As if our jobs weren't hard enough.

[geekgrrl-ca.livejournal.com]

Sony has gone and pretty much released a rootkit on their music CDs. http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html

Follow up to the rootkit. http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/11/more-on-sony-dangerous-decloaking.html


And already some one is using the rootkit to cheat at WoW. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/04/secfocus_wow_bot/

Basicly the gist of it is Sony installs a rootkit on Windows PCs that hides files from the operating system that begin with $sys$. Apparently it does some nasty things with the 64bit version of Windows XP as well.

[Semi-OT] Gah, sometimes, I think hardware vendors plan failure...

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

I swear this POS was meant to betray me.

This laptop was a gift to me from my father in law. It of course had problems. It was well taken care of for a luser, but a real luser had managed to damage the LCD while he was on an Amtrak by throwing his seat back while the laptop was in use. So I went to a local computer recycling shop that had a used LCD, put down the cash for it, him and I replaced some hinges to get the screen to mount, we're in business.

I take it home, put in a spare 40 gig hard drive I hadn't used in a while since I didn't have a laptop to put it in. Fire it up, partition it, format it, throw XP on it, start installing a bunch of stuff, then start noticing it's having some problems - namely it's stuttering, sometimes freezing for a few seconds, sometimes a minute or two. What's up with this? Hmmm. Then I notice the hanging on startup and shutdown. Ok, let's pull out Scandisk. Hangs on that. This isn't good. Out comes Seatools. Immediately fails.

Good news - it's a Seagate with a nice warranty. Bad news - it's still a POS.

Gah.

No, it's fucking DIAL UP

[ihateemo.livejournal.com]

We have a 56K modem and are getting a connection speed of 26.6K. We used to get a connection speed of 33K. Is this as good as we can get? Can you advise?

Can I also add that the phrase "please advise" and all variants thereof are the most annoying turns of phrase ever? It irritates me no end.