Christopher Mackay’s Blog

It seems that the fix Sony posted to remedy their root-kit leaves the user’s (Windows) machine wide open. Open house. Run what you like. Wired News has the story on this and on the pervasiveness of the original root-kit, which has spread to over half a million networks, including military networks.

Not only has SonyBMG president Thomas Hesse arrogantly asked “Most people don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?” (on NPR, cf cbc.ca), Sony.com’s search returns no useful results on the term “root kit” (unless “Charlie Daniels Band The Roots Remain” counts). There is a note on the bottom of the screen at SonyBMG.com, but that’s just pathetic. Sony — the mothership of the Sony empire — is the one taking it on the chin for this malevolent misstep, so Sony.com should prominently step up and help fix it.

I think it’s quite unexpected for a relatively trusted and well-liked company like Sony to screw up this badly, but I know for certain they’ll never screw up like this again because they’ll never regain the level of trust they once enjoyed.

Nov. 16 Update: Sony posts feeble apology, which contains the following statement:

Going forward, we will continue to identify new ways to meet demands for flexibility in how you and other consumers listen to music.

Inane linguistic redundancy aside (”Going forward”), I wonder how long it will take them to ‘identify’ standard Red Book audio CDs — you know, the ones everyone’s been calling ‘music CDs’ since the mid 1980s — as the ‘flexible’ format we’d like to get when we think we’re buying a music CD. When we’re not buying from the iTunes Music Store, that is.

Sony has justifiably been taking a lot of flack over the root-kit issue.

If you haven’t heard about this issue, then you probably get all of your news from the mainstream media. Take a minute and read the cnet story; I’ll wait.

If Apple can be said to have done DRM properly with iTunes’ FairPlay, and I think they can, then Sony has just spectacularly demonstrated how not to do it.

Sony is backpeddaling on this, to some small extent, but I bet no one at Sony gets fired over it.

Today, in response to a complaint on the QuickTime VR mailing list, I’ve posted an entry on QuickTime VR on Wikipedia. Previously, the entire entry consisted of a link to the QuickTime page.

QuickTime VR (virtual reality) is one of many capabilities of Apple’s QuickTime multimedia software, which operates as a stand-alone player for Macintosh and Windows PCs, as well as a web-browser plug-in.

There are two main types of QuickTime VR files:

1. Panoramas
2. Objects

VR Panormas are typically 360-degree photographs (3D-modelled scenes) which allow the user to look all around a certain location and, in the case of cubic panoramas, all the way up and down, too. These photos — sometimes called nodes — may be stitched together from a number of photographs (anywhere from 2 to 20 or more), and multiple nodes can be connected to form a scene..

Object VRs allow the user to rotate or otherwise manipulate a virtual object — again, photographic or 3D-modelled — by clicking and dragging on it. Single-row objects allow rotation along a single axis, and can have quite small filesizes. Multi-row objects may allow the user to see the top and bottom of the object, but will result in proportionately larger files.

It’s not perfect, but hopefully it will be improved upon, by someone else if not by me.