Background

For those completely unfamiliar, YouTube is an advertiser-supported service that allows users to upload and download videos for free. In a world where personal upload bandwidth is not yet remotely sufficient for most individuals to self-publish even text and images, this serves a fairly valuable purpose. Although to start it seemed to be publishing primarily unauthorized copies of already published material, it seems to have matured to the point where it consists primarily of home clips of people recording their pets, their vacations, their silliness (or outright stupidity), and their personal accomplishments.

SecurityFocus has noted that the Sony BMG rootkit is being used to bypass World of Warcraft anti-cheat measures. The stealth backdoor functions of the rootkit are so good, that even the spyware that World of Warcraft puts on your system to check for anything that might possibly be used to reverse engineer or interact with the World of Warcraft game client can't get past them.

I'm inordinately amused by this particular side effect, because truly there are no good guys in this scenario. World of Warcraft is pushing spyware, Sony is pushing a rootkit, and cheaters are using one to attack the other.

In the end, I suspect that makes them all losers, in all senses of the word.

Bruce Schneier has linked to an interesting story about how Michael Larsen, a contestant on Press Your Luck memorized the possible pseudorandom sequences (there were only 6 at the time), and used that knowledge to win himself over $100,000 and vacation prizes. Another account of that story is here, at a site that also hosts a number of compressed clips of the show, including the episode in question.

A lot of webcams are horribly insecure by default. This doesn't mean that they should never be used; there are a lot of situations where it really doesn't matter who sees what the camera is seeing, and experts may very well get it right. A lot of people will get it wrong, however (either by misconfiguration or by insufficient security elsewhere) and Bruce Schneier wrote an entry on a Register article about a couple of cases that have made it through the UK courts recently dealing with hijacked computers and webcams.

Scott Moschella over at Plastic Bugs has documented the process of downloading an encrypted, digital track consisting of nothing but silence, stripping the copy protection from it, and offering the unprotected digital silence for free download, in direct violation of the DMCA, so he claims. In actuality, I suspect he has violated no law; the DMCA covers only copyrighted works, and I think that Apple will have a hard time convincing a judge that a length of silence meets the originality test for copyrightability. Still, it's a fun read, and includes useful instructions on stripping the protection from other works — much less legal under the DMCA, but certainly useful in protecting fair use rights.