Some good shows in here and possibly something for everyone, especially if your into tech.

The Top 10 Podcast Episodes of 2005 – Diggnation Clip Show is #2!:
A great round-up of the year’s best podcast shows. Diggnation and TWIT made the list as did IT Conversations. Some other really good ones as well like the physics of superheroes!

Interesting read of this years winners and losers in the P2P area. No prizes for guessing who the big losers were…

File-Sharing Winners and Losers of 2005:
An anonymous reader writes “A lot happened in the P2P world in 2005 according to Slyck news. From the article: ‘BitTorrent soared to new heights while Steve Jobs enjoyed record breaking iPod sales. Yet not everyone shared this success. The RIAA continued its fight against P2P networking with little effect, as Sony-BMG disgraced itself and the DRM concept.’”

Lessons learned from a pro blogger:
Pro Blogger Darren Rowse shares 18 lessons learned about blogging.

In November 2002 I first heard the word blog after a mate e-mailed me a link and said I should consider starting one. Within 24…
Best thing about this is Darren is an Aussie and also co-founder of the b5 media blogging company of which there are several excellent blogs and bloggers.

In addition, Sony will offer exchanges for consumers who purchased the discs with a copy that does not contain the XCP DRM.

The fallout from this exercise is going to prove expensive for Sony or is it? The costs of re-pressing 4 million CD’s probably won’t hurt them too much but their reputation is taking a hammering. It is a start but is it too little too late?

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Sony BMG Music Entertainment said Friday that it will suspend production of CDs with copy-protection technology that has been exploited by virus writers to try to hide their malicious code on PCs.

They have bitten the bullet and are stopping production of CD copy protection that installs rootkits. Won’t be long before they try some other stunt to get around it but for now it is a start.

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Well, Sony is on the hot plate now, sued by the state of California for having the DRM Root Kit. It seems that it violates several California laws. If this goes through, they may not be able to sell these CD’s in California at all.

Well seems California has filed and Ney Nork will soon file suits against Sony?BMG for the installation of rootkits on to Windows machines.

The EFF (Electronic frontier Foundation) is also investigating on whether a class action suit can be filed.

If I was a Sony artist I might be getting concerned about now and looking to jump ship.

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I figured out how to burn as many CD’s as I wanted with DRM installed. Rename your burning program with $sys$ in front of it.

If you have been following the Sony DRM issues recently you would know that the rootkit that is installed hides file with $sys$ in front of it. This person says that he did that with his favourite burning software and can therefore get around the DRM that restrict CD burning.

Some have said it dosen’t work and some do. may depend on software and machine setup but if it does work Sony are just causing more hassles for themselves. I for one am not sorry.

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Court Finds For Student In Web FOS Case:

An anonymous reader writes “A student who brought a suit against his middle school has been awarded a settlement after two years of legal battles. USAToday reports that the suit was brought after the school leveled harsh disciplinary measures against the student, based entirely on comments made to his website guestbook.� From the article: “Grayson Barber, who handled the case on behalf of the ACLU, said the school presented no evidence that Dwyer’s comments were threatening or disruptive of school activities. ‘Our schools should encourage debate and political engagement rather than punishing students who provide a forum for free expression.’�

Apparently the NJ Board of Education had to pay-out $117,500USD to this kid for what they did to him. Apparently he had been suspended, benched in his baseball team and banned him from a class trip. They accused him of having Anti-Sematic postings in his guest-book which is what other people use to send messages to the author of the site. He denies the comments were there. The school have also never given an explanation of what rule or policy he apparently broke. The weirdest thing is that this a blog he ran himself, not hosted by the school, on his own time and on his own home computer.

The school deserves everything it got in this case and should make other schools think twice about censoring students on the net instead of offering free speech and collaborating in discussion groups and classes.

“I hope this is the week that everyone in the world finds out what a root kit is. And I hope it’s a week we look back on in amazement, as we consider just how far Sony was willing to go to criminalize consumers in its efforts to preserve control over its product.

Another excellent article on the Sony DRM issue. This one is written a little bit easier for the non-tech savvy person to understand. If you have time read both articles.

BOYCOTT SONY!!!!!

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Mark Russinovich has another article about the dangerous patch that released by SONY/BMG. He also confirms that the malware sends something back to SONY’s server. Make sure to take a look at the comment posted by XCP support. It basically says … TRUST us in everything we did.

For those of you that haven’t about this case Sony/BMG are putting a program on their CD’s that automatically installs a program called a rootkit. I am no tech expert but my understnding of a rootkit is a program that gets buried very deep into your system, is almost always untraceable except by experts and it can do nasty things to your computer.

Sony are saying it is part of their “anti-piracy� software but there is no reason to install anyhting like this so deeply into your system. They then released a half-assed unsinstall which Mark discusses in the link but it requires jumping through hoops to receive and that’s just not right.

This won’t affect Mac machines but if your a Windows user everytime you put a music CD into your computer make sure you hold down the SHIFT key as this prevents the auto-run feature and no programs will then be loaded. Once the CD is in you can then burn it or play it whenever you like,

Just another reason to get a Mac. The longer this goes on and more mainstream media pick up on it and make the general person understand it’s implications the more likely the big record companies will reisit using these kind of devious tactics to stop people from copying cd’s.

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