Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

The Buzz

Sony BMG CDs include antipiracy software patch

Sony BMG Music Entertainment said some 5.7-million of its CDs were shipped with antipiracy technology that requires a new software patch to plug a potential security breach in computers used to play the CDs.

The security vulnerability was discovered by online civil liberty group Electronic Frontier Foundation and brought to the attention of Sony BMG, which has been under fire in recent weeks over security issues with an unrelated CD copy-protection plan.

The company said it brought up the issue with the maker of MediaMax software, SunnComm Technologies Inc., which has developed a software patch to fix the problem.

The MediaMax Version 5 software was loaded on 27 Sony BMG titles, including Alicia Keys' Unplugged and Cassidy's I'm a Hustla.

CD copy-protection software generally is designed to restrict how many times computer users can make duplicate versions of a CD in an effort to stem piracy.

A computer security company working with EFF discovered the security issue with the MediaMax Version 5 CDs and how it affects computers running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system.

The MediaMax problem differs from the security hole discovered last month with the so-called XCP technology by First 4 Internet Ltd. of Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, that Sony BMG placed on more than 50 other CD titles. That copy-protection effort was found to leave computers vulnerable to hackers.

Sony BMG recalled the discs with XCP last month and released a way to remove the software from users' computers.

A lawsuit seeking to potentially cover hundreds of thousands of AOL subscribers accuses the Time Warner Inc. unit of illegally billing customers by creating secondary accounts for them without their consent.

The lawsuit, filed last month in St. Clair County Circuit Court in Illinois on behalf of 10 AOL customers in six states, claims the company confused and deceived customers about the charges, stalled them from canceling unauthorized accounts and refused to return questioned fees.

The lawsuit, seeking class-action status, mirrors more than a dozen other actions that have been pending in state and federal courts throughout the country, said Stuart Talley, a Sacramento, Calif., attorney representing the plaintiffs in the Illinois lawsuit. All of the federal cases were consolidated in California two years ago, Talley said.

AOL of Dulles, Va., declined to comment immediately. Co-defendant ICT Group Inc., the Newtown, Pa., outsourcing company AOL retained to respond to customer complaints and billing matters, did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

The head of the European Publishers Council is complaining about search engines. "It is fascinating to see how these companies "help themselves' to copyright-protected material, build up their own business models and parasitically earn advertising revenue off the back of other people's content," Pinto Balsameo said at a Brussels conference.

"Industry must have legal certainty and confidence that their intellectual property will be protected," he said, according to the Associated Press.

Reaction to his comment was clear and quick from John C. Dvorak, a columnist for PC Magazine and for MarketWatch. Calling Balsameo's comments "euro-crap," Dvorak went on to advise: "If you do not want your material on the Internet to be searched and linked to, then take it off!"

Police officers stepping into hostage standoffs and other dicey situations now have something new to throw into the mix: a baseball-size camera that can be hurled from afar, survive the landing and wirelessly relay video and audio back to base for two hours.

The EyeBall camera weighs less than a pound and is protected by a rugged rubber and polyurethane housing. That allows it to be thrown through windows or bounced off walls. When it comes to a rest, the ball stabilizes itself, then begins transmitting footage and sound up to 200 yards away.

The EyeBall is the creation of an Israeli company, ODF Optronics Ltd., which has sold the devices to the Israeli military and to undisclosed military and law enforcement customers in Asia and Europe.

Now Remington Arms Co. has won approval from the Federal Communications Commission to sell them domestically. Remington expects dozens of law enforcement groups to be buyers.

Police can expect to pay $4,800 for two EyeBalls, whose batteries require recharging after about two hours of use, and the corresponding video monitoring equipment. Replacement EyeBalls will run about $1,700.

More than 5 percent of Internet address names issued in the United States are registered using "patently false" contact information, making it difficult or impossible to contact the sites' owners, according to report submitted to Congress.

An additional 3.7 percent of domain names ending in .com, .net and .org contain missing information in required contact fields, the Government Accountability Office said in a report submitted to the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property.

In all, 3.9-million names, or about 8.7 percent, contain contact details that "appeared obviously and intentionally false" or are incomplete, the report said.

Under rules enforced by the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, which has oversight over the Net's addressing system, registrars must collect phone numbers, physical mailing addresses and other contact information from domain name owners.

That information is made public to help individuals, businesses and law enforcement contact Web site operators to answer questions, resolve disputes and troubleshoot network problems.

But in recent years the databases have been mined by telephone marketers and people sending unsolicited e-mail and postal mail, causing some Web site owners to falsify or withhold addresses and phone numbers, observers said.

Text apparently is where the heart is, according to a survey commissioned by Alltel that included responses from the Tampa Bay region. More than three-quarters of the respondents say it's okay to flirt using text messaging on a cell phone, though only 41 percent acknowledged doing so. Two-thirds think it's all right to accept a date by text. In Tampa, more than two-thirds use abbreviations such as LOL (laughing out loud), NP (no problem) and TTYL (talk to you later). The survey also found 52 percent use emoticon symbols in messages. Sounds romantic.

Join Times personal technology editor Dave Gussow throughout the week for news, links and comments about tech issues at the Tech Times blog (www.sptimes.com/blogs/tech) We also invite you to post your comments and questions. Also, we invite you to check out Josh Korr's take on the video game scene at his blog (www.sptimes.com/blogs/videogames)

[Last modified December 9, 2005, 08:53:03]