BoycottSony.us

I decided to keep the Boycott Sony thread alive and well by moving it to its own blog. My intention is to use BoycottSony.us to aggregate information about the Sony DRM brouhaha, other boycott efforts, and maybe a little bit about DRM in general.

I should emphasize one thing: I started this thread from the perspective of a boycott, of totally cutting Sony off until they start treating us with respect. But what this blog will really be about is conversation: people talking to people about what Sony is doing to them and their rights. If Sony wants to join the conversation and talk in earnest to us about what they think they’re doing with their DRM, and more importantly listen to our concerns and take action on them, then I will count that as a victory for this effort.

Incidentally, it’s boycottsony.us because boycottsony.com and boycottsony.net are owned—by Sony.

Showering in the dark.

Our new shower in our first floor bathroom is finished, and not a moment too soon as the second floor bathroom is almost completely gutted now. I took the first shower in the new space this morning, and while I was looking forward to the experience it turned out not to be everything I had hoped, because it was in darkness. Yes, a transformer blew down the hill from us at about 6:10 this morning…

The good news is that our new hot water system’s big ol’ storage tank had more than enough for two showers; our old tankless hot water from our late unlamented oil furnace would not have allowed me to take a hot shower with the power off. But I wasn’t able to evaluate the lights or the efficacy of the new exhaust fan. Oh well.

Before and after photos of the new shower and of the demolition in the upstairs bathroom when I get power back at home.

Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva… oh never mind.

CNN: “Can I quit now?” FEMA chief wrote as Katrina raged. I knew I wouldn’t be the first to jump on the Congressional report of the analysis of the emails sent by Michael “Brownie” Brown during the Katrina crisis, but I couldn’t resist. But the coverage on CNN—“Humor is a stress relief, so we understand”—is pretty damned reprehensible too.

How can one look at the following exchange and not weep in rage:

Marty Bahamonde, FEMA employee on ground in New Orleans: Sir, I know that you know the situation is past critical. Here are some things you might not know. Hotels are kicking people out, thousands gathering in the streets with no food or water. Hundreds still being rescued from homes.

The dying patients at the DMAT tent being medivac. Estimates are many will die within hours. Evacuation in process. Plans developing for dome evacuation but hotel situation
adding to problem. We are out of food and running out of water at the dome, plans in works to address the critical need.

FEMA staff is OK and holding own. DMAT staff working in deplorable conditions. The sooner we can get the medical patients out, the sooner we can get them out.

Phone connectivity impossible.

Michael “Brownie” Brown, Presidential-appointed director of FEMA: Thanks for the update. Anything specific I need to do or tweak?

Sony follow up: patching a stupid DRM mechanism

According to News.com, Sony is going to release a patch for the rootkit DRM mechanism (created by First 4 Internet) that it has been installing on customers’ computers. The patch is available on Sony BMG’s site (though as of this writing not linked from their home page) and will be available through major antivirus manufacturers.

Well, that’s dandy. But it doesn’t address the main problem. Yes, it makes the DRM software visible and eliminates the $SYS$ hidey-hole that could have provided cover for numerous other infections on compromised systems. But it doesn’t eliminate the core issue, which is that an audio recording is modifying the computer systems on which it is played, patching device drivers and otherwise modifying the operations of the machine.

As far as I’m concerned, this doesn’t change anything. They still aren’t getting a red cent from me.

Oh, and the best part? If you go to the update page, it only works with IE…

Another listening list: John Peel’s favorite singles

Courtesy the Times Online, I now have a new set of obscure music to hunt after, the contents of John Peel’s record box at the time of his death. The Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks” has been mentioned in so many articles about him, I’m surprised that it hasn’t been reissued in download friendly form. Other surprises: Cat Power’s “Headlights” b/w “Darling said sir,” three records from Eddie & Ernie (who?); three from Nilsson; .

Less surprising than affirming: Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman,” Pavement’s “Demolition Plot,” Sam and Dave’s “I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down,” a foreign pressing of “Come Together” b/w “Octopus’s Garden” AND “Something,” and 10 different White Stripes records (some with multiple copies).

Like I said, quite a shopping list.

On the Passion of Scooter Libby

I don’t have a lot to say about Scooter’s indictment and subsequent resignation last week, except to note two things.

Number one, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo had Scooter nailed as being involved in the leak about two years ago, as you can tell if you read my transcript from the first BloggerCon (complete with my rushed misspelling of “Libbey” as livey). That lends some credence to recent complaints, from Salon and elsewhere, that the fact that the indictments are only coming now means that the coverup worked. Maddening.

The good news is that this is only the beginning. With the investigation still open and the Sword of Damocles hanging over Turd Blossom’s head, there’s still plenty of room for this indictment to become a big party. We can only hope.

We are at war, and Sony fired first. Boycott Sony.

Read this article at Mark’s Sysinternals Blog about how a Sony copy-protected CD installed a rootkit on his system, and the lengths he had to go to to get the normal functions of his PC back. I’ll wait.

Back? Confused? Let me summarize:

  1. By inserting this Sony CD in his computer, Mark’s computer was infected with software that installed hidden processes, modified his CD drivers, and tricked the OS into hiding any directory that started with the sequence $SYS$.
  2. Using the features in this software (commonly called a rootkit), the Sony DRM could monitor how many times it was being played and limit the burning of music contained on the CD to another disc. However, it also makes the user’s computer vulnerable to other infections.
  3. When Mark tried to uninstall the software by deleting it, his CD drive completely stopped working.

Over the line? Sony obliterated the line long ago. This is egregious. As one Slashdot poster points out, this inverts the argument about P2P networks being hives of spyware, trojans, and viruses. We no longer have to go to P2P networks to infect our computers; they now get infected by music produced by the major labels.

As if that wasn’t enough: first, Sony’s artists, such as Van Zant, whose CD infected Mark’s computer, have nothing to gain and everything to lose from this DRM madness. Second, technically Mark is now a criminal for undoing the damage that Sony did to his system, thanks to the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA.

As of this moment, I’m boycotting all Sony products—music, movies, video games, electronics. And I call on others to do the same. It’s simple. If you treat me with disrespect, I stop doing business with you; if you treat me as a criminal, I call you on it; if you ship a product that disables my computer, it’s war.

Because make no mistake, this is war. More to come; watch this space.

Making Sense of A Child of Our Time

During the Thursday night opening performance of Sir Michael Tippett’s modern oratorio A Child of Our Time, I started to understand the piece a little better. I had been struggling to interpret the libretto in light of the circumstances of its composition—specifically, as a response to the tragic story of Herschel Grynszpan, the young Polish Jew whose assault of a Nazi official gave the Nazis the excuse for the Kristallnacht pogrom. And certain aspects of the libretto make sense in this context, particularly the action of the second part of the oratorio. This, the story of the Boy who, frustrated by continual persecution, shoots the official and is imprisoned after a violent retaliation, appears as close to a retelling of Grynszpan’s tragedy as possible.

But this section is surrounded by meditative passages on the nature of good and evil and the duplicity in men’s hearts, of the love of parents for their children and of winter and oppression. Most puzzling of all is the identification of the slain official as the Boy’s “dark brother” and the ultimate rejection of the Boy—“He, too, is outcast, his manhood broken in the clash of powers.” What is Tippett getting at?

After last night’s performance, I think the key is in the mysterious introduction to section III:

The cold deepens.
The world descends into the icy waters
Where lies the jewel of great price.

These lines from the chorus, coming on the heels of the Boy’s imprisonment, suggest a continual worsening of the situation actually brings about something valuable. What is the jewel of great price? Judging from the penultimate chorus, “I would know my shadow and my light, so shall I at last be whole,” Tippett’s drama is aiming not at social justice but at self knowledge and a deeper understanding of mankind. The Boy’s fate, his lack of redemption, suggests that Tippett condemns him for descending in his despair to murder, and believes that only through embracing his shadow, his dark brother, can he reach the “garden” that “lies beyond the desert”; only through rapprochement can he be healed.

As a response to Kristallnacht, this seems an inadequate, if not astoundingly naïve perspective. Indeed, Tippett in later years commented that while this sort of reconciliation may be possible among individuals, it appears to be impossible among nations. But separated from this specific conflict as a statement for the growth of a man and of mankind, it is a powerful message.

Ultimately the tension between the dramatic exigencies of the Boy’s story and the reflective, meditative lesson that Tippett attempts to draw in the final sections is responsible for the work’s philosophical incoherence. But it is a fascinating, if doomed, struggle between light and dark that forces the listener to ask how else one could respond to events of such horror. And today, as we all engage in our individual assessments of the horrors, wars, persecutions, and failures of humanity of the years since the oratorio premiered in 1944 and in the last five years in particular, it reminds us, just as does the story of Rosa Parks, that the individual’s response to this darkness is the most important thing of all.

Old Arlington maps

arlington 1898

Speaking of the Arlington list, someone just posted a fantastic find: a working map of the town dating from 1898. What is most interesting about this map is that it sets some theories of our neighborhood’s development on their head. I have been told by my neighbors, and even by the folks we bought our house from, that our land originally belonged to the folks who built the house next to ours on the corner, which dates to the 1920s. In fact, the map of our neighborhood not only shows Grand View Road, but shows the plots for our house and the house on either side, in more or less the places they are today. The house next to ours may have been built first, but it never owned our land.

Interesting what you can dig up if you look.

Snow? In October??

I figured that since most of the leaves in our neighborhood were still firmly in place, we were safe from winter weather a while longer. No such luck. As I was leaving my barber’s shop in Arlington Heights, there were honest-to-goodness flakes of snow. Small, still, but getting bigger. By the time I picked up a few light fixtures that had come in at Wolfer’s in Waltham, the flakes were pretty big, and they stayed that way all afternoon. I think we got close to an inch, though it only accumulated on the grass and a few parked cars.

One of my neighbors on the Arlington List got some great photos of the storm, which he dubbed “Hall-snow-een.”

Taking care of business, in a flash: closing up the walls

I’d like to introduce you to the table saw on the right, also known as The Machine That Saved My Ass. Ryobi isn’t a lusted after brand of power tools the way Porter and Cable or DeWalt is, but for my money and for today this is the Power Tool That Walks on Water.

Perhaps I should back up. As I previously wrote, we figured out this weekend that we needed to trim most of the lumber we were using to frame the radiator niches so that the wallboard the plasters were to install would be flush with the existing wall surface. Unfortunately, my plan to use a circular saw hit some snags: lack of a good long work surface, inexperience with the tool, and most importantly lack of time. Because I needed to get the niches framed and insulated by Thursday morning, when the plasterers were due to start working. But I was rehearsing Tuesday night, Wednesday morning, and Thursday morning, and singing a concert Thursday night.

So basically I had Wednesday night after an abbreviated work day to rip a sill plate and top plate and studs for five wall openings, then nail them into place and insulate them. I called Lisa and shared the news. She said, “Can you get that done?” I said, “I think I need to get a table saw.” She said, quite reasonably, “But where would you put it?” Right now our garage is full of plumbing fixtures waiting to go in our upstairs bathroom, but it won’t have a lot of room even in the best case scenario. I told her I would find a portable model, and crossed my fingers.

Sure enough, the Ryobi above folds down and even has wheels to roll it away into a corner. It was pretty quick to assemble. I left the office at six, had it in the back seat of my wife’s Prizm (a tight squeeze, but it fit) by 6:40, and was home and assembling it by 7:30. At 8 pm, I connected the ShopVac to the dust port and started ripping lumber, and was done by 9. The ripping process was an absolute breeze.

I started working. The process I followed was to dry-fit the plates and studs, shim or trim where needed, and then start fastening everything together. I nailed the top and sill plates into the framing above the niches and the floor joists, respectively, using a big heavy framing hammer and some 16d nails. (My forearms are still aching, btw). Then I used construction adhesive to fasten the end studs to the finished plaster sides of the niches, and toenailed the center stud into place. I should probably have used more than three studs on some of the openings, but for the sake of time I left some wider bays.

Wednesday night I only finished two bays (and applied the adhesive to the rest) before my body shut down at 10:30. Thursday morning I got up early, insulated the bays in the kitchen and our bedroom, then cursed as I realized I had cut the plates for the living room some six inches two short. I had to leave at that point, so I kept my fingers crossed that the plasterers would not have enough time to address all the openings yesterday.

On the way from the office to the concert I stopped at Home Depot and picked up two more 2x4s, then swung by the house and ripped and crosscut them to fit, and dry fit them in the living room. I was too tired after the concert to do anything else, so I got up this morning and finished nailing and insulating the remaining bays. As I was working on the second to last one, the plasterer arrived, so I hurriedly finished it and moved on to the last bay, where I had to install an electrical box as well as nailing in the framing and insulating the cavity. Somehow I managed it and was out the door at 8, passing the plasterers who were already screwing blueboard over the first cavity.

It was a close thing, and my arms will ache for a week from all the hammering. But I got it done. Thanks, Machine That Saved My Ass! You’ve earned your precious floor space in my garage.

Well, that was a surprise

For someone (like me) interested in the Bush administration’s ongoing troubles, it was a bad morning to spend in a dress rehearsal. The withdrawal of Harriet Miers’ nomination for the Supreme Court signals more troubles on the horizon and a further diminution of the President’s mojo. Even if the withdrawal came as no surprise.

And it should come as no surprise at all: Salon’s War Room points out that columnist Charles Krauthammer practically scripted the withdrawal and the reason for it in a post on Townhall.com last Friday. For a man whose biography brags that he found Stephen Hawking’s popular books on cosmology “entirely incomprehensible,” Krauthammer nailed this one on the head. The adminstration and the Senate, in deadlocking over the release of documentation  from Miers’ tenure in the White House, found a way to force the withdrawal of a nominee who was widely seen, on all sides of the political spectrum, as unfit to serve in the nation’s highest court. A neat trick: by quibbling over matters of executive privilege, we can still pretend that the emperor has clothes and that he has not shown himself incapable of finding them.

Note to composers

A realization that came during the orchestra rehearsal with the BSO for Michael Tippett’s A Child of Our Time today: in a highly complex, chromatic choral work with shifting meter and uncertain melodic lines, it is perhaps unwise to ask the chorus to sing the text “We are lost.”

Otherwise rehearsals are going well. The performances (tomorrow night, Friday afternoon, Saturday night) should be excellent. And working with Sir Colin Davis is a treat.

Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks’ world seems a million miles away. It’s hard to believe it was (just) less than fifty years ago that segregation was commonplace, that someone could be arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus, that we accepted unequal treatment for citizens of our country based on the color of their skin.

Of course, in some ways, it still seems very real.

And it’s more apparent than ever that there is still a lot of work to do. That we have barely addressed the deep social injustices and divides that were reflected in the laws that Ms. Parks helped to erase, much less the economic factors that continue to put the lie to the image of the US as a land of prosperity and opportunity.

But if there is one lesson to be learned from Rosa Parks, it is this: sometimes even causes that have decades of rising social pressure on their side need a single person to stand up—or, in this case, keep her seat. One person doesn’t change the world, but one person can be the pivot on which the world starts to change.

(I decided to finish writing this even though I think David Weinberger has said it better.)

Thanks, Trend Micro, for your overzealous blockage.

Today’s definition of frustrating is finding out that your company’s new antivirus software considers the eMusic Download Manager to be a “virus” (ok, adware). Especially frustrating since I pay for that service and now can’t use it. The download experience in Firefox is dramatically worse without the download manager, as you lose the option to download a whole album at once; instead you have to click on each song, one at a time.

Emusic is a great service. It’s too bad that someone there made the poor decision of bundling the promo for their service in such a way that it hurts their image and worsens the user experience for their legitimate customers.