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Submission + - Revisiting infamous Sony BMG rootkit scandal 10 years later (networkworld.com)

Submitted by alphadogg
alphadogg writes: Hackers really have had their way with Sony over the past year, taking down its Playstation Network last Christmas Day and creating an international incident by exposing confidential data from Sony Pictures Entertainment in response to The Interview comedy about a planned assassination on North Korea’s leader. Some say all this is karmic payback for what’s become known as a seminal moment in malware history: Sony BMG sneaking rootkits into music CDs 10 years ago in the name of digital rights management. “In a sense, it was the first thing Sony did that made hackers love to hate them,” says Bruce Schneier, CTO for Resilient Systems.

Sony's scheme was revealed on Halloween of 2005, and was followed by a botched response, issuing and reissuing of rootkit removal tools, and lawsuits. There are object lessons from the incident which are relevant today.

Submission + - The Most Disruptive Technology Of The Last 100 Years Isn't What You Think

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Ana Swanson writes in the Washington Post that when people talk about "disruptive technologies," they're usually thinking of the latest thing out of Silicon Valley but some of the most historically disruptive technologies aren't exactly what you would expect and arguably, the most disruptive technologiy of the last century is the refrigerator. In the 1920s, only about a third of households reported having a washer or a vacuum, and refrigerators were even rarer. But just 20 years later, refrigerator ownership was common, with more than two-thirds of Americans owning an icebox. According to Helen Veit, the surge in refrigerator ownership totally changed the way that Americans cooked. "Before reliable refrigeration, cooking and food preservation were barely distinguishable tasks" and techniques like pickling, smoking and canning were common in nearly every American kitchen. With the arrival of the icebox and then the electric refrigerator, foods could now be kept and consumed in the same form for days. Americans no longer had to make and consume great quantities of cheese, whiskey and hard cider — some of the only ways to keep foods edible through the winter. "A whole arsenal of home preservation techniques, from cheese-making to meat-smoking to egg-pickling to ketchup-making, receded from daily use within a single generation," writes Veit.

Technologies like the smartphone, the computer and the Internet have, of course, dramatically changed the ways we live and work but consider the spread of electricity, running water, the flush toilet developed and popularized by Thomas Crapper and central heating and the changes these have wrought. "These technologies were so disruptive because they massively reduced the time spent on housework," concludes Swanson. "The number of hours that people spent per week preparing meals, doing laundry and cleaning fell from 58 in 1900 to only 18 hours in 1970, and it has declined further since then."

Submission + - Google Apps Outage

Submitted by sixthousand
sixthousand writes: As of 18:55PM GMT, and possibly earlier, a yet undisclosed issue has crippled many of the Google Apps services to the point of being unusable. The Google Apps Status Dashboard currently reports the affected services as being Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Classroom and Realtime API. The first status dashboard message states "We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Drive. We will provide more information shortly." A follow up status posted 1 hour and 15 minutes after the first reads "Our team is continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by 10/9/15, 5:10 PM with more information about this problem. Thank you for your patience." The Google Docs Twitter has also acknowledged the issue with a tweet reading "Looks like something's up with Docs — but fear not, we’re on it & you’ll be editing again in no time. Stay tuned here!"

Submission + - Microsoft keeps sneaking in update

Submitted by lesincompetent
lesincompetent writes: How many of you noticed the infamous KB3035583 coming back over and over again even after being manually hidden?
Yes, that's the one that brought us both the free windows 10 upgrade notice and the unwarranted download of up to 6GB of installation files.
For us with no intention of "upgrading" to windows 10, how can we end this frustration once and for all?

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