LangaList, November 7, 2005

Sony's Baloney

Hi Fred, Are you aware of this. Sounds liked a good idea gone really bad. Thanks,
Wayne
FYI, the newest Sony "Digital Rights Management" system on audio CDs apparently installs a "rootkit" that attempts to hide itself from detection and intercepts all calls to the cd drive of your PC. The rootkit appears to have several vulnerabilities in and of itself and these are introduced even on a fully patched and secured windows system.
As reported by The Register:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/01/sony_rootkit_drm/

Hi, Fred ---- I'll be eagerly awaiting your comments in the LangaList on this Sony
rootkitting exploit:
Sony Attacks PC's Worldwide With DRM Rootkit
http://wizbangblog.com/archives/007480.php
Mark's Sysinternals Blog: Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html
--=Regards, Morton A. Goldberg

Many others wrote in, as well. (Thanks to all!) Lots more:
http://www.google.com/search?q=sony+drm+rootkit

Yes, it's a terrible idea; using a Rootkit ( http://www.google.com/search?q=rootkit ) for digital rights management is overkill, if ever there was such.

Hostile and aggressive copy protection has always, always, always backfired on the vendors using it. Example: Lotus1-2-3 was once one of the most widely used pieces of software in the world. Then they instituted a ridiculous "three installs and you're out" copy protection program where you'd be locked out on the fourth install, even if the reinstalls were totally valid ones by the original purchaser on his own machine, using the original disks. And this was back in the early days of PCs when it wasn't uncommon to have to reformat a system every 3-6 months. Didn't matter to Lotus: There was no appeal, no legal workaround, no option: If your drive crashed, or you bought a new PC, or whatnot, you got three installs, period, and then had to buy a new copy of the very expensive software.

Guess what happened? Users either felt justified in using copy-protection cracking tools so they could access the software they'd paid for; and/or flocked to Microsoft's Excel, which wasn't as good (the macro language wasn't as well-developed then, for instance) but which avoided the hassles of Lotus' draconian copy-protection scheme. Lotus' fortunes changed soon thereafter, and it withered to a fraction of its former size and clout.

Note to Sony: Those who do not study history....