Sony DRM nightmare
Dave Tahija
location: Butte, Montana, en route from San Francisco to Juneau
listening to: Train - Save me, San Francisco
registered: 1999.12.27
posts: 261
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Sony, in its infinite corporate wisdom, now includes a 'rootkit' on its music CDs that installs itself invisbly in any Windows computer that plays the CD. The details are a bit murky to me at least but the thing forces users to use the Sony-approved player and apparantly tries to contact Sony via the internet. Here's one of the better articles on this:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4406178.stmThis rootkit is, for all intents and purposes a corporate computer virus so it's not surprising that some hackers are finding uses for it. The first public hacker use is to defeat some ant-cheat features of a game, as detailed here:http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=FL4HR3QVYFLX4QSNDBCCKHSCJUMEKJVN?articleID=173402819&pgno=2There are hints that less benign hackers might find other uses for the thing. Sony has come out with a patch that at least makes the thing visible but does not completely remove it from the system.Macs and Linux machines are immune to the Sony rootkit, thank goodness.I bought two CDs yesterday; neither was from Sony. For now and maybe forever, I will not be buying any music from Sony artists.
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Dave Tahija
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Sony, in its infinite corporate wisdom, now includes a 'rootkit' on its music CDs that installs itself invisbly in any Windows computer that plays the CD. The details are a bit murky to me at least but the thing forces users to use the Sony-approved player and apparantly tries to contact Sony via the internet. Here's one of the better articles on this:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4406178.stmThis rootkit is, for all intents and purposes a corporate computer virus so it's not surprising that some hackers are finding uses for it. The first public hacker use is to defeat some ant-cheat features of a game, as detailed here:http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=FL4HR3QVYFLX4QSNDBCCKHSCJUMEKJVN?articleID=173402819&pgno=2There are hints that less benign hackers might find other uses for the thing. Sony has come out with a patch that at least makes the thing visible but does not completely remove it from the system.Macs and Linux machines are immune to the Sony rootkit, thank goodness.I bought two CDs yesterday; neither was from Sony. For now and maybe forever, I will not be buying any music from Sony artists.
