Sony Root Kit: List of Albums

http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/titles.html

The URL also has to the exchange program, uninstall info, etc.


Artist & Album
A Static Lullaby: Faso Latido
Acceptance: Phantoms
Amerie: Touch
Art Blakey: Drum Suit
The Bad Plus: Suspicious Activity?
Bette Midler: Sings the Peggy Lee Songbook
Billy Holiday: The Great American Songbook
Bob Brookmeyer: Bob Brookmeyer & Friends
Buddy Jewell: Times Like These
Burt Bacharach: At This Time
Celine Dion: On Ne Change Pas
Chayanne: Cautivo
Chris Botti: To Love Again
The Coral: The Invisible Invasion
Cyndi Lauper: The Body Acoustic
The Dead 60's: The Dead 60's
Deniece Williams: This Is Niecy
Dextor Gordon: Manhattan Symphonie
Dion: The Essential Dion
Earl Scruggs: I Saw The Light With Some Help From My Friends
Elkland: Golden
Emma Roberts: Unfabulous And More: Emma Roberts
Flatt & Scruggs: Foggy Mountain Jamboree
Frank Sinatra: The Great American Songbook
G3: Live In Tokyo
George Jones: My Very Special Guests
Gerry Mulligan: Jeru
Horace Silver: Silver's Blue
Jane Monheit: The Season
Jon Randall: Walking Among The Living
Life Of Agony: Broken Valley
Louis Armstrong: The Great American Songbook
Mary Mary: Mary Mary
Montgomery Gentry: Something To Be Proud Of: The Best of 1999-2005
Natasha Bedingfield: Unwritten
Neil Diamond: 12 Songs
Nivea: Complicated
Our Lady Peace: Healthy In Paranoid Times
Patty Loveless: Dreamin' My Dreams
Pete Seeger: The Essential Pete Seeger
Ray Charles: Friendship
Rosanne Cash: Interiors
Rosanne Cash: King's Record Shop
Rosanne Cash: Seven Year Ache
Shel Silverstein: The Best Of Shel Silverstein
Shelly Fairchild: Ride
Susie Suh: Susie Suh
Switchfoot: Nothing Is Sound
Teena Marie: Robbery
Trey Anastasio: Shine
Van Zant: Get Right With The Man
Vivian Green: Vivian

Note: Two titles, Ricky Martin’s "Life" and Peter Gallagher’s "7 Days in Memphis" were released with a content protection grid on the back of the CD packaging but XCP content protection software was not actually included on the albums.

Suckage (Saturday the 19th)

Today had a fairly straightforward plan.
1. Take car to Alamogordo to get the windows tinted, estimated at about two hours.
2. Work in darkroom while #1 is underway. Return to darkroom and continue work after picking up car.
3. Go home.
4. Later, return to Alamogordo and see the new Harry Potter flic, probably dinner would be sought beforehand.

Was it Burns who wrote something about "the best laid plans of mice and men auft gay aglee"?

I decide to go to the darkroom first and drop off all my crap, the guy at the tinting place had no problem taking me back there and picking me up. I have three prints to make, retouch, and mount, for my previous assignment. I was also debating whether or not to pull the roll in my camera and process it, it's for my next assignment, due the second Tuesday in December. The debate is that there are three frames left: I have no problem pulling a roll before I've shot every frame, but I'm not seeing a benefit in processing it (a one hour process for one or two rolls) since I'll be shooting another roll for this assignment. The prints were to complete my previous assignment and get it turned in on December 1st.

All that has been rendered moot – the building housing the darkroom is locked up.

We were told that the darkroom would be available through Wednesday with somewhat limited hours, then it would be closed until Monday. It looks like that isn't quite the case. I tried calling security to find out if the building might be open later but couldn't find their number, and I was on somewhat limited time anyway as I needed to get to my window tinting appointment.

So I'm working on my laptop, sitting in the tinting place (VERY noisy vacuum cleaners as they clean cars being detailed). Fortunately I have enough with me to keep me occupied: I'm working on "work" work, earning about a third of what the window tinting will cost me, and I've got a book in case I get my programming problem solved and find myself at ends. For that matter, I have a whole library with me: I copied the CD that came with the new David Weber Honor Harrington book, At All Costs. It has every book that Weber has published! I finished reading a very good Bolo story a few nights ago at the observatory.


Oh, a final word about the tinting. Our new Matrix came untinted, it was a very basic model. Aside from all-wheel drive, it had power windows/door locks and cruise, those were the only options. Anyway, I'm getting the front windows tinted at 35% (light transmission), the rear at 20%. That will give me privacy so that my camera equipment in the back won't be visible to casual passers-by, so as to discourage a smash and grab theft and with the front windows being a lighter tint, I will have much better visibility when driving home at night. The final quarter mile up the mountain can be VERY dark.

More Sony Root Kit Goodness

So much crap, so little time to post. I wrote this for another board that I frequent, I'd meant to post this here also and just hadn't gotten around to doing it.

One of the stranger aspects of this case is that Sony commited a software license violation in using this root kit. Part of the root kit is based on software taken from an open source software project. This code is free for anyone to use, but if you modify the code at all, you have to post the modifications or you're in violation of the license. Sony did not post their changes.

The best part of this license violation, if I remember correctly, is that the code was written by DVD Jon, who is the (former) kid (now adult) from Finland or wherever who wrote the DVD cracking code DeCSS that made it possible for DVDs to be played on Linux machines and brought forth the first major law suits using the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) to hammer a magazine that had nothing to do with writing the code yet had the temerity to publish said code.


Another amazing things about this is that you agree to a EULA (End User License Agreement) when you install the player software that contains root kit, and the license has a provision that, in effect, says that if someone burgles your house you have to erase all the music from your hard drives. I think they're assuming that burglers break into your house for the sole purpose of booting your computers and copying all the music off of them.

Saturday (the 19th) Update

Turns out the darkroom wasn't closed, they just didn't open until 11am. After getting the car tinted, I got some lunch, did some shopping, then swung back by the darkroom. Made two of the three prints that I needed, finished the other Sunday, though I'm having second thoughts about the negatives that I selected.

I basically didn't leave the darkroom until it closed at 7pm. Russet met me down at Applebee's for dinner, we then went off to Potter. And that shall be another post.

More Sony Root Kit Goodness: Defeat their DRM with a piece of tape!

This is great! A piece of tape in the right place and their digital rights management is utterly ignored. And this isn't the first time that something this primative has defeated DRM: a few years ago someone released some CDs with DRM, a clever person noticed that there was a gap on the CD between the DRM program and the music, so they took a black felt tip pen and colored over the outer ring up to the ring between the DRM and the music -- POOF! no more DRM hassle.

This is pretty much the same thing.

http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=174400748

News of the Weird

http://www.newsoftheweird.com/

Chief executive officers at 367 top U.S. corporations were paid, on average, $431 last year for every $1 paid to their companies' average production worker, according to publicly available information jointly compiled in September by Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy. In 1990, the ratio was about $100-to-$1. (If the federal minimum wage had increased since 1990 by the same rate as the multiple for CEOs' pay, it would have risen from $5.15 an hour to $23.03, but, of course, it's still $5.15.) [New York Times, 9-4-05]

(At one time, the CEO of Toyota (or some other Japanese car maker) was limited in salary to no more than something like 20 times what the lowest paid worker was making. I have no idea if that is still true, but I liked it. And the preceding is based on average production worker wages, not lowest. Sigh. A clear demonstration that capitalism has no soul.)


Erica Salmon, originally a fantasy-football-league "widow" because of her husband's seasonal mania, has now become mogul of her own fantasy league: of famous fashion designers. According to an October report by the Des Moines Register, managers draft teams consisting of three clothing designers, plus one each designer of shoes, handbags, jewelry and celebrity clothing, and then three celebrities, and they get points daily for the number and quality of name-mentions in Women's Wear Daily and other fashion and style magazines. As with football leagues, trades are permitted once a week. [Des Moines Register, 10-20-05]