The Mandelbear's Musings

Techdirt: Microsoft's Final 'Up Yours' To Those Who Bought Into Its DRM Story

Remember a few years back when Microsoft launched a new type of DRM under the name "PlaysForSure"? The idea was to create a standard DRM that a bunch of different online music download stores could use, and which makers of digital music devices could build for. Except... like any DRM, it had its problems. And, like any DRM, its real purpose was to take away features, not add them, making all of the content hindered by it less valuable. Yet, because Microsoft was behind it, many people assumed that at least Microsoft would keep supporting it. Well, you've now learned your lesson. Playsforsure was so bad that Microsoft didn't even use it for its own Zune digital media device. Along with that, Microsoft shut down its failed online music store, and now for the kicker, it's telling anyone who was suckered into buying that DRM'd content that it's about to nuke the DRM approval servers that let you transfer the music to new machines.

Anyone out there on my flist dumb or careless enough to have fallen for PlaysForSure music? Sorry about that.

This article in InfoWorld points to a particularly disturbing article and accompanying FAQ:

The code, published over the weekend by researchers Adrian Pastor and Petko Petkov, exploits features in two technologies: The UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) protocol, which is used by many operating systems to make it easier for them to work with devices on a network, and Adobe Systems' Flash multimedia software.

By tricking a victim into viewing a malicious Flash file, an attacker could use UPnP to change the primary DNS server used by the router to find other computers on the Internet. This would give the attacker a virtually undetectable way to redirect the victim to fake Web sites. For example, a victim with a compromised router could be taken to the attacker's Web server, even if he typed Citibank.com directly into the Web browser navigation bar.

The InfoWorld article's title is "Flash attack could take over your router", but it's really much more general than that: a maliciously-crafted flash movie could theoretically take over any UPnP device as long as it could guess its local IP address. Routers just happen to be ubiquitous, and come with only a limited number of default setups.

Turn off UPnP on any device where it's not absolutely essential. The article says, "Users could avoid this attack by turning UPnP off on their routers, where it is normally enabled by default, but this would cause a variety of popular applications, such as IM software, games, and Skype, to break and require manual configuration on the router", but it's not as bad as all that. Skype, IM, and games work perfectly well on my kids' Windows boxes, and my router is a Linux box without UPnP.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft is a major promoter of UPnP -- it stands for "Universal Plug and Play" and, like so many "features" from Microsoft, it's supposed to make things easier for their users. If they made cars, they'd all have the same key because somebody with two cars might get them mixed up.

Gratuitous Icon Post: The icon comes from the print I bought recently from ohiblather's shop on deviantART.

It seems some SATA drives have a tendency to spin down and not come back to life quickly enough to suit the drivers -- or even the BIOS. My fileserver, which has a pair of 400GB Seagates, seems to be afflicted. Twice, recently, I've come home and found it hung, and when I power-cycled the thing it took no less than two resets before the drives were happy. This does not make me happy.

As far as I can tell, every damned one of my four SATA drives has this problem, in varying degrees. Grrr. I seem to have it most often with drives that are left unused for a long time -- it mostly seems to hit the backup drives (though not always). For now I'm enabling swap on my mirror drive; I don't think it was this bad back before I disabled it to save wear and tear on the drive.

But I'm seriously considering sticking them in a RAID box where they'll get plenty of exercise, and replacing them with IDE drives. Not what I was planning to spend money on, though.

Meanwhile, I've been spending the last hour or so running malware scans on the flower_cat's stupid Windows machine. And disabling the virus scanner, which seems to be causing a host of problems all by itself. Did I mention that I *HATE* Windows?

22:19 Did I mention that I'm an idiot? Seems the fileserver's bootloader menu is a mix of various and sundry old bits that don't go together anymore. No, I do not want to boot from the swap partition! Nor do I want the year-old multimedia kernel that seems to have stuck itself in for the hell of it. That's the problem with not rebooting for a long time...

The project for yesterday was getting Dorsai, my "new" recording box, set up with a realtime kernel and the right set of applications. Specifically, the plan was to install the 64-bit version of Debian Etch (the base for 64Studio), and the 64-bit version of UbuntuStudio (which, being based on Gutsy Gibbon, includes Audacity 1.3.3). Along the way, I wanted to make the multi-OS Grub menu work properly. It took all afternoon.

( the details, for the technically inclined )

This afternoon's challenge is completely different. The Wolfling has a batch of documents, taken off her old computer, that she needs to print. Unfortunately, they were written in Microsoft Works, which has a proprietary format incompatible with everything in the known universe, and the only copy in the house is on that old computer. So I have to get it back in operation somehow I have it in the office hooked up to my KVM switch, so with luck it will Just Work[tm], but this is Windows we're talking about. (... OK, it boots. But I never made myself an account on it, so she'll have to deal with it when she gets home, unless I can do it from the guest account. The fact that it won't shut down properly doesn't help.) Maybe the recently freed version of Works will work on Colleen's machine. Maybe.

5:45pm Guest was able to print from the keychain drive. And there is much rejoicing.

And I'm not too fond of HP, either. No, I don't mean Lovecraft, though HP's printer software install on my Windows 98 laptop had a distinct whiff of the loathsomely undead about it.

And at the end of it all, after rejecting my registration password twice and changing a checkbox each time, I forgot to uncheck the box one final time. So now I've been signed up with Shutterfly, which has terms of service that say they're going to send me spam. Bustards. Not to mention the fact that the install took two blasted hours, froze the machine once, and required the usual "you have moved the mouse; please restart Windows" several times.

And at the end of it all, the software that lets it print on CDs doesn't fsking run on Windows 98, which means that I'll have to drag the Mac home from work or see if I can convince the flower_cat's machine to use it over a network. If I can get the blasted print server running again. Maybe I'll just run samba on the laptop and cups on the lappy for now; I don't think the

If I'd known before I started that the Epson R200 would manage to get its print heads completely unclogged, I don't think I would have bothered. Or I might have let the Y.D. have the HP and kept the Epson downstairs in the office. The HP is a better printer, I think, and HP definitely has better Linux support, but...

Oh, and did I mention that I had to take the first HP back to Fry's -- The YD spotted a broken-off plastic part (looks like a roller of some sort) in the bag when I unpacked it yesterday.

I see a visit to .hp.com/support in my near future.

The Cat6 cable I installed a couple of weeks ago to the back of the house seems to be defective. If I'm lucky it's just a connector -- it seemed flaky when I plugged it into the hub. Fortunately the Cat5 cable it replaced seems to work just fine at 1GHz.

On top of which, somebody seems to have installed the Mavis Beacon typing tutor program for all users, and it pops up and tries to remind you to practice. Or maybe that's the only way to install it. Who knows? It's Windows.

Last night the flower_cat's computer (a cheap Fry's Windows box, two or three years old) fell down and couldn't get up. It doesn't even put a BIOS message on the screen, though the disk spins up and the monitor shows that it has sync for a second or so before it goes back to sleep. Swapping power supplies got me to boot, but a few minutes later it was back to its old habits -- this strongly suggests a motherboard problem. There are parts of the motherboard that stay powered up; my working hypothesis is that pulling the power supply let something cool down. Could conceivably be RAM -- I'll try that this evening -- in which case it's an easy fix. (update 6:30 it's not the RAM.) Otherwise, So we're one box closer to a Microsoft-free household.

The Cat is not a heavy computer user, and she already reads email on Linux. Her other main computer activities are web browsing (in Firefox), streaming audio from filk.com (Live365), and Mahjong. Hmm. The other option, if she really wants to continue playing other Windows games, is to move the other Fry's box in from the office.

This is one of the coolest hacks of all time. Browse to goodbye-microsoft.com, and click on the Debian logo image. It will download a Windows executable. Hopefully you are not so foolish as to allow IE to run programs you download off the internet without an explicit double-click, so go ahead and double-click it. It will ask you whether to run the graphical or text-based installer, download the appropriate one for your CPU, set it up as an option in the (Windows) boot manager, and triggers a reboot.

At this point you have the choice between restarting your stupid old Windows, or booting into the clever and friendly Debian installer. You can even make your system dual-boot. You might want to make backups first, unless it's a brand-new machine.

Ubuntu users can use the somewhat similar install.exe, which downloads Ubuntu using bittorrent and installs it into an image file so that you don't even have to repartition your disk.

Vista: Worthy, Largely Unexciting - WSJ.com (By WALTER S. MOSSBERG)

After months of testing Vista on multiple computers, new and old, I believe it is the best version of Windows that Microsoft has produced. However, while navigation has been improved, Vista isn't a breakthrough in ease of use. Overall, it works pretty much the same way as Windows XP. Windows hasn't been given nearly as radical an overhaul as Microsoft just applied to its other big product, Office.

Nearly all of the major, visible new features in Vista are already available in Apple's operating system, called Mac OS X, which came out in 2001 and received its last major upgrade in 2005. And Apple is about to leap ahead again with a new version of OS X, called Leopard, due this spring.

In other words, it's the best Windows yet, but that's not saying much. Especially when you consider that many of the features of MacOS X came from the Unix of a decade ago.

Good article by Eric Raymond and Rob Landley about why 2008 is a hard limit by which the dominant OS for the next 30-50 years will be chosen, and what Linux has to do to be the one.

The industry-wide switch to 64-bit hardware is opening a critical transition window during which the new dominant operating system will be determined. This window will close at the end of 2008, a hard deadline. The last such transition completed in 1990, the next one cannot be expected before 2050.

The three contenders for the new 64-bit standard are Windows-64, MacOS X, and Linux. The winner will be determined by desktop market share, the bulk of which consists of non-technical end users.

This paper tries to answer a number of questions: Why is 2008 is a hard deadline? What is the current state of the three major contenders trying to become the new 64-bit standard? What are the major blocking issues to to each platform's desktop acceptance? What specific strategies and tactics can Linux use to cope with its most pressing problems? We close with a sober consideration of the costs of failure.

(From slashdot.)

From this post on Groklaw, we learn that Jeremy Allison of the Samba project has resigned from Novell over their patent deal with Microsoft. His statement is quoted in full in the Groklaw article, and includes a letter to management.

As many of you will guess, this is due to the Microsoft/Novell patent agreement, which I believe is a mistake and will be damaging to Novell's success in the future. But my main issue with this deal is I believe that even if it does not violate the letter of the licence it violates the intent of the GPL licence the Samba code is released under, which is to treat all recipients of the code equally.

In case anyone might think I gave up too easily, here is a copy of a letter I recently sent to management on this matter.

---

I know you don't want to hear this, I know *nobody* wants to hear this but I'll not be able to live with this if I don't say it publicly at least once.

Whilst the Microsoft patent agreement is in place there is *nothing* we can do to fix community relations. And I really mean nothing.

As far as I know this is the first such departure, but it is unlikely to be the last.