Day: March 20, 2006

Meme of fours: the all-link edition

Having been tagged by Fury, I thought I might share four things about a bunch of more or less useless personal information categories with you:

Four Jobs I’ve Had

  1. Microsoft Blog Product Manager
  2. Electronic text transcriber
  3. Particle accelerator signal wiring guy
  4. Junior comic book guy

Four Movies I Could Watch Over and Over Again

  1. Raising Arizona
  2. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
  3. White
  4. Garden State

Four Places I’ve Lived

  1. The Lawn
  2. The News
  3. The Hill
  4. The Other Hill

Four TV Shows I Love

  1. The West Wing
  2. Law and Order: CI
  3. This Old House
  4. Supernatural

Four Highly Regarded and Recommended TV Shows I Haven’t Seen

  1. The Sopranos
  2. Sex in the City
  3. Lost
  4. American Idol

Four Places I’ve Vacationed

  1. Brussels
  2. Florence
  3. Westport
  4. Positano

Four of My Favorite Dishes

  1. Risotto
  2. Unagi nigiri
  3. Sammiches
  4. Dal

Four Sites I Visit Daily

  1. Bloglines
  2. Questionable Content
  3. New York Times
  4. Lists of Bests

Four Places I’d Rather Be Right Now

See list of vacation spots

Four New Bloggers I’m Tagging

  1. Zalm
  2. Blogorelli
  3. Tin Man
  4. JP

Sony at it again: DVD based rootkit

I hadn’t been actively looking for Sony DRM links since putting the Sony Boycott blog on pause, so this one came as a surprise: an advisory from F-Secure that a recent Sony DVD (the apparently not completely execrable Mr. and Mrs. Smith) has rootkit-like behavior. The DVD contains DRM from Settec, which is designed to hide itself on the hard disk of anyone who plays the DVD on a Windows computer.

F-Secure posted this back in February; I found it from a few blog links. The usual suspects never commented on this as far as I know—perhaps because the DVD in question was only released in Germany.

Still. This is Not Good.

Begorrah, TK421, why aren’t you at your post?

Thanks to Universal Hub, I made two wonderfully bizarre discoveries yesterday. One is that there are enough übergeeks in the greater Boston area to field a marching detachment of Imperial Stormtroopers in the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade. The linked photo shows everything from regulation general purpose Stormtroopers to an AT-AT driver, a Scout Trooper from Return of the Jedi, to a black-armored TIE pilot and a bounty hunter. Of course, how Stormtroopers get to march in the Boston St. Patrick’s Day Parade when gay people can’t march there or New York is anyone’s guess.

The thorny question of deep irrational unChristian institutional homophobia among Boston’s Roman Catholic population aside, the other wonderful thing I found was the 501st Legion aka Vader’s Fist, a worldwide organization of part-time Imperial Stormtroopers of whom the Boston marching contigent is a mere portion of a garrison.