With some of their CDs, Sony ship a rootkit — that’s right, one of those things that virus writers use to hide their wrong doings. What’s more, they ship a shoddily written rootkit made by some people called First 4 Internet, whoever they may be.

The kit is intended to protect music on the CD it is supplied with. You can’t play the CD in a Windows PC (Mac and Linux being unaffected, thankfully) without installing a rootkit on your computer.

I’ve installed a few wireless network cards recently, and have one major recommendation for anyone else about to do the same thing: Never use the manufacturer’s software to manage the network connection.

Each card I’ve installed has a big sticker on the plastic bag containing the card saying “First install software from CD before inserting the card” in big, scary letters. Don’t give in! Be brave and rip open the bag, casting caution to the wind. Keep that CD away from the computer! You’ll benefit in the end.

One of my friends, a Mr John Wood, has been working for the past year on a piece of software that allows you to automatically backup your data to a small peer-to-peer based network of your trusted friends, or buddies. It’s called BuddyBackup.

BuddyBackup monitors the folders you ask it to and makes sure that your files are backed up (encrypted, of course) to the people you nominate. In return, their files are backed up to your PC. Once you’ve chosen the folders, the software can be left to run in the background and it will make sure any changes to the monitored folders are distributed to your buddies, safe and sound. The changes are sent compressed and only a diff is sent to each buddy, so it doesn’t swallow all your bandwidth.

The other day on an open-source mailing list I subscribe to, someone was asking whether people thought that an idea for a feature they had was a good one. The way it was written was nice enough, but the final paragraph contained this:

If I could write a line of code, I’d write this myself. Unfortunately, I can’t, so someone else will have to do it :). It shouldn’t be very complicated, though.

I’ve changed the way sources are displayed in Bluefunk. I’ve moved them to a separate side-pane that can be shown or hidden. I changed this because I felt it was confusing to have the playlist and sources contained within the same container widget. This was both from a user point of view and a coding point of view as it added quite a few conditional checks to the code. I think this probably acts like in the new Totem, but I have only seen one screenshot so I cannot say for sure. It’s slightly annoying because I’ve been planning this change for at least a couple of months — I haven’t just copied Totem!