Ants eat eyeball; Jon Lyons still the Pimp of Anime; Sony Rootkits mess up thousands of PCs

One hundred greatest internet moments, including Pokey the Penguin, James Guckert, the Bert-Osama photo, Hamster Dance, DeCSS.... the hits go on. (and how better to start than an illegal link to DeCSS?)

Ant eats away woman's eye in hospital:

KOLKATA, India (Reuters) - A woman receiving treatment for diabetes at a state-run hospital in eastern India lost one of her eyes after ants nibbled away at it, officials said on Tuesday.

The patient recovering from a post-surgery infection shrieked for help as the ants attacked her on Sunday night, but nurses told her it was normal to feel pain from the infection.

On Monday, the patient's family saw a gaping hole with swarming ants in it when they lifted the bandage on her left eye.

Authorities of the Sambhunath Hospital in Kolkata said they were probing the incident.

"It's not uncommon for ants to attack diabetic patients. We have set up a committee to investigate the unfortunate incident," hospital superintendent A. Adhikary said.

Scampering rats and stray cats and dogs sharing bed space with patients are not uncommon sights at India's overcrowded state-run hospitals that are used by millions of poor and middle-class people.

Jon Lyons with a certain camp Anime style: Jon is still chugging away at the whole "amazingly proficient practitioner of the Japanese cartoon style the kids call anime" thing. He entered a comic in a Japanese contest, and thoughtfully put an English version on the Internet for us (open the links in a separate window). Sort of an afternoon daydreaming imagination, Calvin & Hobbes meets Voltron Retro style sort of thing.

He's been refining it, since well, pretty much any of us knew him. So it's really good now. Good luck, Jon, and you've got a good shot at winning yet another contest. Nice. He is wrapping up a final leg at U-W Madison in the Art and Japanese programs. (duhhhh!)

Post college: Points in Case has some entertaining stuff. The Cost of Living in Athens, Georgia, inside the minds of college guys and girls. Well it's over for me, what a bummer...

Sony CD Root Kit causes 500,000 infected computer networks: BoingBoing tells us that vast numbers of computers have been infested with the rootkit program that automatically installs from audio CDs on PCs, which creates lots of dangerous security vulnerabilities. First the details (via earlier post):

The consequences of the flaw are severe. It allows any web page you visit to download, install, and run any code it likes on your computer. Any web page can seize control of your computer; then it can do anything it likes. That's about as serious as a security flaw can get.

The root of the problem is a serious design flaw in Sony's web-based uninstaller. When you first fill out Sony's form to request a copy of the uninstaller, the request form downloads and installs a program - an ActiveX control created by the DRM vendor, First4Internet - called CodeSupport. CodeSupport remains on your system after you leave Sony's site, and it is marked as safe for scripting, so any web page can ask CodeSupport to do things. One thing CodeSupport can be told to do is download and install code from an Internet site. Unfortunately, CodeSupport doesn't verify that the downloaded code actually came from Sony or First4Internet. This means any web page can make CodeSupport download and install code from any URL without asking the user's permission.

And its effects:

More than half a million networks, including military and government sites, were likely infected by copy restriction software distributed by Sony on a handful of its CDs, according to a statistical analysis of domain servers conducted by a well-respected security researcher and confirmed by independent experts on Tuesday...

Kaminsky asked over 3 million DNS servers across the net whether or not they knew the addresses associated with the Sony rootkit -- connected.sonymusic.com, updates.xcp-aurora.com, and license.suncom2.com. He uses a "non-recursive DNS query" which allows him to just peek into the cache of that server, and find out if anyone else has asked that particular machine for those addresses recently.

If the DNS server said yes, it had a cached copy of the address, which means that at least one of its client computers had used it to look up Sony's DRM site. If the DNS server said no, then Kaminsky knew for sure that no Sony-compromised machines existed behind it.

The results have surprised Kaminsky himself: 568,200 DNS servers knew about the Sony addresses. With no other reason for people to visit them, that points to one or more computers behind those DNS servers that are Sony-compromised. That's one in six DNS servers, across a statistical sampling of one third of the 9 million DNS servers Kaminsky estimates are on the net.

More details here. COPY PROTECTION CAUSES VIRUSES. Fucking A.

Further Geek News: The story of a rebellion in the Linux community and Linus Torvalds demonstrating he is still King of the Geeks (via digg).

China: All this stuff about China, well I ran into an interesting history of Tiananmen Square. Not that interesting. But Chinese history has that sense of theater... The declassified history of Tiananmen Square. Thanks, National Security Archives

Apparently a Chinese scheme to sell tracts of land on the moon was shut down by those heartless anti-Capitalists, who pulled their license on grounds of "profiteering and lunacy."

There is this book (and a forthcoming video game) about nonviolent conflict called "A force more powerful." One part is about how many protests have happened at Tiananmen over many years. Interesting argument about what the student protesters failed to accomplish. However it also has a somewhat patronizing tone ("we are privileged to decide how these things ought to go, why did you kids put up the Goddess statue?"):

But the defeat of the student movement cannot fully be explained by the violence used to send it underground or into exile, for many other nonviolent movements in the twentieth century deflected repression and endured to fight another day. Erratic and divided leadership, that believed more in the power of the moment than seeing the right moment to apply power, was at least as great a problem. This overconfidence diverted student leaders from the necessary work of organization and strategy. Had they seen the value of recruiting support from other parts of society - workers in transport and communication, civil servants, and, most important, the police and the military - they might have consolidated their gains and opted to develop a broader challenge not confined to Tiananmen, a convenient venue for repression.

Failing to appreciate or plan for the possibility of repression was an error in itself, but it also freed the students to indulge in whatever provocative action seemed enticing. Inflammatory gestures such as erecting, opposite Mao's Mausoleum, a "Goddess of Democracy," a replica of America's Statue of Liberty, doubtless antagonized the regime while not changing any facts on the ground. In short, while the students were familiar with the most obvious forms of nonviolent action - occupying public spaces, hunger strikes and playing to the international media - their decisions in using these sanctions did not reflect "any significant degree of strategic thinking..."10

The failure of strategy at the moment of crisis kept echoing throughout its aftermath. The government's use of repression taught the wrong lesson to many about how rights and democracy should be pursued. In 1999 one former protestor called himself "a victim of June 4," since he was fired and prevented from getting another job; he had decided that "the only path for China was. . .cautious, progressive liberalization." Even the flammable Wu'er Kaixi, who fled China and later had to pump gas and wait on tables in California, succumbed to lower expectations. Explaining why he hoped that Beijing would not be forced to acknowledge its Tiananmen savagery, he said that doing so might only set back gradual reforms. And he wanted to return home. "I think if everything goes okay, I'll be able to go home in five years. If something happens, if there are demonstrations and another crackdown, it will take longer."11