems man can make machines solve for him as compared to his own ability to solve problems, really is a technical question in recursive function theory. -- J. McCarthy, Towards a Mathematical Science of Computation .

Until real software engineering is developed, the next best practice is to develop with a dynamic system that has extreme late binding in all aspects. -- Alan Kay, Is Software Engineering and Oxymoron? In the Croquet User Manual.

Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. -- Philip Greenspun.

By Ehud Lamm at 06/19/2004 - 08:14 | other blogs
============================================
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/10/14.html

This item ran on the Joel on Software homepage on Friday, October 14, 2005

From the Good-Intentions Department

When you see an error in the Windows Event Log, there's always a handy URL that you can click for up-to-date, detailed information about why you got that error, especially since most of the errors you see in there are completely incomprehensible.

Does it work? For really common problems, it gets you an official explanation from the documentation, but it never seems to really have useful information about what caused the problem. Every time I've ever clicked it, I've gotten this:
========================
http://www.zeldman.com/daily/1005g.shtml

Ma.gnolia

“Found is the New Search,” the page proclaims. Zen koan? Nope. George Orwell outtake? Uh-uh. It’s the thought-provoking slogan of Ma.gnolia, an upcoming social bookmarking service now in pre-launch, sign-up mode.

The temporary site’s design is not only lovely, it is also unusual, suggesting levels of thought and depth rarely seen in the category. What a pity this beautiful mini-site will have to die!

I know something about the product that’s coming, and look forward excitedly to its release. You might want to sign up.

• Play today’s Report as MP3

=======================
http://www.xmldatabases.org/WK/blog/1961_New_programming_languages.item

New programming languages

Lot's of interesting programming languages have been popping up lately. Groovy has been one that initially caught my interest and now there's a new language called Boo that looks really interesting. Boo is a language that targets the CLR, but has syntax based on Python. It's not out to make a Python clone, just to have a similar syntax that can leverage the class library and other facilities available through the CLR. It's a really interesting language and runs just fine on top of Mono on Mac OS X.

Another language that looks interesting is from Microsoft Research and is now called Comega. This is an evolution of the language that used to be referred to as X#. This language also targets the CLR and has integrated direct support for XML within the language syntax. I'm dying to have a usable language with tight XML integration so it's good to see progress in this area. Unfortunately, Comega is based around the concept of strongly typed XML which is something that I think defeats the whole point of using XML. Also in typical Microsoft fashion the compiler is available in a format that can only be installed on Windows. So far I haven't been able to try it out to see if it works on Mono. Well, actually I did try to install it on a Windows machine but the installer just silently fails so even that was unsuccessful. I suspect it's looking for the .Net framework or something else that isn't installed on that machine, but there's no information at all on what it requires. Anyway, the compiler download isn't actually linked from the Comega site as far as I can tell so you have to go to the download section on the Microsoft Research site if you want to get it. If it turns out it will run on Mono I'd love to hear about it.

Posted by Kimbro Staken

Saturday Jul 17, 2004 at 3:15 PM
===============================
http://weblog.ikvm.net/PermaLink.aspx?guid=b28aa8b7-87e3-49d7-b0aa-3cc2cb5dbac9

Frozen Strings are Cool

First off all, sorry for the bad pun, but I couldn't resist. Once Whidbey ships, one of the areas that .NET will be light years ahead of Java is the ability to share memory between different instances of the runtime. Microsoft did lots of work in Whidbey to enable sharing of memory pages (e.g. see Rico's post). Sun did a little work in J2SE 5.0 to allow rt.jar to be shared across VM instances, but that's really not much compared with the sharing that NGEN enables on Whidbey.

Frozen Strings

One aspect that hasn't been written about much is the ability to pre-create string instances in NGENed images. What this means is that string literals are layed out in the .data section of the NGEN image exactly like they would be layed out when they are dynamically created by the CLR. So whenever you use a frozen string literal in your managed code you're simply passing around a pointer to static data in the NGEN image and not to an object in the GC heap. Since these strings live in the .data section of the image, the standard copy-on-write page sharing that the operating system uses for initialized data sections in images applies, so unless you modify the object somehow (more about this in a bit) all applications using that image will be sharing the same physical memory pages.

To get NGEN to create frozen strings for your string literals, you have to mark your assembly with the StringFreezingAttribute. Note that the downside of doing this is that your assembly will not be unloadable, because the frozen string instances that live in your image aren't tracked by the GC, the CLR needs to keep the image loaded for the lifetime of the process.

Copy-on-Write

Strings are immutable, so why did I mention modifying the object earlier? One obvious way to modify a string is to use unsafe (or native) code to poke inside the string (a really bad idea!), but there are other ways of "modifying" immutable objects. The first is to use an object as a monitor (using Monitor.Enter or the C# lock() construct) and the second is to get the object's identity hashcode by calling System.Runtime.CompilerServices.RuntimeHelpers.GetHashCode() or doing a non-virtual call to Object.GetHashCode() on the object. Using an object as a monitor will cause the object header to be used as a lightweight lock or as an index into the syncblock table that contains the heavyweight lock, so this can mutate the object (header). Locking on string literals was always a bad idea, because they're probably interned so they may be shared by other pieces of code that you don't know about and they can also be passed across AppDomain boundaries, but in Whidbey there is the additional (potential) cost of having to take a page fault and having to make a private copy of the page containing the strings object header, if the string is frozen. The second issue (identity hashcode) turns out not to be an issue for frozen strings, because NGEN pre-computes an identity hashcode for frozen strings, so RuntimeHelpers.GetHashCode() will simply return the value that was pre-computed and stored in the object header.

8/6/2005 6:52:03 PM (W. Europe Daylight Time, UTC+02:00
=====================

Geek Halloween Costumes
11.	Cat5-Woman
10.	A hard drive eating boot sector virus
9.	TPS report, with wrong cover sheet
8.	A blocked pop-up ad
7.	The 40-year-old virgin
6.	A network server with hot-swappable pants
5.	P2P pirate
4.	A 7-in-1 card reader
3.	A mushroom
2.	A Blue Tooth earpiece
1.	An iPod Nano complete with scratches and class action suit

BAC to BAC? || + Social Software

WebMink: "Faith of the Heart
Back in 2002 I recommended some books by Marcus Borg, a trio describing ways of understanding Christianity that fit the current age without discarding the historic faith. While a few people looked at them, I felt they were too long a work to really be something to recommend to most friends.

I was thus delighted to see that he has written a new book which covers the whole subject in a way that is both accessible and concise. I'm in the middle of reading 'The Heart of Christianity' [US|UK] now, but I'm already both impressed and moved by it and I'd recommend it to anyone for whom faith as belief has grown tired or who is searching for a balance of explanation and mystery in their faith.

Borg is especially careful to respect and value what he terms 'the earlier paradigm' and 'the emerging paradigm'. The title reflects his call to return to an understanding of faith as an affair of the heart as well as of the head. He takes time to explain how the earlier paradigm is itself a product of the Enlightenment and the subsequent era, and suggests that the focus on fact and the scientific method has led to a loss of the parallel understanding of mystery and metaphor that preceding generations of Christians would have cherished.

Borg is reasonable, rational and persuasive and unlike some other books I've read on interpreting Christianity for today he doesn't 'throw out the baby with the bathwater'. He does, however, unlock for me new ways to understand Christianity, and I'm really appreciating the new book."
=========================
http://koranteng.blogspot.com/2005/05/on-significance-of-social-software.html
On The Significance of Social Software

Danah Boyd posts the abstract of a paper she's writing on The Significance of Social Software for public criticism.

In this paper, I will explore the contributions of social software. I will argue that there have been notable technological advancements, but that their significance stems from the rapid iteration of development in ongoing tango with massive user participation. In other words, the advances of social software are neither cleanly social nor technological, but a product of both.

Social software represents a new generation of social technology development - a generation that is dependent on moving beyond the laboratory and into mass culture. Its manifestations are already staggering - ABC declared 2004 the Year of the Blog as blogging challenged everything from political discourse to identity production. Social networking services in the hundreds have motivated millions of people worldwide to construct and negotiate profiles and grapple directly with the social awkwardness of being more public than one thought. By allowing people to easily stumble upon the work of others, media sharing services have prompted new ways of organizing information and playing with the intention of producing media. These advancements complicate critical theoretical ideas about the nature of the public(s), the role of relationships in sharing, and the collective desire to organize information.
.../...
From my standpoint, the only difference in the emergent software is that much of it is web-native and can leverage the delightful surprises and scale of the web platform (which thankfully has remained relatively open). Previously this type of software was typically on vertically-integrated platforms (e.g. Lotus Notes, Groove etc). Now if you lived with those platforms, you would know that you can in some cases get much of the immediacy of the web. As an example, Notes has always had hyperlinks of a sort, there are database links, view links and doc links. Ray Ozzie even invoked Lotus Notes' hyperlinking fundamentals in a bid to save the browser from the Eolas lawsuit. The problem with Notes hyperlinks was that they weren't simple URIs - even if you could indeed copy and paste them in Notes; they were only useful in Notes clients. The ubiquity of the web could not be leveraged in other tools. I couldn't jot down the URI to a particular teamroom on a napkin or paste it in an instant messaging window to share. On the whole nobody cares what kinds of clients you use with web-native software.
Sociological Insight

When considering social software, you have to bring in the sociologists and hence I'd point to some older case studies to consider in this arena regarding the nature of the communities that the software in question is supposed to serve.


* Wellman, Boase and Chen: The Networked Nature of Community Online and Offline

Communities started changing from groups to networks well before the advent
of the Internet. Initially, people believed that industrialization and bureaucratization would dissolve community groups and leave only isolated, alienated individuals. Then scholars discovered that communities continued, but more as sparsely-knit, spatially dispersed social networks rather than as densely-knit, village-like local groups....

Given the movement from the local and densely knit to the far flung and sparsely knit ... it is useful to define community as networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging and social identity.


* Koku and Wellman: Scholarly Networks as Learning Communities: The case of TechNet

"There's a shift from small groups to diffuse, variegated social networks. Boundaries are permeable, interactions are with diverse others, linkages switch between multiple networks, hierarchies are flatter and more recursive.... transient, virtual organizations.. work relations spill over nominal work group boundaries... even connecting to outside organizations"


The insight of such quotes is about the fluidity of the communities in this modern life of ours. They presage a notion of social networks with sometimes implicit rather than explicit webs of relationships. The kind of thinking required for networks needs to be flexible in order to deal with the diffuseness of our evolving patterns of discovery and social interaction. Handwaving a little, it is like the kind of shift in thinking that we have gone through in the move from desktop productivity applications (like the traditional office suites) to web applications that need to keep the network abstraction and usage patterns in mind.
On Metrics

I'd also throw in some Usage Statistics from Groove Networks but the details from that report seems to have vanished into the cyber ether although the summary is important in what it displays about how people actually use the software (as opposed to how the people who wrote the software thought it would be used). With appropriate metrics, those in the community can get measures of health (since as we know sometimes a group is it's own worst enemy - e.g. the kind of collaborative moderation on Slashdot). The metrics can also help those who are developing the community software.

Right now the server logs at del.icio.us, Flickr and Furl are among the most valuable pieces of property in the internet. Certainly for anyone interested in social software, the kind of insight that Joshua Schachter is gaining from his logs would be invaluable.

But this goes beyond research, potentially this is something that can be translated into features of genuine use by glue layer people or perhaps that can be monetized in some fashion (e.g. through advertising supported services). If you want to be intelligent in your design of social software, sometimes you need to go straight to the source and simply ask the users (e.g. the proliferation of "Report Spam" buttons in web mail clients). Enlist the users and get them to feed you their usage patterns (e.g. the Alexa toolbar). It's no wonder that Google is trying to do the same with the launch of its web accelerator.

Cross-posted at the Inside Lotus weblog.

%7 Microsoft Warns of Impossible to Clean Spyware

Slashdot | Microsoft Warns of Impossible to Clean Spyware: "Re:Unpossible to Clean SpyWare?
(Score:4, Interesting)
by Werrismys (764601) on Friday February 18, @09:27PM (#11719168)
'Honestly, VMWare is the best way to use Windows :-)' You could not be more right. I have been advocating VMware before, but for a reason.

I have set up 98SE, 2000Pro, XP environments (clean) under VMware and can easily create a 'clean' environment to test stuff. The snapshot feature is excellent, just snapshot the VM in question and if/when the software fucks up, restore.

The virtual hardware is the same every time. No driver issues. In fact, the current desktop PC's are so fast that it would make sense to run Winblows in them exclusively under VMware.. just store the user dirs on server. Get a new PC? Just copy the virtual disks and configuration.

I've been using VMware since its introduction and am currently using the 4 (and 5beta) versions for desktop use. I've had no use for the expensive server version yet since most of the servers are already running Linux.. but for those legacy Win32 apps VMware is really a blessing. Even been testing BSD's and SuSE distros with it."
-----------------=========

Sysinternals.com is a Good site
(Score:5, Informative)
by tristanj (797805) Alter Relationship on Wednesday February 23, @09:52AM (#11755734)
Sysinternals has been around a while. These guys really know their stuff when it comes to Windows operating systems.

Here are some good tools of their that I use frequently

Autoruns

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/autorun s.shtml [sysinternals.com] shows a complete list of programs that start up automatically when windows starts. Filemon

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/filemon.s html [sysinternals.com] Filemon shows all filesystem access, so you can see which files programs are accessing. I have found it very useful in diagnosing software problems and fighting spyware. Regmon

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/regmon.sh tml [sysinternals.com] Like filemon, but for registry access. Shows keys being read and created. Pagedefrag

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/pagedef rag.shtml [sysinternals.com] Defrags the registry hive (most of the registry is stored on disk but is not typically defragmented by many tools) and paging file. Also many others here

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/utilities.shtml [sysinternals.com]

IMHO any windows admin should have this stuff installed. Many of the utils come with source code.============
==============

OSX definitely has some positives.
(Score:4, Informative)
by nortcele (186941) on Friday February 18, @04:41PM (#11716422)
(http://slashdot.org/)
OSX is more secure in many ways. For those that know what they are doing... (they usually don't get infected but that's beside the point) you can use the "chflags schg " command as root to lock a file so that it cannot be modified. The flag can only be cleared in single-user mode. Standard linux distros with ext2/ext3/reiserfs don't have that. I'm not real up to speed on WinXP or 2003, so I don't know if they have a single user mode (or a real multi-user mode ). But OSX can be hardened to where you can be sure the kernel or critical libs cannot be updated.
-----------------------

Re:Argument for Partitioning
(Score:5, Informative)
by slaker (53818) on Friday February 18, @04:15PM (#11716080)
There does exist a tool called "linkd" in the Windows 2003 Server resource kit, which allows you to set mount points via the command line.

So you install a system. Use two partitions. Pull the drive. Install 2nd drive on working windows machin. Copy the "Documents and Settings" to the second partition of the newly installed drive. Then use linkd to create a "Documents and Settings" mount point from one partition to the other.

As a semi-serious builder/hobbyist, when I build a system, I use preconfigured sysprep images where I have already done this (the mount point linkage IS copied by programs like ghost that support NTFS5). I can restore a single partition or the whole disk. Either way. I distribute a restore DVD to my customers that can fix their spyware- and virus-hosed Windows installs without killing all the pictures they took with their digital camera etc.

It took me a bit of fiddling to make sure I have the process right, but for the number of times it's saved me two hours' work, I almost want to cry.
--------------------

Bruce Schneier on the Prototype Detection Tool
(Score:5, Informative)
by Noksagt (69097) on Friday February 18, @04:04PM (#11715927)
(http://arc.nucapt.northwestern.edu/)
Bruce covered the tool in a recent post [schneier.com] on his blog. He says:

This is a really interesting technical report from Microsoft. It describes a clever prototype -- called GhostBuster -- they developed for detecting arbitrary persistent and stealthy software, such as rootkits, Trojans, and software keyloggers. It's a really elegent idea, based on a simple observation: the rootkit must exist on disk to be persistent, but must lie to programs running within the infected OS in order to hide.


Here's how it works: The user has the GhostBuster program on a CD. He sticks the CD in the drive, and from within the (possibly corrupted) OS, the checker program runs: stopping all other user programs, flushing the caches, and then doing a complete checksum of all files on the disk and a scan of any registry keys that could autostart the system, writing out the results to a file on the hard drive.

Then the user is instructed to press the reset button, the CD boots its own OS, and the scan is repeated. Any differences indicate a rootkit or other stealth software, without the need for knowing what particular rootkits are or the proper checksums for the programs installed on disk.

Simple. Clever. Elegant.

In order to fool GhostBuster, the rootkit must 1) detect that such a checking program is running and either not lie to it or change the output as it's written to disk (in the limit this becomes the halting problem for the rootkit designer), 2) integrate into the BIOS rather than the OS (tricky, platform specific, and not always possible), or 3) give up on either being persistent or stealthy. Thus this doesn't eliminate rootkits entirely, but is a pretty mortal blow to persistent rootkits.

Of course, the concept could be adopted for any other operating system as well.

This is a great idea, but there's a huge problem. GhostBuster is only a research prototype, so you can't get a copy. And, even worse, Microsoft has no plans to turn it into a commercial tool.

This is too good an idea to abandon. Microsoft, if you're listening, you should release this tool to the world. Make it public domain. Make it open source, even. It's a great idea, and you deserve credit for coming up with it.

Any other security companies listening? Make and sell one of these. Anyone out there looking for an open source project? Here's a really good one.

Note: I have no idea if Microsoft patented this idea. If they did and they don't release it, shame on them. If they didn't, good for them.

----------------------

Hmm
(Score:5, Informative)
by ctr2sprt (574731) on Friday February 18, @04:17PM (#11716121)
(Last Journal: Saturday June 25, @10:44AM)
Maybe I'm missing something, but this doesn't seem like anything new. Google for HackerDefender, I'm sure you'll find some relevant links. It intercepts the appropriate system calls to make itself completely invisible: it hides its processes as it's running, it hides the services that start them, etc. I've been seeing it on my employer's Windows servers for quite some time. There are ways to clean it, though they could of course be circumvented as well. The foolproof way to remove it is to boot from a special Windows boot CD and delete the files it uses.

Unless there's something really new and complex going on here, not only is this not new, but IT professionals already have ways of dealing with it. In our case, on a live system with one reboot required. I wouldn't call it minor, certainly (10 minutes of downtime is 10 minutes of downtime), but... hell, if script kiddies have been using this for months and months...

------------------

Already in the wild?
(Score:4, Interesting)
by kilocomp (234607) on Friday February 18, @04:57PM (#11716614)
One of the computers I support had a very nasty piece of spyware. I am not sure if it was exploiting the same things described by Microsoft, but it had the following symptoms:
1. The process would not show up in task manager
2. The related files would not show up in Explorer
3. The related registry keys did not show up in regedit
4. It some how was being called by Winlogin, so it ran even in safe mode.

The way I detected it was by using several Sysinternals utilities http://www.sysinternals.com/ [sysinternals.com]. I have a script that uses pslist to monitor all processes on the network and this spyware was not smart enough to hide from that. A remote regedit session enabled you to see the related registry files. I had to use BartPE http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ [nu2.nu] to mount the drive and clean out the related files and registry ke
----------
Re:Ok...
(Score:5, Informative)
by Zocalo (252965) on Friday February 18, @04:17PM (#11716114)
(http://www.zocalo.uk.com/)
Actually, most *NIX rootkits have been intercepting system calls to the kernel and replacing common command tools that might be used to detect and remove them for ages. I haven't heard of one that can avoid detection by the likes of Chkrootkit [freshmeat.net] and Rootkit Hunter [freshmeat.net] yet, other than by being brand new of course. Naturally, that doesn't automatically mean that it's impossible to write one though.
-------------------==========

Reputation Counts
(Score:5, Insightful)
by Ridgelift (228977) on Wednesday February 23, @11:26AM (#11755485)
Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell have been providing invaluable tools for years. Even if Microsoft released a rootkit detection package tomorrow, I would still use sysinternal's over anything Microsoft provides because "there is no anonymous team of programmers or writers behind Sysinternals" [sysinternals.com]. They put their name on everything they give away and sell.

When it comes to trust, people put their names on things they know are trustworthy. I can't count the number of times I've felt betrayed by Microsoft's products not doing what they're supposed to do, only to discover a flaw in their product that they knew about but didn't tell so as not to affect sales. I also can't count the number of times utilities such as NTFS for DOS [sysinternals.com] have saved my butt in the field.

Way to go Sysinternals.
==================================

Microsoft BSA
(Score:5, Informative)
by TheFlyingGoat (161967) on Wednesday February 23, @11:19AM (#11755415)
(http://members.surfeu.fi/kklaine/primebear.html | Last Journal: Tuesday March 15, @02:16PM)
While you're at it, download the Microsoft Baseline Security Tool [microsoft.com]. It's not quite the same, but it's an excellent tool for anyone looking to make their Windows box more secure. It can also scan computers on your network (that you have rights on), so you can easily find all the Windows boxes on your network that aren't up to date on their patches, have Guest accounts enabled, or other bad things.
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\This proves once more...
(Score:4, Interesting)
by Spy der Mann (805235) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (todhsals.nnamredyps)> on Friday February 18, @04:55PM (#11716590)
(Last Journal: Wednesday October 12, @02:42PM)
how flawed this operating system is.

Flaw #1: Any app can make arbitrary changes to the registry.
Flaw #2: Any app can make arbitrary changes to the system files.
Flaw #3: There is no "safe-mode" for core utilities, that would bypass any hijacking of system calls.

Now can anybody explain to me what was the point of having "system, readonly" attributes, if they can just be turned off?

Bill Gates never wanted to admit it. But this is just proof that Windows is nothing but MS-DOS "on steroids".

Till a few days ago, I thought Linux would be the doom of Microsoft, defeating it like David defeated Goliath. But it turns out.. Goliath is about to die from a genetic anomaly. His very nature gave him a short lifespan.

Oh joy...
--------

Unblock Google Cache in China || REXX

Unblock Google Cache in China

The not so obvious point about this
(Score:5, Insightful)
by teutonic_leech (596265) on Monday October 31, @02:48PM (#13916905)
I am sure that plenty of responses are going to be along the lines of 'this is going to get disabled very soon, so why bother?'. However, I feel compelled to point out that the worst thing we all can do is to simply roll over and accept censorship of any kind. It is important that we do whatever possible to allow Internet audiences in more restricted nations to get a glimpse at the full spectrum (bad and good) of all the information that's out there. Yes, it is an armsrace and yes this workaround will probably not stand for very long.

BUT we need to send repeating signals that information should not be restricted. The reason for that is the unfortunate ability of homo sapiens sapiens to adapt to almost any environment. May this be extreme climate, sparse resources, or supressive political regimes. I bet you that a great majority of Internet surfers in China were probably upset when they first learned about those restrictions - but over time they probably accepted this as 'normal' and happily made due with the information that is presented to them. In some ways we are doing the same here in the U.S. and I make it a point to watch news shows from Europe to counter-balance the often one-sided and myopic reporting I mostly witness on most U.S. news stations/channels.

So, if this can shake up some complacency and re-instill the hunger for freedom to all information, then this is a great little work-around. We all need to get a kick in the keester to sometimes not simply seek a position of maximum comfort and non-conflict. Remember the old expression: If working towards freedom, prepare for war. I'm not quoting this expression to be taken literal here - I'm saying that it's always dangerous to accept the status quo.
Sorry for the rant - I'm getting off the soap box now...

--------------------------

Google is a genius...
(Score:4, Interesting)
by clragon (923326) on Monday October 31, @07:10PM (#13919127)
wow.. having born and lived in China i know what this means for google.. profit.. you have to understand that it's not impossible for people to get books or other literature restricted by the goverment. before the internet, the CCP would put restriction on a book (a banned book in other words) and the next day there will be millions of people wanting to read that book, regardless of if it's good or not. when CCP put restrictions on the internet, there was no way around that for a normal person. another thing i have to mention is that the Chinese search engine is http://baidu.com/ [baidu.com] everyone in China uses it like us using google. google is not popular there compared to BaiDu. so with this uncensor, there will be millions of chinese flowing to google in order to read uncensored information on the internet. and since google is not a Chinese businese (unlike BaiDu) the CCP can't do anything about it. so google's influence in China will finaly increase... all i can do is applaud google's business tactics... wow... /offtopic/rant as far as the "evil communists" goes, it's not all evil. the person over threw the Qing Dynasty, and made China democracy country, Sun yat-sen, was the leader of china when he wanted to have 2 kinds of goverment parties. one is democracy and one is communism. he believed that people should have freedom but not complete freedom because that would cause alot of problems. thats how the communist party came into power, before that they were a tiny little political party that had no power. when Sun yat-sun died he gave the position of president to Shiang Kai-shek (as you can see China wasn't completly democracy back then, probably because a voting would have caused too much trouble in a already poor country and some people doesn't even know who was their leader and stuff) and Shiang kai-shek hated the Communitst. he ordered secret assasination of communist party members which furthur worsen the relationship of the 2 parties. so the communist party members basicly said "why are we waiting to be assasinated? why dont we just rebel?" so thats how they started the war and then the japanese started attacking china and the rest is history. so as you can see, the communist struggle to power was hard and when they were finaly in power, there were still lots of pro-democracy people around and letting the democracy party people having a taste of their own medicine, they started torturing the democracy party people and murdered lots of innocent people, because they came to power because the KMT gave them power, they learned the lesson of the KMT and never gave any other part in China significant power, just to establish themselves as the official goverment in the people's eyes. Shiang Kai-shek escaped to Taiwan and established his own democracy goverment there (and i should metion that he purged all of his old KMT party members form mainland) , and later died and the presidency to his son (not as democracy as he say he is :P ). if Shiang Kai-shek didn't decide to assasinate the communist party members we might actualy see an example of a democracy goverment AND a communist goverment co-exist and govern on country together. where the people have freedom, but not too much that it endangers the country's existance. /end rant
-----------------

Now let's just hope...
(Score:5, Insightful)
by whamett (917546) Alter Relationship on Monday October 31, @12:39PM (#13916844)

... that Google doesn't voluntarily identify users who do this, like Yahoo did [theepochtimes.com].

Unfortunately, many high-tech companies are all to eager to do business with a regime that has killed 80 million people [ninecommentaries.com]. Western companies' equipment, software, and expertise are what allow China's 30,000+ full-time internet censors to block this kind of breakthrough soon after they're discovered. They couldn't have built such a system without our help.
--------------------

is this information available in China?
(Score:5, Insightful)
by mah! (121197) Alter Relationship on Monday October 31, @12:19PM (#13916673)
(http://slashdot.org/~mah!/)
It's an interesting idea... but is slashdot [slashdot.org] or information the feature itself [customizegoogle.com] blocked by their Cisco-backed filter [opennetinitiative.net]?
------------------

Great Firewall of China
(Score:5, Funny)
by The_Rippa (181699) Alter Relationship on Monday October 31, @12:28PM (#13916741)
I missed this whole thing...are they trying to keep the Mongolians out of their network?-

======
http://readthisblog.net/category/computer-stuff/

Read This Blog!Because everyone is entitled to my opinion.

Pages I find through SiteMeter

I use SiteMeter to track traffic to this site (I guess I could use the logs that my ISP provides, but I started using SiteMeter years ago for Defenestration Corner, where logs weren’t available, and I like the reports they provide).

Every so often, I look at the referers they report, and if something looks interesting (usually a search engine referral), I’ll click on it. Today, I found that my blog had been reached by a Google query for “kedit macros 2005″; I was curious enough to look at that page of Google results to see what else showed up. There wasn’t much, but because it was the second page of results, I decided to look at the first page.

And there was an entry with a very intriguing title: Eastern Orthodox Editors (XEDIT/KEDIT/THE, etc). It is one page on an interesting site (http://www.softpanorama.org) prepared by Dr. Nikolai Bezroukov as a service to the UN Sustainable Development Networking Programme.

Dr. Bezroukov has some definite views on editors (ones which aren’t far from mine). I am going to have to take a closer look at vim the next time I fire up my Linux box — I’ve been using it strictly at the same level of knowledge that I had for vi back in 1992 or so, and it appears that it’s far more capable than I’d given it credit for.

=====

May 28, 2005

Rexx - King of Languages

Howard Fosdick wrote about one of my favorite languages, Rexx, on OnLAMP earlier this week.

For many years, I did almost all my programming in Rexx, mostly on VM/CMS but occasionally on TSO or OS/2; it was a language well-suited to the environment and to the kinds of problems I had to deal with, especially when augmented with tools like WAKEUP (providing event handling) and RXSOCKET (TCP/IP socket access), as well as the invaluable CMS Pipelines. One of the best features of Rexx was its ubiquity on VM/CMS; because it used system hooks, it was available as a macro language for any program which needed one — and so it was far easier for a developer to use Rexx than to make up a unique language.

Back in 1989, Almaden’s only connection to Usenet was an AIX box, which dialed out once a day and fetched the day’s postings. I wanted real-time access to Usenet, especially misc.kids (this was long ago, before spam was invented, and so there was some actual content on Usenet), but our only connection to the ARPANet was on VM. So I wrote some Rexx code to gateway postings through VM to the AIX box (and back); it was probably about 2000 lines of Rexx and needed four virtual machines to run (CMS was single-threaded). Since the postings were traversing VM, it also seemed like a good idea to gateway them into our VM-based conferencing system — and at one time, that traffic accounted for 25% of the network traffic in IBM.

Rexx was the native macro language on OS/2, as well, and at one time, my OS/2 Gopher client had a hook to allow writing Rexx macros. Unfortunately, I never figured out any use for macros in a Gopher client, and so I never documented the hook (I think I removed it before the official release of the Gopher client). But Mike Cowlishaw took great advantage of the OS/2 support of Rexx when he wrote the OS/2 Gopher (and later Web) server, GOSERVE — of course, he was also the author of Rexx, so it was a natural decision for him!

I don’t use VM/CMS much any more (I still have an account, which I use once every 90 days to change its password); I still do have a mission-critical Rexx program which converts my paystub into QIF form so I can import it into Quicken. And my preferred text editor, Kedit, uses a 90%-subset of Rexx as its macro processor.

These days, I tend to write in Python — it has much the same “feel” as Rexx, and it makes it easy to get to SOAP, XML parsers, and the like. I tried Perl for a while, but didn’t like the style of the language. I’m playing with Ruby a bit, but haven’t really gotten down to writing anything real, and I can get by in PHP when I need to (for example, in customizing WordPress). But I still miss Rexx.

Filed under: Computer Stuff — David @ 9:01 pm

Apple Sells 1 Million Videos in Seven Days

Apple Sells 1 Million Videos in Under 20 Days: "Re:Christopher Walken Effect
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Frogbeater (216054) Alter Relationship on Monday October 31, @03:16PM (#13918146)
(http://frogbeater.com/)
I noticed that too. Particularly because I worked on that video.
I was the dolly grip, which means every shot in that video in which the camera was moving (except the one where he gets on the escalator) is me moving the camera (dare I say, dancing with Mr. Walken?)

No royalties for me.

But the iTunes store has validated that video as one of the greatest of all time.

Here [frogbeater.com] are some behind the scenes shots if anyone is interested.
That would be me, standing behind the camera."
--------


========================


Fighting against public knowledge
(Score:5, Interesting)
by saskboy (600063) Alter Relationship on Monday October 31, @12:13PM (#13916615)
(http://www.abandonedstuff.com/ | Last Journal: Friday October 28, @07:52PM)
I wonder how big China will have to get before they realize that it's hopeless to control information. I guess the people in power figure that as long as they maintain tight control for enough generations, the lack of information will just feel commonplace to the Chinese people. I don't think human biology will allow for that apathy about the world though. Although I could be wrong [ie. growing US apathy about non-domestic issues].
--
*Space age Foil Hats for kitty* [sasktelwebsite.net]

-----

Defend Yourself in the Imminent Robot Rebellion

Defend Yourself in the Imminent Robot Rebellion: "Asimov's Laws
(Score:5, Interesting)
by AtomicSnarl (549626) Alter Relationship on Monday October 31, @08:27AM (#13914735)
Don't worry -- Pretty soon they'll evolve to discover Asimov's Zeroth [androidworld.com] Law [wikipedia.org].

Umm, they ARE evolving, aren't they"
-----------------

I'll boil it down to two steps.
(Score:5, Funny)
by Artifakt (700173) Alter Relationship on Monday October 31, @09:24AM (#13915141)
1. Don't put any RED LEDs in robots. With only blue LEDs, they can't flip the evil bit (This is exaustively demonstrated by that Will Smith movie that wasn't based on Isaac Asimov's I, Robot http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0343818/ [imdb.com])

2. Do what I do - twice a year, gather all your electronic devices, (except one video player system), set them in comfortable chairs in front of the tube, and give them a marathon showing of The Brave Little Toaster http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092695/ [imdb.com]. Warning, I tried adding popcorn to the experience, but surprisingly, it increases the risk of rebellion when it gets caught in the little workings.

Now for the real problem: If zombies rend, mangle, eviscerate and eat their living victims the way they do in movies, how do any of the victims have enough physical integrity left to turn into more zombies?
--
I am Not a Lawyer. I am not a Gypsy Prince. I am not Komar, King of the Voins.

------------

A Century Too Late
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Markus Registrada (642224) Alter Relationship on Monday October 31, @10:59AM (#13915992)
The machines took over more than a century ago. They're called corporations, they were declared "legal persons" in the 1880s and "natural persons" in the 1920s. They have since been consolidating their control of the U.S. government. The big ones live forever, and most are forbidden by charter to exercise anything like a conscience.

All those pulp-fiction stories about robot takeovers? They were meant to warn us to take control back from the corporations before it was too late. Now that they've taken over TV, newspapers, and movie studios, it probably is, and robot-takeover stories are just a genre. They're not even worried about me posting this. ("Terminator" was their little joke.) The Japanese zeibatsus and the game companies are working on human-shaped appendages for you all to interact with once the CEOs and Dick Cheney become unnecessary. They're in no hurry, because there's no "off" switch.

So, welcome your old, familiar corporate overlords, instead. A few of the toadies among you (you know who you are!) will be tormented somewhat less, but expect lots of competition. The heroes will, as a rule, be patiently outlived. That is all. Return to your tasks.

Sony DRM scumware cloaked in music CD <+ORCL 'free' DB bunk>

http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=05/10/31/0659254
Oracle To Offer A Free Database: "Re:what a wimpy database
(Score:5, Informative)
by smitty_one_each (243267) * Alter Relationship on Monday October 31, @07:05AM (#13914216)
(http://www.emacswiki...iki/ChristopherSmith | Last Journal: Friday July 22, @07:43AM)
The thing about PostGreSQL that trumps the competition, IMHO, is that you can build in support for tools such as Python on the DB server.

PL/pgSQL bears a resemblance to PL/SQL, and both languages are servicable enough. Oracle cooks in its own JVM. While Java is an undeniably powerful tool, one feels relatively enslaved to the JVM, compared to the bliss of simple, clear Python code.
--
VIRI NON SVMVSNE DEVO SVMVS"
---------------

Clearly, Oracle has bought a major disk drive company. Have you ever downloaded or tried to install Oracle? It's easily 10 Gigs of useless crud, wrapped around a few CD's of material actually relevant to your particular setup. For Linux, they publish it as a set of binary bundles that have to be strung together so that you can *then* take apart the tarball. What a waste of disk space!

The approach shows up in everything they do. Build a huge, conglomerated edifice of software to provide the one brick you actually need, rather than keeping components modular and portable. It's like making people install a whole radio station just to get a pair of headphones.
------------

----------
http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html
Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far
Last week when I was testing the latest version of RootkitRevealer (RKR) I ran a scan on one of my systems and was shocked to see evidence of a rootkit. Rootkits are cloaking technologies that hide files, Registry keys, and other system objects from diagnostic and security software, and they are usually employed by malware attempting to keep their implementation hidden (see my “Unearthing Rootkits” article from thre June issue of Windows IT Pro Magazine for more information on rootkits). The RKR results window reported a hidden directory, several hidden device drivers, and a hidden application:
------------------

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=05/10/31/2016223
Re:Sony is protected by the DMCA
(Score:5, Informative)
by plilja (91030) Alter Relationship on Monday October 31, @10:27PM (#13920992)
Actually, many folks misread this section of the DMCA. The DMCA allows an individual to circumvent copy protection for thier own use through the "fair use" provision.

What it prohibits is the disemination of knowlege and tools on how to circumvent copy protection.

Anyone is free to do anything they want to rid themselves of any copy protection on media they own...as long as they keep the knowlege of it entirely to themselves. (There are some exceptions for encryption research and, to a lesser extent security research, as well)

------------------------

Re:Sony is protected by the DMCA
(Score:5, Informative)
by Alsee (515537) Alter Relationship on Tuesday November 01, @04:44AM (#13922236)
(http://slashdot.org/)
I don't know why this idea keeps cropping up, and particularly why it got modded to 5. The DMCA most certainly does NOT permit circumvention for Fair Use purposes.

US Law Title 17 section 1201: [cornell.edu]
Circumvention of copyright protection systems
(a) Violations Regarding Circumvention of Technological Measures.--
(1) (A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

The act of circumvention itself is indeed criminalized by the DMCA.

Note that the DMCA also says:
(c) Other Rights, Etc., Not Affected.--(1) Nothing in this section shall affect rights, remedies, limitations, or defenses to copyright infringement, including fair use, under this title.

That sounds pretty good, right? Except it's pure bullshit, law literally written by lawyers employed by the publishing industry. It means absolutely ZERO. It says it protects/preserves Fair Use defenses to Copyright Infringment. However CIRCUMVENTION CRIME is not copyright infringment. Circumvention crime has absolutely nothing to do with copyright infringment. There is no Fair Use defence to cricumvention crime. So what that section really says is that a NONEXISTENT defence is not affected. It sure sounded nice hough, didn't it?

-
--
- -EFF link: Fight the DMCA [eff.org]
-----------------

In democratic america...

(Score:5, Insightful)

by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 31, @05:06PM (#13919071)

corporations exploit YOU!

hrm, so much for humor. I don't find it funny at all

:/
-----------------

Re:In democratic america...

(Score:5, Insightful)

by conJunk (779958) on Monday October 31, @05:10PM (#13919126)

damn... you know it's getting scary when the soviet russia joke is not only unfunny, but frightening....

i don my tinfoil hat and robe...
-----------------

Re:In democratic america...

(Score:5, Informative)

by nmb3000 (741169) <nmb3000@that-google-mail-site.com> on Monday October 31, @05:50PM (#13919456)
(http://www.khaaan.com/ | Last Journal: Friday October 28, @11:42PM)

corporations exploit YOU!

Insightful indeed.

The thing is that there is more than a corporation here. The artist that chose to sign with Sony is now going to feel the repercussions of this dirty little trick Sony tried to play. Do you think that Sony really cares if they loose a few sales of this one CD because they got caught red-handed? Of course not.

These record labels are not only exploiting the consumer, but they are screwing over the artists that depend on them for advertising and distribution. Here is contact information [thevanzants.com] for Van Zant [thevanzants.com]. Let them know that you're pissed. Let them know you won't be buying their CD. Let them know that they were screwed by Sony. While you're at it, why not let First4Internet [first4internet.com] know that you hate them and hope they burn in Hell for writing malware like this. A few thousand emails will do wonders for these jerks.

If enough artists move away from these corporate labels it can only mean good things for the consumers. It's not impossible for this to happen, just extremely difficult.

--

I am the proud winner of the very first ThinkGeek No-Prize, awarded by Mark S. on June 2, 2005. Envy me!
-----------------

Re:In democratic america...

(Score:5, Insightful)

by chrysrobyn (106763) on Monday October 31, @07:09PM (#13919995)

In democratic America... corporations exploit YOU!

I've read two relevant quotes.

"Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard."

"In communism, man exploits man. In capitalism, it's the other way around."
----------------

Britain's Computer Misuse Act...

(Score:5, Interesting)

by jd (1658) on Monday October 31, @06:00PM (#13919546)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Friday July 29, @11:33PM)

...could probably be used in this way, for this software. The program was unquestionably not authorized by the user, as it is not declared in the EULA. As there is no apparent (yet) "Phone Home" capability, it would not violate the Data Protection Act. It might violate tresspass/break-and-entry laws, as the only reason the hacker of Prince Philip's e-mail account escaped conviction was that a transient tool was not considered a lockpick. This is a permanent tool that permits repeated intrusion, so I would guess the courts would be more sympathetic to the argument that it was breaking and entering. IANAL, but most people in computing in Britain have covered the DPA and CMA to some degree, because these are things IT people need to be careful of. It is possible - though unlikely - that the EU could also prosecute Sony over this, as it may infringe on privacy and computer protection laws in Europe. It's very doubtful the EU would take such action - they barely took any action against Microsoft for anything it did - but if Sony or other companies agravate the situation enough, there ARE elections in Italy coming up and the ruling elite there could do with someone to victimize.

America - well, there's no privacy in the US of A. The trade in personal information is open and widespread. There is an excellent chance that if anyone tried to prosecute Sony over privacy infringements that it would be laughed out of court. You can't protect what you don't have. Posession is 9/10ths of the law, and Americans posess very little - much as they often like to believe otherwise.

Sony actually has a much stronger case. Reverse-engineering their DRM scheme is in direct violation of both the letter AND the spirit of the DMCA, which is explicitly intended to prohibit exactly this kind of research (ie: the study of the spyware) and this kind of result (ie: the removal of it, afterwards). Depending on who Sony licensed the rootkit from, there is a possibility it might also violate aspects of the PATRIOT act. (If the rootkit is also used by any law enforcement groups, then this study could compromise wiretapping provisions in the act.)

--

What do we need to make our world come alive? What does it take to make us sing? (SoM)
-------------

Didn't Notice?

(Score:5, Funny)

by KidHash (766864) on Monday October 31, @05:09PM (#13919111)
(http://www.normanonline.co.uk/)

Not that this makes it better in any way, but I liked how he said

I hadn't noticed when I purchased the CD from Amazon.com that it's protected with DRM software, but if I had looked more closely at the text on the Amazon.com web page I would have known

followed by a picture of the amazon web page in question with [CONTENT/COPY-PROTECTED CD] clearly visible in massive letters.
----------------

"There won't be ANYTHING we won't say to people to try and convince them that OUR way is the way to go. " --Bill Gates
-------------

--

What do we need to make our world come alive? What does it take to make us sing? (SoM)
-------------

Didn't Notice?

(Score:5, Funny)

by KidHash (766864) on Monday October 31, @05:09PM (#13919111)
(http://www.normanonline.co.uk/)

Not that this makes it better in any way, but I liked how he said

I hadn't noticed when I purchased the CD from Amazon.com that it's protected with DRM software, but if I had looked more closely at the text on the Amazon.com web page I would have known

followed by a picture of the amazon web page in question with [CONTENT/COPY-PROTECTED CD] clearly visible in massive letters.
----------------

"There won't be ANYTHING we won't say to people to try and convince them that OUR way is the way to go. " --Bill Gates
-------------
Turn off autorun [annoyances.org].
---------------

Damn, I thought I was first

(Score:5, Interesting)

by muzzy (164903) on Monday October 31, @07:40PM (#13920163)
(http://www.muzzy.net/ | Last Journal: Thursday November 07, @11:58PM)

I thought I was ahead of time, when I implemented a rootkit DRM just a few days ago. My rootkit is a part of my project, trying to show how malware and DRM systems can get really close to each others, and both get protected by law. Under EU Copyright Directive, it's going to be illegal to remove this rootkit.

You can read about my copyright projects here:
http://muzzy.net/files/copyright_projects_en.txt [muzzy.net]

--
/* mZ^WC */

The Man Behind Apple And Pixar

The Man Behind Apple And Pixar


Interesting paragraph, using Pixar as leverage
(Score:5, Interesting)
by SuperKendall (25149) * Alter Relationship on Monday October 31, @12:46AM (#13913128)
One of the more interesting paragraphs in an article of otherwise rehashed details this:

Jobs is a fiendishly good negotiator, a skill honed in the 1970s, when he charmed every supplier in Silicon Valley into providing parts for the first Apple computers. It's this ability that makes him valuable to Pixar, where Jobs isn't so involved in the production side (that is handled by John Lasseter). Jobs's role was to write the cheques (which nearly bankrupted him, until the company was floated) and barter with film studios. Which he did with accomplishment: Disney gave in to Pixar, and is presently trying to woo it back to a new distribution deal - a deal that Jobs is making Disney give up all sorts of favours for, like providing content in the form of TV shows for his Apple iTunes store. The giant Disney, kowtowing to the tiny Apple? A bizarre reversal.
An interesting speculation, which would explain how Jobs was able to get Disney to be the first to put TV on ITMS - anyone remember how scared Disney was of DVD's for quite some time? Uses Pixar as leverage is diabolically clever. And it's even hinted at by the only other non-music video for sale being Pixar shorts.
--
'If there were no Apple, it would be necessary for Microsoft to create one.' (apologies to Voltaire)
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Full of Sheet
(Score:5, Interesting)
by David Off (101038) Alter Relationship on Monday October 31, @01:59AM (#13913330)
(http://www.abcseo.com/)
Back around the Gulf war Cringely made another observation about the duo which I like. He said Gates was like the Sultan of Kuwait, not wanting the boat rocked and milking the profits from his empire. Jobs was like Hussein, firing his revolver in the air in front of a crowd of fanatics and telling the rest of the world that they are "full of shit".

If you want a very good book about Apple [apple2history.org] up to the time of Sculley and Jobs' early years try to get hold of The Journey is the Reward [amazon.com] by Jeffery Young. West of Eden, the End of Innocence at Apple Computer [amazon.com] by Frank Rose is also another good book at this time. Oh, and if you want a laff read Sculley's book Odyssey [amazon.com] - a more talentless f*ck and bigger blowhard you could not wish to hire to ruin your business, the guy obviously only made it by marrying the boss's daughter. Sculley is all that is wrong with corporate America. The book must rank with "The Road Ahead" as the deranged ramblings of someone who just didn't get it. :-)
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More Insight
(Score:5, Interesting)
by Brainix (748988) Alter Relationship on Monday October 31, @02:49AM (#13913419)
(http://brainix.net/)
For more insight into Steve Jobs, click here [folklore.org].

Also, the following quotes are spoken by Steve Jobs' character in the movie Pirates of the Silicon Valley [imdb.com]. Steve Wozniak has verified [woz.org] the movie as accurate.

* Information is power.
* It's better to be a pirate than to join the navy.
* 90 hours per week and loving it.
* Real artists ship.

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