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November 30, 2005
Design Disappointment
Just got back from eyeballing the fashion-designer-decorated Christmas trees at the Birger Jarl hotel, which touts its design credentials with every drop of a press release.
"This is yet another interesting angle of our image, in which Swedish colour, form and design are in focus. The concept allows for many combinations of interaction between people, material and form," claims Marianne Hultberg, Managing Director of Hotel Birger Jarl, in a press release (I'd link but it's a PDF file). "It is especially exciting to be able to unite an old tradition with completely new concepts, to the delight of our guests and everyone in general," she says.
What a disappointment. It happens that I had an errand at Immanual Church, which appears to be part of the complex housing the Birger Jarl. It's not like I made a special trip, in other words, but my ten-year-old could have turned out something more interesting. A colorful, pulsating clump of mini trees made me think of America (except for the ceramic troll in front) but not, say, Design with a capital D. None of them did.
A couple were pretty, so that was something. (There's supposedly one dressed up as a Midsommar Maypole but I didn't spot it.) The Amnesty tree was worthy but dull, a real-life representation of the organization itself. (Hope one of the nice Amnesty volunteers doesn't come into my office right now and beat me to death with an Amnesty-logo-etched drinking glass, even though I deserve it.) One amusing tree was bedecked with tree-shaped air fresheners that had glossy fashion and ad pics glued on the back. But the display, on the whole, sucked. That doesn't make it an ineffective PR ploy, of course. The hotel was able to squeeze ink out of a variety of local newspapers and blogs so I suppose it paid off. But next time, hold a contest, make a big deal out of it and actually give the designers (by donating money to their favorite causes, perhaps?) a reason to feel more passionate about their creations.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 07:47 PM | Comments (0)
Hack Seeks Flack for Sizzling Nordic Coffee Breaks
I miss my PR and tech marketing buddies. Maybe one of them would be willing to relocate:
Ericsson Internet Payment Exchange AB (IPX) is one of the youngest divisions within Ericsson, delivering global payment and messaging solutions for SMS, MMS, Web and WAP. IPX facilitates payment and distribution of content by seamlessly interconnecting content providers, media companies, governments and consumer brands with mobile operators. In practice, this means services such as mobile ringtones, TV voting and much more. IPX can provide digital content to end-users around the world through a single point of contact. IPX is connected to 550 million subscribers and is live in 18 countries. The IPX team currently has some 80 employees.Job Description
As PR and Marketing Communications Manager you are responsible for managing the overall marketing and communication plan of IPX worldwide. You will develop and refine the market message of IPX and also coordinate press and PR activities. The position includes planning and organization of industry events and trade fairs where IPX needs to be seen. You will update and maintain PR material - both for internal and external use - and also take responsibility for the internet and intranet sites. Driving competitor analysis will also be a part of the position.You will work closely with the IPX team world wide and with other Ericsson Group functions. You are expected to build excellent relations in external areas, such as with customers, media, marketing companies and public institutions.
The position is based in Stockholm, Sweden.
I dunno. Global payment: sounds like yawnsville to me. Of course, those global messaging solutions are a whole 'nother story. So who's up for relocating? Not Phil Gomes, he moved recently. Not Melody Haller. Not Sam Whitmore. (Sam, would it kill you to have a little glowing bio info in html?) Not Renee Deger. Not Abbe Patterson nor Frank O'Mahony nor Sarah Hofstetter. Why not? Because I'll never convince them to leave the U.S.
Maybe Colin Smith. Only because he's too cute to fit in with all the well-fed males that dominate WebEx management. (Subrah, that's a joke but would it kill you to give Dean a little company next time there's a management opening?) Or perhaps Tom Murphy. After all, he's already in Europe. Both would be fun to have in town. Guys, think it over. We've got less sun but better food. One of you should take the plunge. Then we'll get together with Lennart Håkansson, who heads the technology practice at GCI. (Lennart, would it kill GCI to offer an English-language option?)
A marketing ménage à trios...What could be more exciting?
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 03:08 PM | Comments (0)
November 29, 2005
Online Sales = Big Butts?
Michael Bazeley of the San Jose Mercury, among others, has reported on the new Pew Internet and American Life Project survey, which estimates that one in six American adults online has sold something through an Internet classified ad or auction site. (The word estimate is mine, btw. Why doesn't every journalist add that qualifier to survey items--what, it's too obvious? I think not.)
"The number of visitors to online classified sites jumped 80 percent from September 2004 to this September, according to data from comScore Media Metrix that was released as part of the Pew study. Craigslist was the most popular classified ads site, with 8.7 million visitors in September. Close behind was Trader Publishing Co., which operates nearly four dozen vehicle, merchandise, housing and employment sites, such as BargainTraderOnline.com and ForRent.com."
As Bazeley notes, "Much has been made about the effect that craigslist has had on newspaper classified advertising" but as far as I can tell, no one has considered the effect that Craigslist, eBay and other online sites may have had on the expanding American waistline. The so-called obesity epidemic has been linked to many factors, including excessive TV, a lack of exercise, the growing size of food portions and even movements in personal income tax rate and in the gender wage gap. So why can't online sales be a contributing factor?
Big butts are unhealthy, however we got them. And now, it turns out, they're unhealthy in an unexpected way. As Jessica Heslam writes in the Boston Herald,"Rapping about big behinds made Sir Mix-A-Lot famous, but a new medical study says those plump rumps don’t do women any good when it comes to getting a shot in the traditional spot. Researchers say a majority of people, especially women, aren’t getting the proper dosage from backside shots because the needle can’t get through the blubber. As few as one in 10 women (and six in 10 men) may be getting proper dosages from injections, said Dr. Victoria Chan of Adelaide and Meath Hospital in Dublin."
CBS News explains why this matters: "The medicine gets injected into the buttock muscles, then filters into nearby blood vessels. Such shots are used for a variety of medicines, including vaccines, painkillers, contraceptives, and antinausea drugs." I may be joking about the online sales-obesity connection but drugs that can't do their job are no fun, especially for women who end up with pregnant or ill as a result.
At least there's one bright spot on the horizon: the obesity rate in Mexico is expected overtake the U.S. rate soon. Alas, no word yet on how their pets rank compared to our pets.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 07:24 PM | Comments (0)
November 28, 2005
Snow Falling on Tech Dreams & Harried Parents
"What is a startup without bleary-eyed, junk-food-fueled, balls-to-the-wall days and sleepless, caffeine-fueled, relationship-stressing nights? Answer?: A lot more enjoyable place to work." Be balanced is the tenth rule of Evan Williams' rules for executives of Web startups. Finding balance, or at least trying to allow employees to find it, is excellent advice for all Silicon Valley companies, web-related or not. Over many years the Valley work ethic and the cell/pager mentality of constant access has dramatically transformed home life for many residents and not for the better.
"As information technology allows households and communities to become places of production, it also changes the way such social institutions think of themselves. Families and communities, like upgraded software can be 'refreshed' or 'reinvented.' Families can then become a kind of product. Finally, the pivotal assumption that work is done at a workplace and family life is lived at home is much too simplistic. Many forces, not the least of which is the technical ability to work from home, have blurred the domains. If time at the workplace does not really reflect the time spent working, how does that effect family leaves or the length of a work week?"
That's a rhetorical question from one of the anthropologists at the Silicon Valley Cultures Project. Dr. J.A. English-Lueck knows exactly what that does to the length of a work week and offers examples:
"John is a middle-aged product development manager at a high tech company in Silicon Valley. ... He tries very hard not to take too much work home with him, preferring to work late on site, but the international nature of his work means he is on the phone at midnight and at dawn. He is grateful for E-mail and voicemail since they can fit his schedule. Realistically, he thinks about work problems constantly, in his garden, and in his car. He talks about his work all the time with his wife and volunteers to install network servers at his daughter’s school on NetDay.
"Meanwhile, his administrative assistant, Sharon, complains that her work load is overwhelming, even to the point where she is expected to move furniture and take out trash. She is expected to learn new programs and upgrades on her own time. Both John and Sharon now take work and worry home. Sharon checks her E-mail and voicemail in the predawn hours before her children wake to prepare for any tasks that may need to be addressed immediately. She carries a pager and a cell phone so that she can stay in contact with her teenaged children after they come home from school."
The modern work grind is no news to most people but that doesn't make the challenge of balancing work and family life any less real or important. I haven't read Po Bronson's new book, Why Do I Love These People, but I'm always interested in the drama of families: what brings them together and what pulls them apart. When it comes to family life, is balance even possible?
I don't know the answer to that question, and I'm not sure I ever will. I can say that Sweden seems like a more promising venue to create a more balanced family life. Which does not mean the three members of my family hew to a party line on, well, anything. The snow has returned. My kid, ever gracious, muttered "I hate snow" and rolled back into the bedcovers when I delivered the news this morning. But I was happy then and I'm happy now. The grim winter lanscape has become a paradise of white and black line art punctuated by occasional flashes of color.
There may be something more beautiful than tree branches laced with fresh snow but, offhand, I can't think of what it might be.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 06:00 PM | Comments (0)
November 24, 2005
Give Thanks If No Bone-Eating Snot-Flower Worms Are In View
Thanksgiving greetings. Both my husband and my daughter came into my life in mysterious, unexpected ways that prove I'm one lucky gal. I have a long list of things I am grateful for today: family, friends, health--you know the drill. And I'm also--net addict that I am--way thankful for the Internet and all the people responsible for many wonders that developed as a result, including Tim Berners-Lee, Vincent Cerf, Robert E. Kahn and Ray Tomlinson.
I remember editing Steven Levy's 1994 column on the World Wide Web for Macworld, which described an addictive online experience using Mosaic. Today I'm still excited by the Internet and happy to have my own small home in cyberspace thanks to Dave Winer (who graciously hosted my first blog and held my hand as I got started) and Doc Searls (who inspired my blogging and whose own writing inspires me still). I feel incredibly lucky to live in a time when I can connect with people I know and people I hope to know even though they are thousands of miles beyond Stockholm. Not that it's a habit to express my thanks. As Garrison Keillor explains in Salon, "Truly we should be thankful. And we do try to be. But the English language is so rich in terms of complaint and insult and groaning and rather sparse in the Exaltation Dept., so the Lord doesn't get praised as He should. Instead, we bellyache, we kvetch, we get our undies in a bunch. After all, we're descended from people who considered rejoicing to be bad luck: It tempts fate."
I won't be eating my turkey until Saturday. Between now and then I'll tempt fate by pondering a few of my many blessings, which include a complete absence of bombs and toxic chemicals. My family has also been spared the difficulties faced by many others, including a refugee from Sudan and a solider beaten and robbed on American soil.
So I'm part of a lucky bunch. I hope you are, too. And should our luck come to an abrupt end, at least we don't have to worry about bone-eating snot-flower worms inhabiting our bones. Some other worms may find a home there but not those. Happy holiday!
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 08:55 PM | Comments (0)
More Grillz
Call Ray D. for a custom grill. Check out his dazzling handiwork.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 12:31 AM | Comments (1)
Marketing: The Dental Connection
Sequestered in Sweden, I miss out on most developments in hip-hop. So the rage for dental jewelry is news to me. Don't miss the slideshow running with a great LA Times article by Chris Lee, who writes:
"Hip-hop has had a well-chronicled love affair with conspicuous consumption. Gold 'rope' necklaces and 'iced out' wristwatches covered in precious stones have become standard issue within the field. And over the years, rap paeans similar to Nelly's 'Grillz' have been devoted to sky pagers, Adidas sneakers, chrome hubcaps and the diamond affluence of 'bling-bling.'
"But according to Bun B, whose grill spells 'Trill,' the title of his recently released album, across six top teeth, dental jewelry is more than simply an assertion of rappers' purchasing power.
" 'Gold teeth have evolved from being just pieces of metal on your tooth,' said the hard-core rapper. 'For some people, it's an expression of who they are: their 'hood, what they represent.... It's marketing, a promotion.' "
An expression of the hood? Yeah, right. But promotion? Ubetcha. This trend didn't make any sense to me until I got to that line. The hip-hop artists profiled in the piece all got their grillz at a place owned by a fellow hip-hop star but you can get something similar from Mr. Bling. I'm rather taken with the $500 fang covers but there are plenty of choices.
I still don't get it. Gold choppers remind me of Jaws, the James Bond villain in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker. Of course there's no reason this particular trend would speak to me but clearly it has an audience or Mr. Bling would not be in business.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 12:12 AM | Comments (0)
November 22, 2005
Sony Wounded, Politicians Smell Blood
"Sony insists on its Web site that it has recalled all affected CDs. However, Attorney General’s investigators were able to purchase numerous titles at Austin retail stores as recently as Sunday evening," according to a press release issued by the office of Greg Abbott, Attorney General for the great state of Texas.
Texas is great--it actually has a law against Sony's behavior. Did I not (along with about a billion other people) say it should be illegal? And, as it turns out, it is in that chunk of the country.
"The Attorney General’s lawsuit alleges the New York-based company violated a new Texas law protecting consumers from the hidden spyware. ... 'Sony has engaged in a technological version of cloak and dagger deceit against consumers by hiding secret files on their computers. Consumers who purchased a Sony CD thought they were buying music. Instead, they received spyware that can damage a computer, subject it to viruses and expose the consumer to possible identity crime.' "
Abbott, who is darned photogenic in cyberspace, is probably doing a little happy dance right now. Attorneys eneral, who are politicians, after all, love to defend citizens, or at least appear to, especially when they can do it in highly visible, low-risk ways. (Bet other state officials will join him, if they can.)
My friend Pete commented a few days ago that we shouldn't really blame Sony executives for their behavior, the company has a responsibility to its shareholders to maximize value, etc. But Pete's all wet on this one. In practical terms, any attempt to maximize shareholder value by using spyware has been completely eroded by this costly PR disaster and resulting lawsuits. (Not that anybody at Sony was smart enough to foresee this and stop it before it happened.)
But that's not the main reason I disagree. The main reason I disagree is because even if no one had ever discovered the spyware, secretly placing it on customer computers was wrong. Adults are supposed to understand the difference between right and wrong. Every damn thing shouldn't have to be spelled out and legislated. When you were growing up, did your mom need to tell you not to put bugs in her dinner plate? Probably not, and you were just a kid. We're talking about grownups here.
I'm not claiming that the difference between right and wrong is always clear but in this case, it's no contest. If the profit motive is a valid excuse for Sony's bad behavior, then everyone has a valid excuse. Because there's always a need to protect an industry from pirating or to win more air time for acts or to protect market share or to keep a company afloat or to donate to good causes or to prop up a stock price.
Pete suggests we need more legislation in self-defense. He's clearly right but it irks me. It irks me that individuals inside some companies so willingly demonstrate how little respect and consideration they have for the people who keep them in business. A company that cared about its customers would not do what Sony did. Sony's contempt was visible. As a result, it's pissed away a fair share of customer good will.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 03:45 PM | Comments (1)
Stockholm: The Darkest Season
We had a lovely autumn but autumn is over. I took the photo above on November 7. On Saturday the first snow arrived, a glittery respite from the gray gray gray atmosphere created by the skeletal trees and the sun's stubborn refusal to rise at a decent hour and its unseemly haste to disappear entirely too early. Did I mention how gray it is? (And now the snow is melting. Yuck.)
The change in season means the national candle fetish is in full swing. This morning my kid and I munched our cereal by candlelight. I think it's the Swedish way of transforming an environment that could termed suicidally depressing into "cosy" and "warm." Swedes don't usually string up Christmas lights anywhere but on a tree. But I saw white Christmas lights everywhere during a February visit to Anchorage once and it was a swell idea. So this week I'll be stringing lights on just about anything not moving, so consider yourself warned.
With winter comes the need for winter boots, natch. The kid's boots are busted so we'll be buying new ones this afternoon. My old boots were fine--except for the zippers. The pull tabs were crap and disintegrated last season. (This despite the fact that in 1913 a Swede, Gideon Sundback, developed the modern zipper, the one with metal teeth. Where's the national pride in Sweden's rich zipper history?) Paper clips make lousy pull tabs, it turns out, and fall apart quickly but not before poking holes in your fingers when you pull up the zippers. Mr. Too Tall, my better half, suggested key rings. It will never work, I thought, but I tried it this morning and he was right.
There's an advantage to such wacky pull tabs. When you visit a friend and leave your boots in the hall (in the big pile of boots that are heaped in hallways in homes and schools all over Sweden this time of year), it's much easier to find them again on your way out. One time I had to find my boots in a collection of twelve or so pairs of black footware at a student performance and it was a bigger pain than you might imagine. Think black carry-on on an airport carosel of black carry-ons and you've got the idea. I'm ridiculously pleased that I won't have that problem now. Assuming the rest of the boots hold up!
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 11:36 AM | Comments (1)
November 19, 2005
The Internet Metaphor Battle: Place vs. Plumbing
As mentioned earlier, Bruce Schneier has reported on what he calls the real story behind Sony's rootkit misadventure: "the collusion between big media companies who try to control what we do on our computers and computer-security companies who are supposed to be protecting us." ZDNet's David Berlind agrees that's noteworthy but says the overall digital rights managment situation is the larger issue.
"Sony's rootkit, as bad as it was, isn't the real story. The way the entertainment cartel is applying DRM as a whole is the real story. They're applying DRM in a way that the Sony fiasco was inevitable. This wasn't the first time lack of DRM interoperability manifested itself in the end-user experience in an ugly way, and it won't be the last. ... Unbeknownst to most people, what started with music (let's just say audio) already applies to video and it's not going to stop there."
Where will it stop? With total corporate control if we're not careful, and we're not just talking audio, video and text. That's not how Berlind put it but it's a fair description of the bleak future painted by Doc Searls in the passionate plea for activism pointed to by Berlind. Doc is in rare form and no wonder: he's a modern Paul Revere trying to spur his beloved community to action before it's too late.
"Are you ready to see the Net privatized from the bottom to the top? Are you ready to see the Net's free and open marketplace sucked into a pit of pipes built and fitted by the phone and cable companies and run according to rules lobbied by the carrier and content industries?
"Do you believe a free and open market should be 'Your choice of walled garden' or 'Your choice of silo'? That's what the big carrier and content companies believe. That's why they're getting ready to fence off the frontiers.
"And we're not stopping it."
Doc's scary links document the threat to the Internet as we know it and explains why the words we use are so important.
"In this debate the radicals are the carriers. We need to fight them, just as Larry and crew need to fight the copyright extremists: by re-framing the subject. To start we acknowledge the necessity of the transport metaphor; but also its insufficiency. Of course, at its base level the Net is a system of pipes and packets. But it's not only packets, or 'content' or anything for that matter). Understanding the Net only in transport terms is like understanding civilization in terms of electrical service or human beings only in terms of atoms and molecules. We miss the larger context."
Read Doc's essay, then read his blog for responses and contributions from other folks. I'm no visionary but I worry that Doc is right. After all, corporations do whatever necessary to make a profit. If telcos and cable companies need to gate every little stretch of the Internet to thrive, they'll do it--if we let them. (For a historic perspective on how corporations exercise power, don't miss Ted Nace's book "Gangs of America" for educational and entertaining reading.)
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 04:43 PM | Comments (1)
November 18, 2005
Sony: Weirder and Weirder
Before the move to Sweden, I envisioned my kid embracing age-old Swedish traditions. I saw her in the woods, picking berries or mushrooms. In summer I imaged her splashing in the Baltic Sea while, in winter months, she'd skate across frozen lakes. Yeah, right.
The global sway of American pop culture had completely escaped my notice before the move. These days I get frequent reminders of it. The one this morning arrived in the form of earnest 11-year-olds swaying on stage while mumbling the lyrics to "Wake Me Up When September Ends" under the considerably more energetic direction of the spiky-haired music teacher at our elementary school. (You haven't lived until you've heard class 5A sing "twenty years has gone so fast.") I like Green Day too but jeez, whatever happened to "Du Gamla, Du Fria"?
Luckily Sweden isn't so Americanized yet that corporate execs here could secretly collect information from customer computers without expecting a jail sentence. Sony's probably big enough to survive this debacle (including lawsuits and more nasty PR) but what about First4Internet, the British company that provided both the flawed copy-protection software and the flawed uninstaller? To the glee of many, it appears that some of the free code used by First4Internet in the digital-rights management software it developed for Sony was used in a way that violated the terms of its copyright. As The Register put it, "The irony of a company using code from someone who circumvented DRM to develop an even nastier form of DRM - without even saying 'Thanks!' - will surely feature in geek trivia quizzes for years to come."
Confused yet? I have been so Andrew Kantor's column in USA Today is a gift of clarity about the degree of evil Sony has wrought. I understood that Sony's DRM format caused a security problem. But not the all-important fact that Sony's patch for "removing" the original software also created a security problem--among other failings. As Kantor explains:
"In order to get the patch, you have to provide your name, e-mail address, and other personal information to Sony. When you finally download the thing, it does the patch thing, and then it installs all sorts of new stuff that Sony doesn't tell you about. And it continues to send your listening habits to Sony and its partners, but now it has a bunch of your personal information too. But wait. Incredibly, there's more. The patch itself, it turns out, opens another big security hole."
Talk about criminal cluelessness. Sony first produced CDs that 1. secretly installed software on your computer, 2. secretly sent Sony information about the songs you listened to, 3. created a security hole in your PC and finally, 4. damaged the operating system if anyone tried to remove it. Sony's considered response to the outrage provoked by this news was first to deny there was a problem, then to demand lots of personal information before giving you a software fix that 1. secretly installed software on your computer that secretly sent Sony information about the songs you listened to and 2. created another, larger security hole in your PC.
No wonder I couldn't keep the story straight. It's pure Hollywood. And while it may be Sony's biggest screwup, it's not the company only screwup. "Sony's general incompetence when it comes to digital music boggles the mind," notes David Pogue. "First there was its 'iPod killer' music players, which were initially released without the ability to play a little file format called MP3. Then there was its disastrous Connect music store, whose design was so wasteful of screen space it was almost unuseable. And now the astonishing move to copy-protect all of its music CD's--ironically, in some cases, over the strident objections of the actual bands--with software that behaves like spyware."
As David points out, angry consumers aired their complaints in public forums like Amazon reviews, where they vowed not to buy affected CDs. Information Week went to town with this headline: Bloggers Break Sony. "There's a whole new set of rules that people have to live by," Factiva CMO Alan Scott told Information Week (Factiva just happens to make text-mining software to help execs track the gossip about their companies). "Whether it's blogs or user groups or NGOs, it's all about honesty and authenticity. This is just the latest painful example of a major company finding that the old tools and the old actions don't work."
Those old tools and old actions, also known as lies and lying, do work often enough. Just not this time. And as much as we'd all like to see these go away, I'm confident that in certain circles dissembling will always be in style. Even now I bet there's a bunch of executives nationwide using Sony's situation as a case study in crisis PR when it should be a case study in ethics. Sony's actions were wrong before they became public knowledge and they're wrong now. Too bad the company hasn't figured that out.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 12:44 PM | Comments (2)
November 17, 2005
The Real Story Behind Sony's Rogue Rootkit
Bruce Schneier delivers the goods in a terrific Wired News article that ticks through several entertaining aspects of Sony's use of a secret software tool, a rootkit, to protect its CDs and its bungled attempt to help people remove it. There are so many twists that it's hard to see the big picture. Sony's hubris, he notes, is plenty large.
"Sony BMG's president of global digital business demonstrated the company's disdain for its customers when he said, 'Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?' in an NPR interview."
That attitude, while breathtaking in its miscalculation, is not the real story, according to Schneier.
"The story to pay attention to here is the collusion between big media companies who try to control what we do on our computers and computer-security companies who are supposed to be protecting us," Schneier writes. "What do you think of your antivirus company, the one that didn't notice Sony's rootkit as it infected half a million computers? ... This is exactly the kind of thing we're paying those companies to detect -- especially because the rootkit was phoning home.
"But much worse than not detecting it before Russinovich's discovery was the deafening silence that followed. When a new piece of malware is found, security companies fall over themselves to clean our computers and inoculate our networks. Not in this case."
Read Schneier report's for names, dates and details. Schneier, a security wiz and cofounder of a corporate IT security firm, is asking questions that need to be answered. "What happens when the creators of malware collude with the very companies we hire to protect us from that malware? ... Who are the security companies really working for? What will they do the next time some multinational company decides that owning your computers is a good idea?"
My guess? Roll over and play dead for as long as they can. Just as many of them did this time around.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 06:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Gay Scat, Nylons & Sony: The Evil of Stealth Software
As you probably know, Sony is busy backpeddling from a boneheaded decision to use a secret form of digital rights management software on its CDs. As the London Free Press explains, "This anti-copying software would automatically install on a user's computer when the music CD was inserted in a computer disk drive. ...The application was designed to install at a 'root' or system level and be disguised so it could not be found by normal means. Also, the computer user would need to read the entire user agreement and understand the wording in order to have any awareness of the application and how it would operate.
"Second, the media player Sony used with the CDs would send the Internet protocol address of the user's computer and their listening habits back to Sony -- without notice to the user. As if that wasn't enough to create a public relations problem, the application could be co-opted by a hacker. Designed to hide a legitimate objective (preventing unauthorized copying) it could also be used to hide other objects, including malicious code taking advantage of the Sony technology. It did not take long for an exploit to appear."
Insert Scream-like expressions of horrified PR execs here.
What's interesting about Sony's stupid move (aside from reminding us of the age-old truism that companies are perfectly happy to mislead their customers when it suits them) is how much it mirrors the common, sleazy tactics of so many Internet bottom feeders. My PC was hijacked recently thanks to an unknown person in Odessa and Integrated Search Technologies, which appears to specialize in software that both forces itself upon consumers and downloads third-party software PC users haven't requested.
The hijack happened because I wondered why this blog (and others) got a slew of trackback spam that promoted mainstream branded products (including autos from Ford and Toyota and phones made by Nokia) along with the usual collection of links to gay scat (who knows?), casino and big boob sites. So I followed a trackback link to a faux Nokia 7280 review at mobile-nokia.info/ nokia-7280-high-fashion-lipstick-phone while recklessly using IE (Foxfire is my usual choice).
Quicker than you can say foolhardy, a security warning appearing on my screen and asked if I wanted to install and run something from Integrated Search Technologies (IST). The answer was no no, a thousand times no but the evil scum who engineered this particular piece of marketing madness didn't care what I wanted. The first gray box was replaced with another: "Click YES to have access now."
The bottom of the IE window said it was “installing components…ysb_regular.cab” so I shut down the PC. When I restarted, a file called download.xxx was sitting on the desktop. After I deleted the program, I used Firefox (under my settings, it should *not* allow a web site to download or install software without my permission, although I did allow Javascript, to go back to the site and saw this:“Applet Installer Applet started." In a panic, I unplugged the PC. Later I turned off Javascript in Firefox and went back to the site. No problemo.
The WHOIS registry lists an Odessa address as the registrant behind the faux Nokia wonderland that hijacked my PC but he or she is not the power behind the sneaky software. According to DOXdesk, that dubious honor belongs to IST, which provides ysb_regular.cab or the ISTbar, “an IE toolbar, homepage- and search-hijacker."
DOXdesk is wildly helpful in explaining how it works: “Installed by ActiveX drive-by download on affiliate sites; typically porn in the case of XXXToolbar, from April 2003. An ‘aggressive’ downloader is usually used: if you refuse the download, a JavaScript alert complains that it won’t take no for an answer and opens the download window again.” In my case it didn't open the download window again, it simply downloaded the program despite my frantic attempts to stop it.
According to DOXdesk, all versions of this corrupt bit of coding "also install other third-party software which includes advertising." This is not the worst part, though. The worst part is this: the software “can download and execute arbitrary unsigned code from its controlling server. This is used both to update the software and to install third-party software.”
IST describes itself as "a leading Internet marketing solutions provider, specializing in effectively targeting valuable customers at the moment they are most interested in a particular product or service. IST targets the customers through several different delivery methods such as highly effective toolbars and plugins available for Internet Explorer." Plenty of folks would disagree with that description, including those who've filed a complaint with the FTC against the company.
Until recently, I would never have compared companies like IST and Sony but now I do. Smooth move, Sony. You gotta wonder why this behavior is legal for Sony, for Integrated Search Technologies or for any other company or individual. Regulators, are you listening?
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 02:42 PM | Comments (0)