Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has filed suit against Sony BMG over the rootkit discovered recently on many of the company’s audio CDs. From the Attorney General’s press release:

“Sony has engaged in a technological version of cloak and dagger deceit against consumers by hiding secret files on their computers,” said Attorney General Abbott. “Consumers who purchased a Sony CD thought they were buying music. Instead, they received spyware that can damage a computer, subject it to viruses and expose the consumer to possible identity crime.”

In the Texas suit, Sony faces fines of $100,000 per violation of the state’s new Consumer Protection Against Computer Spyware Act. No word yet as to what final number this will translate to, but if just 10,000 Texans were to file complaints under the suit, Sony BMG would face damages in excess of $1 billion. Keep an eye out for submarines full of weaponized QRIOs surfacing off the Gulf Coast…

Betanews via Digg

Lots of people (including, rumor has it, her bosses) have poignant things to say in criticizing Maureen Dowd’s latest, to be honest just plain embarassing, publicity stunts, some of them reasonable but most of them spending a bit too much time on something witty and influential but ultimately not so substantive. Us reasonable people don’t need to go much farther than: Maureen Dowd does not care about women. People who don’t care about women cannot legitimately call themselves feminists.

Sure, she can critique, with dubious degrees of evidence, sexism in men. But that doesn’t make you a feminist, and certainly doesn’t qualify you to expound on what direction feminism now ought to take. Being a woman and self-interested? also doesn’t quite cut it.

And then there’s the talking about how men always go for weak women (a category into which she, remarkably, classes service workers) and not for someone as strong and tough and single-minded as her. And, in doing this, expressing disdain for those women and the part of men that likes them.

“Hypponen agreed that Sony’s software could help hackers circumvent most antivirus products on the market today. He added that installing the Sony program on a machine running Windows Vista—the beta version of the next iteration of Microsoft Windows—‘breaks the operating system spectacularly.’” -Washington Post

This is totally hilarious to me. I thinks that it’s awesome that Sony’s DRM breaks Microsoft’s Vista, which impliments parts of the hugely restrictive NGSCB. These companies definitely don’t want to play too nice with each other, so who knows if Microsoft will fix Vista in time. So Sony CDs could be little bombs exploding Vista computers everywhere!

I’m with Andrew 2.0 on this one. He’s been all “Let’s hope things get worse.” Hopefully something as terrible and hilarious as this will make people realize that DRM content shouldn’t be touched. It’s probably too much to hope that it will make Microsoft and Sony think the same thing.

The label Unlocked Groove (it turns out I know these guys!) has just offically released tracks on vinyl under a creative commons license. Even if it has been done before (without actually printing on the vinyl), this is damn cool.

Their reasoning is as follows:

• The main output medium is vinyl, which is extremely hard to copy
• We’re dj’s, we want people to play our music
• As long as Moby doesn’t steal our stuff and make a billion dollars off of it, we want our music to be reworked (note: he shouldn’t be able to do that under a non-commercial license)

Could this be the beginning of a new era of vinyl releasing?

Slashdot reported today that a new feature in the Firefox Plugin CustomizeGoogle enables users in China to circumvent the Great Firewall’s block on Google’s Cache. (Funny I was just looking at Customize Google last night.) Essentially what this means is that when China censors what their users can view, they normally manage to block Google’s own archived version as well. With this plugin, the links to Google Cache are modified and China’s firewall does not recognize them as Google links. Thus, Chinese users can essentially view an archived version of any content that has been blocked. This feature, appropriately enough, is only available in the Chinese version of the plugin.

Now while it is undoubtedly reasonable that the plugin developers have found a way, albeit temporarily, to circumvent China’s censorship, I caution the widespread publicity of the workaround. Of course by blogging it myself, I am only adding to the problem. As soon as the Chinese authorities are aware of such a way to get around the Great Firewall, they will surely work around the clock until they prevail. More people may very well find out about the plugin and be able to use it for now, but I wonder if it will even work tomorrow… It is then a tough question of whether to keep something quiet potentially for the benefit of those who are aware of it, or publicize it and run the risk of it eroding very quickly. This time we have opted for the latter, but perhaps we might act differently next time?

What a Beast! It’s is truly reasonable to spend a year of one’s life to build a Transformer costume that actually transforms. Imagine the possibilities. Before a halloween party you can just park yourself in front of driveway and then while every one is arriving, you can transform and say, “Oh is this the party?”

To get you in the mood for trick or treatin’, here’s a tasty video featuring Beck, Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade, Smoosh, Feist, Peaches, Malcolm Mclaren, Devendra Banhart, Karen O, and Elvira. Do they know it’s Halloween

The guys over at Ice Cream Man have made it their mission to give away free ice cream at shows. How are they gonna do it? Sponsorships they claim, and so far it looks like it has worked out. Feel like this your long lost mission in life? Then join the crew.

And what is their motivation you ask? Because well you know, it gets hot in there...

‘Nuff Said.