The place João Bordalo calls home: Tag sony

The new Sony Rolly

bordalix — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 11:43:00 -0400

The new Sony Rolly SEB-10BT is a funny little thing: it has 2 small 1.2W speakers, and it moves with the music rhythm. Just take a peek at the following video and see it for yourself:

It's not really a personal mp3 player due to is size, but is definitely a breeze of fresh air in the market.

No support for the new Sony AVCHD

bordalix — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 11:42:00 -0500

Warning! If you intend to buy a new Sony camcorder, with AVCHD capabilities, think twice: there is no support for this codec, neither in Windows or Mac.

My girlfriend's father bought the new Sony HDR-SR1 (with 30GB harddisk) for a journey, recorded more than 300 clips, and now he can't do anything with it! Windows or Mac are not able to play (or edit) any of those clips, due to the lack of the proper codec.

He requested my help, so I searched for the codec in the web, just to find out that there are a lot of people complaining about the same issue. I drop the search when I found out that Sony itself does not support it in is own software. The solution? My girlfriend's father will have to wait for the spring. Now, imagine his face when I told him that.

In fact, this should be one of the worst years in Sony's life: look at the evidences. The Sony camcorders with AVCHD support are the new HDR-UX1 and the HDR-SR1. Beware.

Sony DRM breaks copyright?

bordalix — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 09:52:00 -0500

This can be Sony's worst nightmare: first, Sony decided to distribute a rootkit in there music CDs, to be installed in your PC (without your knowledge), in order to hide is DRM software; second, Mark Russinovich discovered the existence of this rootkit, and make it public, which make people start to scream at Sony; third, someone took advantage of the rootkit and wrote a trojan codenamed Stinx-E, able to hide from Windows, so impossible to be detected and cleaned; fourth, Sony decided to provide an uninstaller to allow people to erase the rootkit, but this uninstaller raised new security holes; and finally, it seems Sony used some LGPL code, without delivering the source, so breaking copyright:

It turns out that the rootkit contains pieces of code that are identical to LAME, an open source mp3-encoder, and thereby breach the license.

This software is licensed under the so called Lesser Gnu Public License (LGPL). According to this license Sony must comply with a couple of demands. Amongst others, they have to indicate in a copyright notice that they make use of the software. The company must also deliver the source code to the open-source libraries or otherwise make these available. And finally, they must deliver or otherwise make available the in between form between source code and executable code, the so called object files, with which others can make comparable software.

Sony complied with non of these demands, but delivered just an executable program. A computer expert, whose name is known by the redaction, discovered that the CD "Get Right With The Man" by "Van Zant" contains strings from the library version.c of Lame. This can be concluded from the string: "http://www.mp3dev.org/", "0.90", "LAME3.95", "3.95", "3.95 ".

Ridiculous

bordalix — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 09:51:00 -0500

So, after all the fuss around this issue, Sony decided to allow people to download an uninstaler for is DRM software. All you have to do is fill a form, download the software and run it. Know that you know that, don't do it. People from Freedom to Tinker found out that if you install Sony uninstaller in your PC, you are opening a huge security hole. Malicious users can execute code in your PC, all you have to do is visit one of there websites. Where (and when) is this going to end?

Anti-Sony manifesto

bordalix — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 09:48:00 -0500

So, Sony installs a rootkit in your PC when you buy a CD from them, in order to implement his DRM. This was discovered by Mark Russinovich in October (highly technical post). In my personal opinion, this an unacceptable behavior, and I'm not alone: Frederico Oliveira wrote what I consider to be the first anti-Sony manifesto, which I totally subscribe.