ej’s blog-o-matic

Sony DRM infects your PC

Next time you buy a CD from Sony/BGM, you should be aware that if you put it in your computer, it quite possibly will install spyware which has been know to cause Windows “Blue Screens of Death” and leaves a monster-truck-sized security hole in your computer, to which virus and worm writers can exploit.

All of this for just trying to listen to a CD you bought legitimately. Wonderful.

Here’s a couple of articles that explain the issue a little more in-depth:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Spyware/index.php?p=698
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1882795,00.asp

…and here’s a Google News search on the topic:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=sony+drm&btnG=Search+News

Furl

I find myself wanting to make virtual “post-it” notes of web pages that I visit. I could just bookmark it, but then I would have to deal w/ syncing my bookmarks from home/work/other-computer-using-places.

I’ve recently come across a web-based bookmarking service called Furl. Once you’ve signed up, you can just add a little “bookmarklet” to your browser and anytime you come across an interesting page, you can just click on the “Furl!” button to save it to your personal storage space. The double bonus is that you can now access it from any computer with a browser.

http://www.furl.net

Google Talk

I’ve recently downloaded Google’s new Instant Messaging client, Google Talk. It has a relatively spartan user interface, but the totally bitchin’ aspect of it is that its underlying messaging protocol is completely open (XMPP, based on Jabber, for those who care).

Why should you care, you might ask? Well, since it’s completely open, Google is putting pressure on all of the other popular IM providers (AIM, Yahoo and MSN) to open up their protocols for inter-op. The up side of this, is that hopefully in the future, you won’t need 4 different chat clients to interact with all of you friends, family members or co-workers.

So go download Google Talk when you get a chance (you’ll need a gmail address) and leave me a comment that you’re on, so I can add you to my buddylist. Don’t worry about submitting your email address…it only shows up in the admin interface for the blog, not on the publicly viewable part.

Science in America

The Struggle Over Science

How Firefox Works

If you want to know a little bit more about the Firefox browser, check it out here.

Open Source Enterprise Software

If you happen to make buying decisions about software in the enterprise, here’s an article about open source alternatives.

Planarity

Here’s a little game to waste a few minutes of your day.

Sharing Large Files

If you find yourself needing to email large files around, but your email provider sets certain limits (typically 10-20MB per email), you might want to take a look at a couple of different sites that will let you temporarily store your files.

Dropload

Upload Temple

Open Source Flash

Here’s a link to an Open Source Flash framework…enFlash.

Plugins!

If you happen to blog, and you happen to use Wordpress for said blogging, you might be interested in adding additional functionality to your site.

Take a look at some of these plugins from http://wp-plugins.net/