Ed Felten and Alex Halderman of Princeton continue their analysis of Sony’s DRM enforcing rootkit.

A key moment:

Customizing the [rootkit uninstaller Sony offered after it was revelead they'd compromised user's machines] uninstaller in this way is more difficult for the vendor and increases customer support costs, compared to a more traditional uninstaller, so a rational vendor would not do it unless there was some benefit. Most likely, the benefit is to the vendor’s platform building strategy, which takes a step backward every time a user uninstalls the vendor’s software. Customizing the uninstaller allows the vendor to contol who receives the uninstaller and to change the terms under which it is delivered in the future.

The entertainment industry (with the full cooperation of hardware and software vendors) is working, step by step, to replace the current open architecture with a DRM enforcing platform. Sony’s rootkit is an early example of what will be hardened into the machines in the near future.

This is what you could call a vamp till the point is reached.

Many years ago I dated a woman who was very fond of buying me surprise gifts.

Without fail these presents were within the category of things I loved, but somehow always not-quite-right.

No doubt, someone has written a treatise on handling, with flash, your lover’s well meaning misfires – that would’ve come in handy for my younger self.

One lovely spring day, she popped her very lovely self over to my apartment bearing a book. “I know you’ll love it” she said, her eyes ablaze with anticipation, “it’s a philosophy book and I know how into philosophy you are.”

She was right; that spring I was reading a collection of translated Simone Weil essays along with Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish.” It was a serious French thought kind of season.

She pressed the book into my hands and planted a juicy kiss on my lips, a good start to the afternoon.

I looked at the book’s title:

“Jacob the Baker”.

Which, disconcertingly, is still available for sale.

As I held this book there was a moment, a sliver of space-time, when I synaptically course corrected to swerve my reaction away from its natural trajectory and towards something sweet to the ear yet neutral on the topic of my opinion of the work.

“Oh. Wow. Thank you” was the best I could do at the moment.

I read the book. At first, I wondered about the author – what kind of person was he? Did he really take this material seriously? Later, I wondered more about the audience. There were people out there who
loved this book, who drew solace from it, who considered it to be a profound thing – what sort of folk were these?

Who’s the audience? That’s always the more interesting question.

…

The eXile’s John Dolan first unmasked Frey in 2003 beginning his review like so:

“This is the worst thing I’ve ever read.”

Dolan has appropriately returned to the topic of Frey on the occasion of the latter’s public flogging (a precursor, undoubtedly, to his rehabilitation and a new book) but instead of taking the easy way out by focusing his fire against Frey the liar (the standard op for this story), wonders aloud – and with the correct portion of rudeness – about the people, both high and low, who accepted such an obviously stupid work as important and praiseworthy.

“…I was stunned at the number of emails boasting proudly that Frey’s books were the only ones the writer had read in years. I guess this comes from decades of patronizing illiterates with “Reading Is Fun” soft-sell campaigns; I guess I’m supposed to be grateful, as a representative of the bad old elitist tradition, that millions of people who move their lips when they read actually finished a whole book-gold stars for everybody, a hall pass for the ones who read both Frey’s books.

But it’s a very, very strange argument, as if I were to start sounding off on mathematics with the boast that it took me three years to pass Algebra in high school, or show up as color man on an MLB broadcast bragging that I hate baseball and still hold the season record in Pleasant Hill’s Little League-not one hit or walk in an entire season.

These readers actually consider themselves noble savages, whose responses are all the purer because they haven’t sullied themselves with books. That fraud is a perfect complement to Frey’s: he pretends to be a scarred veteran and they pretend to be cultural virgins, rather than thrashed sluts who’ve been fucked a million times by every after-school special, every Brian’s Song death-porn tearjerker, and can’t imagine anything better.”

[...]

full at the eXile

As I grow older, I’m more and more interested – when it comes to considering technologies – in focusing on how a device or system’s boosters answer a simple question: what problem is this thing solving?

It’s possible to predict the most likely ways a system will fail – or fail to live up to its marketing splash – by tracking how this question is answered (which, often enough, is expressed via advertising).

This came to mind today as I read news stories about the limited deployment in three New Jersey schools of the Teacher-Parent Authorization Security System an iris recognition platform described as providing relief from “…the administrative burden associated with the student sign in/sign out process.”

Perhaps.

We’ll have to wait and see what new administrative burdens the iris recog system creates and whether it actually solves problems (it would be interesting to know what those admin burdens were and how iris recog was settled upon as the ideal solution) or merely replaces new for old.

The digital age, which seemed, only the twinkling of an eye ago, like the opening of a doorway to new, well lit rooms fully furnished with unprecedented freedom (always a dream of course but a bit more plausible than some others) shows strong signs of devolving, by corporate design, into a kind of soft prison.

Digital rights management measures – both technological and legal – are one of the walls.

But there’s no need for bitter tears when analysis and countermeasures are better responses.

What Mark Russinovich started is developed more fully here:

Ed and I are working on an academic paper, “Lessons from the Sony CD DRM Episode”, which will analyze several not-yet-discussed aspects of the XCP and MediaMax CD copy protection technologies, and will try to put the Sony CD episode in context and draw lessons for the future. We’ll post the complete paper here next Friday. Until then, we’ll post drafts of a few sections here. We have two reasons for this: we hope the postings will be interesting in themselves, and we hope your comments will help us improve the paper.

Today’s excerpt is from the middle of the paper, where we’re wading through details about the copy protection systems and the techniques they use to recognize protected CDs.

Please note that this is a draft and should not be formally quoted or cited. The final version of our entire paper will be posted here when it is ready.

More at Freedom to Tinker…

Over the years, the sort of people who, once upon a time, with edge of their seat enthusiasm, predicted strong ai was just a kiss away have become progressively quieter and more cautious. It turns out that thought is not well understood – certainly not understood well enough to crisply duplicate via silicon and instruction sets.

It was unreasonable to expect a machine version anytime soon (or perhaps, at all).

The creation of expert systems – software and hardware dedicated to performing subsets of thought (or thought-like) activities – has proven to be more successful. The term “expert system”, coined in the 1970s, is mostly out of fashion but the ideas that formed that branch of AI research are propelling today’s narrow task directed applications designed to perform actions previously reserved for living minds

One of the more high profile research programs is real-time language translation which is, needless to say, an incredibly difficult task for a human let alone a machine.

IBM’s Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator (or MASTOR – it’s not a worthy high performance computing project unless it has a commanding, or double entendre-tastic acronym or name such as “Deep Blue”) is, according to IBM, able to translate speech on the fly from one language to another (for a small group of languages at this early stage).

IBM is making exciting claims about this technology’s accuracy and robustness. At this point, although I’m still very much interested in the theory and practice of this sort of thing I’m a little more curious to understand the assumptions that shape design principles (and the commercial objectives – for example, replacing, to some extent, call center workers with MASTOR or MASTOR like systems is discussed in the PC Mag article).

Language is a profoundly deep activity, intimately married to our habits and styles of thinking. It’ll be interesting to see how MASTOR does and what new things we learn about the intricate structures of language by watching its inevitable (and probably syntactically surreal) stumbles.

from nanotechweb.org

Scientists in the UK have made 2D arrays of particles that are held together by nothing except light. The “optical matter” arrays developed by Colin Bain of Durham University and Christopher Mellor, now at the National Institute for Medical Research, consist of polystyrene nanospheres that are trapped by light that has been scattered off a prism. The arrays provide a new way of assembling matter on the nanoscale, and could also shed light on processes inside crystals that take place at even smaller scales (ChemPhysChem to be published).

full…

Sometimes, when it’s very cold and I’m outside nursing a bottle of Egyptian Saki while gazing at the stars through the hydrocarbon haze and the halogen light pollution, I dream I’m on the Ringworld.

Everything then seems scarily alright.

And speaking of massive engineering projects…

After a hard day of doing hard things – the hard way – few things satisfy like a time accelerated, electronica sound tracked video journey from LA to New York.

LA to New York in three minutes.

At first, Dracula thought he’d have to use his hypnosis powers to convince the University to accept his thesis and bestow a doctorate – but, as it happened, the reviewers were so pleased with the quality of his work – “An Examination Into The Uses Of Turning Into Wolves, Bats and Other Unpopular Creatures For Obtaining Hot Ass” – that no magical intervention was required.

But, once the hard work of research and writing was done and a newly minted (if centuries old and undead) PhD had emerged into the frightful night the question remained: what to do with his doctorate?

The want ads seemed to have inexhaustible entries for “Java programmer” and “Licensed Practical Nurse” but precious few (actually, none) for “Highly Educated, Cultured and Seductive Lord of Darkness”.

Being unspeakably evil and facing dim employment prospects, he did what countless others before him have done: wrote a script and tried to shop it around in LA via his MySpace page.

The story is biographic; the blood splattered details would be familiar to any horror film aficionado or mate of Tyra Banks. What he needed was a catchy title.

The list so far:

* Dracula Goes Bananas

* Dracula and Doctor Monkey Learn To Drive

* Doctor Monkey vs. Dracula

* Dracula’s Accountant

* Black Dracula – “horror has a new color: guess what, it’s Black”

* Dracula vs. Kate Moss’ Skank Commandos

* Dracula Rethinks His Commitment To The Republican Party

* UltiEvil, the awakening (in which, Dracula joins forces with Battle
Jesus to combat DC Comics’ Darkseid)

* Doctor Monkey Conquers The Globe (a spin off from Dr. Monkey’s
appearance in the first drac/Monkey film)

* Dracula Has Game

In fantasyland – for example, Star Trek – machines never simply fail, they’re manipulated into failure via alien intervention, temporal anomalies and other gateways to non-stop excitement.

In un-fantasyland, the place of databases with false entries, help desk personnel who read from scripts that rarely address your actual issue and motherboards that fail, just because, failure is like the air we breathe.

Despite this, we react to failure as if it were a new twist in time – a shock to an otherwise creamy, smooth, sugar sprinkled system.

The two boxes digitally imaged above, boxes people depend upon, failed this morning – or sometime: I tried to boot them this morning and discovered their non boot-a-bility. “Damn” I said, because that’s what you say, or one of the things you say, when failure slaps you upside the head like an insulted woman in a 1940’s melodrama.

“Damn” I said, “these bastards won’t boot.” Then I sighed, sat down and got ready to call Dell because that’s the other thing you do (after the troubleshooting of course) you call the gods of failure to ask for help.

But we are playthings to the gods, they keep us on the phone performing ritualistic actions (remove the cover, remove the RAM) for their sport.

The machines will be repaired; their failure state put into remission.

Till next time.