latimes (dot) com
November 8, 2005
By Robert Salladay, Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-110805arnold_lat%2C0%2C7268769.story?coll=la-home-headlines

SACRAMENTO -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger showed up to his Brentwood neighborhood polling station today to cast his ballot in the special election -- and was told he had already voted.

arstechnica (dot) com
11/1/2005
by Eric Bangeman
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051101-5514.html

....Some newer CDs from Sony BMG contain an antipiracy application that must be installed in order to play the CD on your Windows PC. Should the unwary consumer say "yes" to the license agreement, the application implants hooks into the Windows kernel to make sure you don't use the CD in a manner Sony doesn't approve of. Those hooks are undetectable unless you know exactly what you're looking for, and are all but impossible to uninstall apart from contacting Sony and requesting removal. Attempting to remove the software yourself will leave you with a nonfunctional CD-ROM drive. Heaven help you if you're running a beta of Vista. Sony's application will utterly hose your Vista install.

The Enquirer
(News, Reviews, Facts, and Friction)
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27426

....If you try to remove it yourself, you risk breaking your optical discs, or it kills them for you. Mark from Sysinternals is more than smart enough to figure out how to fix this, but are you? Off the top of your head, how do you do that again, no looking it up? To make matters worse, it installs itself so it runs in safe mode, and if it conflicts with something, you are really hosed. Sony's response? "This component is not malicious and does not compromise security.". There are already exploits out there that take advantage of this.

So where is all this going? Let me put it to you this way: The war inside that box that came with your keypad and display could probably be described as being less successful than the Iraq occupation. We may well be on the verge of a "catastrophic" Internet meltdown. Read the LA Times article at the link posted above. Arnold Schwarzenegger's attempt to vote has already been compromised. What will happen to democracy when the Internet totally melts down? Read the other articles about rootkits.

Of course there are many things you can do to protect yourself (somewhat). Of course you must have an antivirus program. Of course you must have a firewall. (I also have Spyware Guard, Spybot Teatimer, Spyware Blaster, MSU-Blaster, a-squared anti-trojan, and WinSonar. And also I have this very strange little anti-malwear proggie from Bit Defender, which dives deep into the system, leaving only a tiny little uninstall icon in an obscure corner of the start menu.)

Be aware of what is going on in the computer world around you. Check-in at arstechnica (dot) com, schneier (dot) com (I use Bruce Schneier's Password Safe proggie), insecure (dot) org (providers of Nmap -- don't ask), etc.

I plan to move to Ubuntu Linux just as soon as possible. In preparation for that, I avoid programs that require the Microsoft ".NET" framework, preferring software that runs on Sun's Java Runtime Environment, such as the jpodder (a podcast reception program).

As many of you know, I am deeply troubled by computer voting. It would be literally hundreds of times less expensive, and thousands of times safer to just use hand-marked, eye-counted ballots.