Well well well, it would appear that not only is Sony rootkitting hundreds of thousands of Windoze PC’s around the world, along with making peoples PCs even more insecure when they try and remove it, but they also appear to be possibly infringing peoples copyrights by distributing LGPL libraries as part of their rootkit.

Now the LGPL is a lot less straightforward that the GPL so this looks a lot less clear, but there does appear to be code from two different LGPL libraries in a single ActiveX control installed by the rootkit. To me that looks like it’s covered under section 2 of the LGPL, which implies section 4, which says:

You may copy and distribute the Library (or a portion or derivative of it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange.

If distribution of object code is made by offering access to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent access to copy the source code from the same place satisfies the requirement to distribute the source code, even though third parties are not compelled to copy the source along with the object code.

In other words, if my reading is correct then they should be required to distribute the source code to their library, or be in violation of the license and thus infringe the copyright of the original authors. Now people like the BSA call this “software piracy”. I wonder if they’ve been tipped off about this possible infringement ?

Well it’s SC time again, and time for another round of gigaflop harlotry, er, sorry, another round of the Top 500 Supercomputer list!

Applying my non-patented completely arbitrary criteria for a summary of the vendor stats I find..

• At number 1 is IBM with:
  • 5 of the top 10 systems, including the top 3,
  • almost half of the list with 219 of the top 500 giving them just over 43%
  • over 52% of the total R_max!
• Next is HP with 169 systems.
  • combined with IBM they make up over 77% of systems and 71% of R_max
• Then we’ve got a tie between SGI and Cray, both with 18 systems
  • Cray just edge SGI out on R_max with 143606 versus 126711.
• Then there’s Dell with 17 systems.
• Linux Networx have 16 systems.
• Then there is a big gap before we hit the rest…

“The Rest” are, in order, NEC (6); Hitachi, Atipa and homebuilts each with 5; Fujitsu and Sun each with 4; Appro and Intel each with 2 and a whole bunch of one-hit wonders.

One oddity there is that Apple have only one system listed (at number 308) but there are two homebrew Apple systems in the top 20 (numbers 15 and 20)! Then of the 3 that are left 2 more are Apple boxes (numbers 80 and 303)..

The EFF has a nice little article on the “EULA” that comes with certain Sony silver discs (that masquerade as music CD’s) which has some really interesting bits. Caveat that with the understandable fact that it only talks about US law and assumes that you have some rights to fair use which may or may not exist in your country.
Of course this only affects Windoze users who forget to press the shift key if they haven’t already disabled the Windoze “AutoRun” virus delivery system for CD’s.

My favourite quote from this contract with the devil is this bit about when you must stop playing the music you bought, er, sorry, licensed:

Without prejudice to any other rights SONY BMG or any SONY BMG PARTY may have hereunder, the term of this EULA shall terminate immediately, without notice from SONY BMG, and all rights you may have hereunder to use the LICENSED MATERIALS shall be immediately revoked, in the event that you: (i) fail to comply with any provision of this EULA, (ii) fail to install an update of the SOFTWARE that was previously provided to you by the SONY BMG PARTIES within the time specified, or (iii) file a voluntary petition or are subject to an involuntary petition under applicable bankruptcy laws, are declared insolvent, make an assignment for the benefit of creditors, or are served with a writ of attachment , writ of execution, garnishment or other legal process pertaining to any of your assets or property.

Yes indeedy, if you get into financial problems you have to remove this music from your computer…. and then they complain that people don’t buy many CD’s these days. Not only is their mass produced talentless music crap, the companies are stupid!

NB to fellow residents of down under regarding fair use rights – they don’t exist in Australia so it is illegal to put those CD’s you’ve bought onto your iPod here.

The BBC is reporting that there are now two lawsuits underway against Sony over the fiasco surrounding their covert installation of spyware-like software on Windoze PC’s when users tried to play various music silver disks (no, they’re not legally CD’s) they created.

Yahoo Finance:

Changed Ticker Symbol
‘SGI’ is no longer valid. It has changed to SGID.PK.

This is the prelude to their delisting from the NYSE.

John Naughton over at the Observer has written his his less than impressed take on Windows Live and Office Live.

The core of his thoughts is expressed in these paragraphs:

On the other hand, Gates and co are smart folks who know in their bones that web services represent the future. But they’re stuck, because if Microsoft were to become a major provider of such services (which it is technically quite capable of doing), it would be tantamount to cannibalising its core business – the lucrative Windows and Office franchises. After all, to access web services, all you need is a browser – and it doesn’t have to be Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer. Nor does your computer have to run Windows. Firefox running on Linux or Safari running on a Mac are just as good for web mail or search as Explorer running on Windows.

So Microsoft has a problem. It can’t go all-out for web services – which explains the pathetic fudge announced on Tuesday. The new ‘live’ sites will only offer supplements and complements to Microsoft software running on your computer.

My only quibble with that is that he forgets the fact that they could possibly, with ActiveX, at least make it necessary to run IE, although Linux users on Intel systems may be able to get away with running IE under Wine to access these services.

Bill Thompson has written a good opinion piece over at the BBC called “The Rootkit of All Evil ?” on the recent Sony DRM Fiasco.

Fortunately, it is possible to avoid buying discs like this. Philips, who defined the CD standard and then made it widely available, has been very clear that these music delivery systems do not count as Compact Discs and cannot use the CD logo.

As far back as 2002, Philips representative Klaus Petri told Financial Times Deutschland that “those are silver discs with music data that resemble CDs, but aren’t”.