Circuit Rider - Version 3.7
By Jim Scheef

Download your music–it’s safer than buying Cds!--Unless you’ve been hiking in the wilderness for the last two weeks, you heard about Sony BMG’s plan to infect your computer with “root kit” software intended to hide digital rights management (DRM) software that limits how you use the music on that the new Neal Diamond album you just bought. At first, Sony BMG (the music publishing part of Sony) denied that they used anything like the “malware” you work so hard to avoid; but when other malicious code was released that exploited the Sony code to hide its files too, the record company was forced to acknowledge what they had done and try to correct the problem. The result is a recall of possibly millions of CDs sold over the last few weeks. You can read Sony’s apology and find information about how to identify problem CDs, the program to exchange those CDs, and how to remove the bad code from your computer on www.sonybmg.com.

Now, can you imagine being the executive who approved this plan? Or, even worse, how about the poor IT guy who told that executive, “Oh, yea, this will work. No one will ever find this stuff and defeat it.” Fortunately for us, one of the first people to find the “root kit” was Mark Russinovich of Winternals, Inc., a company that makes tools that get you out of bad trouble when Windows servers crash. He also has a site called SysInternals.com that offers free software. He was testing one of those programs (RootkitRevealer, which does what the name implies), when he discovered the Sony malware. (Ok, he wasn’t the first to find the Sony malware, but was the first to publicly announce it.) Make no mistake, this is malware. It hides files at the lowest level of the operating system and then uses the hidden files to monitor your use of the music on the protected CDs and phone home to Sony.

There is another unintended (and so far unreported) angle to this story. Technically, Mark Russinovich violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) when he found the Sony code. He was debugging a new version of RootkitRevealer, and had to reverse engineer the Sony root kit code to determine what it did and how to defeat it. When he started, the Sony copy protection software was just another splotch of evil code that did not belong on the computer. It was not until be disassembled it that its origin and purpose became clear. It is against the law to disassemble or reverse engineer any software intended to protect copyrighted material. Now I ask you, should Mark go to jail? The DMCA needs to be repealed. Call your Congresspeople and next year don’t vote for them if they continue to support this gift to the music and movie industries.

A challenge
Can you stop using Internet Explorer? I did. Well, almost; every once in a while I still need to open something in IE. After a lot of trials and a few false starts, I finally made Firefox 1.0.7 my default browser. Along the way, I’ve found enough cool stuff to make a general meeting presentation. Initially I did not like Firefox by itself enough to make the switch–there were too many IE features and add-ins that I missed. However, once I discovered the Mozilla Extensions web page (https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/) I found little tools that fixed all of my complaints and even made life a little easier. One of these extensions is called PlainOldFavorites. This cool 22K download puts your IE Favorites on the Firefox menu bar, so they work just like in IE. No more synchnonizing your Firefox Bookmarks and IE Favorites! This, plus the Firefox versions of the Yahoo and RoboForms toolbars, and I was hooked. I now have more than fifteen extensions loaded.

Along the way, I found that there is more to this than just telling Firefox to be your default browser. I also went into the Tools menu of Windows Explorer (note the name–not IE) and opened Folder Options. Click the File Types tab and scroll down to the HTM and HTML file extensions. Now click the Change button, browse to firefox.exe (wherever you have it installed) and click OK all the way out. If you did this right, all of your IE shortcuts will change the Firefox logo, as Firefox is now the default program for that type of file. Double clicking what used to be an IE shortcut on your desktop now opens that web site in Firefox. Cool, eh?

Call your Congresspeople
By the time you read this, the renewal of the USA Patriot Act will probably be a fait accompli. But if it’s not, please call your congresspeople (all of them) and ask how they have voted on the Patriot Act Renewal. Tell them that your civil librerties are important and that you are ashamed that they voted for the act as it was (both of our Senators did) and that you expect them to protect your civil liberties. Remember when this was first passed? The Justice Department and the FBI said the library records search provision would “hardly ever be used”. Well they have used it more than 30 thousand times since then. I find it hard to believe that all of those instances were “exceptional cases” of national security.