Magic Statistics

French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said Thursday that the riots in several Paris suburbs over the previous night were "not spontaneous" but rather "well organized".

"What we saw in the department of Seine-Saint-Denis overnight was not spontaneous, it was perfectly organized. We are looking into by whom and how," Sarkozy told French news channel i-tele.

The interior minister also said the government would not allow "troublemakers, a bunch of hoodlums, think they can do whatever they want" in the country.

A force of 1,000 police were assigned late Thursday to Seine-Saint-Denis, following the previous night of violence which affected about half of the 40 towns in the department, mostly communities of immigrants from Africa, officials said.

Mr Sarkozy may have to go abroad to find out "by whom" and "how".

via Drudge.

The French press has begun to attack Mr Sarkozy, suggesting that his tough talk only exacerbates tensions and enrages the rioters. Thus, U*2 over at ¡No Pasarán! says,

The French preSS has come down squarely on the side of the rioters. One can only guess that the reason for such an early surrender is that they are afraid that the next step will be bomb belts and suicide attacks.

France is getting to be as bad as Britain, says Theodore Dalrymple. The recent (and, as we speak, ongoing) riots are a case in point. From Dalrymple's terse and caustic comment:

The cause of the riot, apart from the relatively clement weather for the time of year that is a necessary but not sufficient cause of such rioting, was the death of two youths and the severe burns of another. They apparently formed members of a group of 15 who were peacefully breaking into a workshop when the police arrived and arrested six of them.
. . .
They fled and took refuge in an electricity transformer by climbing over two walls complete with eloquent notices that millions of volts were bad for you, where two of them were electrocuted to death and one suffered severe burns. The two dead were of Turkish and Malian extraction; perhaps the new methods of teaching had left them unable to read, at least at speed.
. . .
Rioting at the terrible injustice done to the three youths ensued, kindergartens and schools were stoned in natural consequence of their martyrdom, and 28 cars were burnt. The fact that the cars probably belonged to poor inhabitants of the quartier did not inhibit the rioters, or even give them pause; in such a situation it is self-expression that counts. A shot was fired at one of the armoured vehicles carrying the forces of law if not of order, and pierced its armour: a testimony to the increasing fire-power of the slums.

Read the whole thing.

Several of Sony Music's latest CDs have been programmed to load stealth software onto your computer's drive. This software was designed to prevent illegal copying of your CD. Now that they've been caught, Sony is distributing a software patch that will reveal the location of the stealth files.

The controversy started Monday after Windows expert Mark Russinovich posted a Web log report on how he found hidden files on his PC after playing a Van Zant CD. He also said it disabled his CD drive after he tried to manually remove it.

Russinovich made the discovery while running a program he had written for uncovering file-cloaking RootKits. In this case, the Sony program hid the antipiracy software from view. Similar technology also has been used by virus and worm writers to conceal their code.

A firestorm quickly erupted over what appeared to be an attempt by the music company to retain control over its intellectual property by secretly installing hidden software on the PCs of unsuspecting customers.

Making matters worse, Sony did not disclose exactly what it was doing in its license agreement, Russinovich said. It only mentions that proprietary software to enable copy protection would be installed. The software affects only PCs running the Windows operating system.

This is so stupid for so many reasons. Did Sony really think that no one would discover what they had done? Did they really have no cognizance of the bad PR this would generate? They simply assumed that all of their own customers are potential thieves. Not exactly a corporate strategy designed to endear your company's products to consumers.

Of course, the stealth software affects only those who actually purchased a Sony CD and does not impinge on P2P music file-sharing in the least. Still, Sony says that it plans to add the software to future CD releases. Sony apparently thinks it owns its customers' PCs.

Sony is also implicating itself in potentially humungous legal liability if any virus-writers exploit the hidden files to attack PCs previously invaded by Sony's stealth software. Another source of legal liability is that a non-expert computer user who attempts to remove the software can cripple his own computer. The geniuses at Sony who thought up this childish scheme should be fired.

I doubt that Sony's attempt to install hidden software will be the last. Other corporations will try this again with more sophisticated stealth software. If you want to protect the personal information stored on your computer, this would be a good time to buy a Mac.

Michael Geist of the University of Ottawa suggests that current Canadian privacy laws may be inadequate to prevent this sort of corporate spying and that relevant laws should therefore be reformed.

See also this and this.

The ground-breaking ceremony for The Next Chapter at my alma mater Regent College took place on Tuesday morning. The project calls for a new library, more classrooms, expanded student services area and updated information technology. Almost $12 million of the $14.5 million goal has already been raised. This page is the first of several pages providing an overview of the project, and this page has plans and images of the new facilities. There's even a webcam so you can see what's going on at the library construction site right now.

That lucky guy Matt Jones was at the ground-breaking and posted two photos.