Dungeon Master Forum

Most geeks amongst you will already know about this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4406178.stm
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27349
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27508

I wholeheartedly disagree with what Sony have done and urge anyone who agrees with me to boycott Sony CDs and other products.

I disagree too. Luckily I do not play CDs through my computer hence should not have this 'malware'. Sony should immediately try to rectify the situation at all costs. As for a boycott, well, maybe computer products. Some well and not so well known artists are on the Sony label, it seems a bit unfair to them.

Dear me, Sony in trouble again?

Being at Uni, it's quite inconvenient lugging a lot of CDs around, even in a wallet they're quite heavy and take up a lot of space, so I've opted to rip most of my music to my HD. I've not encountered any CDs of mine that won't rip because of copy protection, even the ones that state they have protection. Now this piece of work is just down right nasty, even for Sony. Why should I not be able to rip my music - I've paid for it and I'm not giving it to anyone else. And even if ripping / copying was the reason they did it, blatant sabotage of someone's computer is bang out of order

I recently read somewhere that Sony's DRM thing has been in allsorts of trouble too - a bit of reverse engineering allowed World Of Warcraft hackers to hide their hacking programs, with WOW actually having spyware in itself too! The quote from the site was something like 'industry spyware fighting industry spyware'. Big Brother is indeed keeping a closer eye on us all the time...

It has nothing to do with Big Brother. It's to do with greedy corporations. While I admire Blizzard's desire to prevent cheating through the use of its integrated spyware, I disagree with the means. Two wrongs don't make a right, and all that. There are less subversive means to circumvent illegal/amoral behavior.

This truly is evil. I vividly remember Sony stopping imports of video games from the USA and Japan to Europe, and ever since that I am not very fond of their politics. But that is nothing compared to this one. I wonder what consequences they will face.

Technical information for those who want it :
Here's the article which started it all :

http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/1 ... ights.html

( BTW, Security expert Mark Russinovich's site : www.sysinternals.com has some very valuable system tools for those want to want to know/understand what's going on on their Windows machines. I use regularly Autoruns, Filemon, Regmon and Process Explorer )

The Sony rootkit issue has been heavily discussed on Slashdot, you may find some geek insight :

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/31/2016223
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/02/1421250

The least to say is that Sony has been caught red handed in a move both stupid and criminal.
Well, the result is that Sony is now in a PR nightmare, and propably will soon be in deep legal trouble.

For me Sony is a company which has been going down the drain for quite some time. Before this scandal it was already on my list of companies I do not want to touch with a ten foot pole. All of their products are now DRM protected to the point they are almost totally unusable. It's also all proprietary software, proprietary hardware, proprietary formats, proprietary interfaces, proprietary accessories, meaning that Sony's stuff works with nothing other than other (expensive) Sony stuff.

The fact that the WoW spyware and Sony's rootkit went on collision course is quite ironic

Taking the completely different view, I do not have any Sony products on my computer. I do not agree, as above, to their means. But I have LOTS of Sony products in hardware and software, mainly in my home entertainment system.

Personally, I'd take a different view again - this isn't anything to do with Big Brother tactics by Sony with malicious intent; purely management incompetence.

I very much doubt that Sony ever took a decision to rootkit computers. More likely they wanted to protect their music, issued a policy statement to that effect to a sub-manager who then interpreted it as being a bit of software that installs off a CD. That manager then tells their sub-manager to get some software that does this - that manager then tells their sub-managers to hire some "technical guy" to do it. They then find the first person with some free time (or more likely the lowest bidder from an outsourced company) who knocks something out which does the job and doesn't have the time to test it or fully think about the implications of un-installing etc.

Basically, the way these large corporations work, IMHO it's far more likely to be a badly organised, cheaply funded, poorly planned and not at all tested bit of work than anything approaching a conspiracy.

That's not to say that I don't disagree with the end result, but how they got to that point is important.

One of the blog comments on the sysinternals report pages is very interesting:

First4Internet, eh?... let's see... according to public records, they were incorporated 24/11/1999. In 2004 they had a turnover of £709,941 and operating expenses of £1,301,546 -- meaning an operating loss of £591,605. In the last five years they have, on average, lost £541,067 a year. For 2004, their credit rating is "HIGH RISK" (complete with capitalisation). Meanwhile, the four directors share annual renumeration of £224,413 between them (average £56,103 each).

One of the directors, Nicholas Bingham, (appointed in 2002) was director of "Sony pictures home entertainment Ltd." from 1989 to 1997, and director of "Sony pictures television production UK Ltd." from 1996 to 2000, and director of "Sony digital radio europe Ltd." from 1994 to 2000.

A cynic might say Sony selected this inept copy protection technology because it was supplied by one of thier cronies. The reason this is a bad business practice can be seen by the software's many failings.

George makes a valuable point. The highest arm in Sony probably never realized the ramifications of allowing the think-tank to run wild like that. Now they have to clean up the mess, and that in itself is rather sad. I'm sure they'll button down for the future. Blizzard . . . eh, not so sure about them. They make great games, and this is the first time I've ever had a low opinion of their company's practices. It's going to hurt them in the long run, that's for sure.

I, too, use a lot of Sony products, and it's unfortunate that all the Sony products I use today are licenses they bought from Sonic Foundry (SoundForge, Vegas, Acid Pro). Tainting good software with bad practices is probably the worst form of degeneration (see also: Microsoft and Virtual PC). Anyway, I use downloadable setup packages that don't require CD's and then register them electronically. This is pure coincidence; I didn't even know about the rootkit transgression at the time, so I consider myself very fortunate to have blindly circumvented it.

http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/comics/20051104.jpg

Must admit I havent been keeping up with it all, but I watch this web comic and I assume that this is relevant in part to what you are discussing.

Nothing to do with it at all - he was commenting on the fact the Playstation 3 won't have a unified account as XBox does, so each game will need different log ins, possibly subscriptions, etc, to play online.

But I think the whole 'we're Sony' thing applies here too. **** pants!

Oops, you know what they say about assumption....

but certainly is annother example of Sony's bad decisions. However, they mention Nintendo.. which has made some stupid moves itself already..

but this a whole other ball of wax... in annother thread we were all whining about the PSP... seems sony is just making people mad everywhere..

LMAO at that comic. It's ironic because that actually is Sony's policy. One of their execs is quoted as saying, "We don't create products for the market; we create a market for our products."

Various updates on this fiasco:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27670
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27649
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27662
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27641
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,14 ... _tophead_3

I tried to find a definitive list of all the XCP CDs that carry the rootkit. Apparently Sony refuse to issue one, and the best you can get is a partial list here http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004144.php

I've got quite a few copy protected CDs but as far as I know no rootkit afflicted ones. I can really understand people's anger in that many of us go to great lengths to keep our PCs safe with AV software, Spyware detectors etc., and only installing trusted software (like *ahem* CSBWin and RTC).

I really can't see the point of copy protection anyway as it doesn't work (maybe XCP does?) - I've not encountered a single CD that Exact Audio Copy won't rip. Am I a pirate? Not really. I just want to put the music I legally bought on my MP3 player and burn some CD-Rs for the car. Whilst this is not strictly legal in the UK, no-one has ever been prosecuted for ripping their own albums.

My goodness, Sony really have been bloody stupid. They even included open-source code in their player and didn't credit it as such:

Article

i really hope that will break their neck. not only because of sony, but also as a sign. very funny