| Friday, November 18, 2005 |
 | Too, too perfect. Sony start by putting on their CDs a piece of rights management software that installs itself on a PC without telling the user, is invisible to the casual viewer and, when removed, might destroy one's ability to use your PC CD drive. This is pretty shoddy in itself, but then hackers start to see the opportunities inherent in having a hidden repository for programs installed on PCs. Growing furore about the covert installation of what is in effect an invisible vuln leads, among other things, to Microsoft identifying Sony's little helper as spyware.
Eventually, Sony relents and releases a tool to uninstall the rootkit, despite refusing to admit that it had done anything wrong (personally, I suspect that "kills CD drives" is not in the Red Book, and as such it might be possible to say that they were fraudulently misrepresenting their product as CDs, but never mind). Shortly thereafter, this tool is identified as a greater threat to security than the rootkit itself. Wunderbar. And now it seems that the company which produced the XCP copyright protection software may have infringed not only somebody else's copyright but the copyright of one of the greatest opponents of DRM, Jon Johansen. Sometimes a story just writes itself.
More information on identifying CDs which have the potential to break your PC can be found here.
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