Accidental Empires by Robert Cringely: Full of interesting and amusing anecdotes about the start of the modern PC era, with some of Cringely’s wild theories thrown in. The book is about ten years old now, and some of his predictions about the (then) future of computing show he’s probably a better storyteller than he is prophesiser. But it’s certainly got some gems in it. Given some of the stuff he writes about the industry’s major players (Jobs, Gates, Ballmer, etc), I’m almost surprised they agreed to talk to him subsequently for the TV version. A good read.
Category Archives: Culture
Sony backs down – a teensy bit
Sony has said they will stop using the XCP copy protection software so derided for its sneaky (but clumsy) cloaking mechanism. But they haven’t said they’ll offer replacement CDs to those who’ve got lumbered with it. Apparently it was only ever applied to CDs sold in the USA, though some of these may have gone to other parts of the world courtesy of Amazon and the like.
As for Sony’s uninstaller… Ed Felten is about to reveal why that too is flawed.
Meanwhile Microsoft has set XCP in its sights, and (quite rightly) said their Anti-Spyware package will remove it.
As if the rootkit sneakery wasn’t bad enough, the EFF has studied the EULA and notes the protected CDs have a licence precluding copying the music onto business computers (eg computers not owned by you). It also requires you to delete the copied music if your CD is stolen, or if you file for bankcruptcy!
And the chorus of people calling for an all-out Sony boycott continues to grow.
I stand by what I said. Pack of evil bastards.
PS. The flaw in the uninstaller is revealed: Sony uses an ActiveX control (known as “CodeSupport”) as part of the process, which is marked “Safe for scripting” and left on your computer, leaving it wide open to attack from dodgy web sites. What a pack of idiots.
They are, however, recalling the affected CDs.
Sony’s evil DRM
Sony BMG, the only major record label that refused to sign up to the Apple iTunes Australia store, has been caught red-handed taking Digital Rights Management measures that put a trojan onto Windows computers. It puts files disguised as device drivers onto the computer. Attempts to remove the files may end up in your CD/DVD drive being disabled. Mark Russinovich at SysInternals has the grisly details. Naturally none of this crap is detailed in the EULA displayed when you put the CD in, and it can’t be easily removed once it’s there — in fact Sony ask you to contact their customer service department to remove it!
The DRM does allow limited copies of the music to be made, but not in a form playable on iPods. Sony blame Apple for this, even suggesting that people complain to Apple, despite that it’s Sony’s DRM that stops it working.
Interestingly on Macs, the DRM doesn’t operate, and you can use the CD as normal, I assume including ripping to MP3. Hopefully that’s also the case on Linux and other operating systems.
Sony has now announced that a patch will be issued. It won’t remove the DRM nasties, but it will uncloak them.
- F-Secure’s information
- Sony’s official line, and the patch — I love the way it’s a system requirement to be logged in as an Administrator to play a CD
This shows complete contempt from Sony to its customers. What a pack of evil bastards. They obviously haven’t twigged that eventually they’ll lose any copy protection arms race — not only will anonymous hackers figure out how to get around it, but they’ll have alienated lots of customers in the process by producing these broken CDs. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if some people get so pissed-off by the whole idea that they seek out pirated copies (ripped on Macs!) on P2P services.
Interestingly, one label that Sony distributes is distancing itself from their DRM. And Ben Edelman and Ed Bott ponder if Sony is committing fraud by selling these products as “CDs”, given they break the established standard.
Sunday 1pm: Update from SysInternals about the patch
How to get feeds of Blogspot blogs which supposedly don’t have feeds
Got a favourite blog on Blogspot written by someone who hasn’t figured out how to enable XML feeds? No matter, just add atom.xml to their URL (eg http://reallyquiteunlikely.blogspot.com/atom.xml) and put that in your aggregator. Easy.
Dilbert blog
Scott “Dilbert” Adams’ blog. (via Scoble)
Osborne Executive (luggable)
A little more nostalgia during my cleanout of old stuff… this is an advert for the Osborne Executive luggable computer, from the February 1984 edition of Australian Personal Computer.
Be amazed by its 4Mhz Z-80A processor! Gasp at its 7 inch amber display! Impressive stuff, no?
A few brief things
How to snatch an expiring (.com) domain — basically, the action happens 75 days after the expiry date.
Ah, the joys of the pr0n industry, always so quick to grab hold of the latest throbbing new technology. They’re already making use of the video iPods.
Some Swedes name their kid after Google. Thankfully only the middle name.
Dimitri Kokken of Belgium is selling his humungous collection of old computers. Gawd knows how he’s collected them all, but they appear to include just about every 8-bit computer every built, including such obscurities as the Oric Atmos, Spectravideo 318, Commodore CD-TV, and a bunch of MSX machines. No Microbees though.
Only Commodore Amiga
I’m preparing to move house, and during the inevitable clearout of old stuff, found a magazine from 1989 with this advert:
I had an Amiga 1200 for a while in the 90s. Lots of fun.
Quest I: my Ultima clone on the BBC micro
When I was 17 or so (year 11, 1987), I had spurned my Commodore 64 in favour of a BBC B micro. At the end of year 11, some of the departing year 12s gave me the code to a little project they’d been working on: a clone of Ultima for the Beeb. It was really just the core of such a game: the display routine for moving about the map, obscuring objects out of view (such as behind walls), and showing monsters.
At a time when I should have been out pursuing girls, this caught my imagination (I’d played a LOT of Ultima in my time), so I took the code and expanded it. A friend who was into role playing games wrote a basic story for it. Another friend supplied some music for the title screen.
I re-wrote the main display routine in 6502 assembly language for speed, and added maps, extra characters to talk to, weapons and fighting. “Quest I: The Wrath of Mægenmund” (egads, it sounds like something out of Spinal Tap) wasn’t anything special, and was never finished, but it was pretty cool.
It ran in the Beeb’s graphics mode 4, so it was monochrome, 320×256 pixels, I think. It used a lot of loading in and out from the disk, with a main (outdoor) map, and lots of separate maps for dungeons, towns and villages. There was no sound to speak of, but there was a lot to explore. You could buy drinks from bartenders (to gain strength), talk to the villagers, buy weapons and supplies, then go out and fight monsters to get more treasure. The money was measured in pounds, shillings and pence, and the language and fonts of the characters and the interface was a wacky mix of olde English, gothic script and runes.
I kept working on it for a couple of years after high school (the Beeb saw me through part of university, until an IBM PC arrived in our house), but it fizzled out in 1990, when other interests overtook it.
Floppy disks
In case you’d forgotten what 5¼ inch diskettes look like, here’s a reminder.
My kids noted: “So they really were floppy!”
I wonder what ever happened to the Xidex company? There seems to be little information on them on the web, but a few ebay sellers are selling unused disks. Verbatim are still around.
Why were the disks out? Today I set up my old BBC micro to see if it still worked, and to ponder putting it on ebay. It did work, but some of the disks reported errors. On closer inspection, some appeared to have mould or some other kind of growth on the magnetic part.
Possibly if I really had to retrieve the data, I could find someone to recover it, but there’s nothing important on them. It does serve as a reminder that every so often you should refresh your vital data from whatever media it’s stored on, onto something new.
Fairfax tries podcasting… almost
Fairfax/The Age has discovered podcasts, with a business and an IT cast. With RSS and everything But ohhhh… WTF is this? It only plays in a player on their web page. The RSS they’ve setup will apparently work with iTunes or iPodder, but you can’t simply save an MP3 off the site.
HINT: A podcast needs to be easily downloadable, not tied to a web page with dodgy streaming, or to podcasting software I don’t have. I should be able to Right Click/Save link as. Subscribing via RSS is all very well, but how do I know if I want to get that involved?
Oh, and Garry Barker’s an interesting writer, but he’s going to have to cast more than a 30 second intro to what his podcast will eventually be about to get me listening regularly. (Or was that just the streaming cutting out after 30 seconds? You see the problem here?!)
And so we keep waiting
Rumours spread far and wide last month that iTunes Australia would start on October 3rd. Well, October 3rd has come and gone, and nothing happened. So we keep waiting.