BEWARE of Sony

[evildr]

If you haven't heard yet Sony has taken their invasion of consumer rights and privacy to a whole new degree. Previously they had employed a copy protection method that was so strict you often had to find ways to bypass it(like holding down shift ^^) in order to even be able to listen to your CD's on your computer. Recently a computer engineer working on his home computer on which he had listened to CD's released by Sony when he discovered a discrepency onhis machine.

What he discovered is that Sony has been including special software( a root kit) on all their CD's as part of their "Copyright Protection". This rootkit among other things monitors your computers activity. I do not have the complete break down of all the damage it does but I'm sure it monitors file download/sharing, installations, and personal inormation for marketing. Given that they have no garuntee you'll visit their site for them to query the information it is also pretty sure that your computer broadcasts the info if not actually opening a backdoor.

The further risk with this is that especialy now that it is public knowledge the malware/rootkit makers will use Sony's prefix to access the installed rootkit and hijack it's functionality. I'm currently looking for a removal kit from someone other then Sony. Sony offers one but it requires you to provide a shitload of personal information including IP address among other things.

So as I said, Beware of Sony atm

[Gyruss]

What's so tarded about this "DRM" is that it makes files and processes that begin with a string of umm... I think it was "$sys$" invisible from the system, filesystem, etc etc

So if someone used a Sony CD in their system, and had this massive exploit installed on it, then Adware, spyware, viruses, etc other crap can come along and use it to hide on your machine where scanners, file searches, manual checks could never find it. etc

Re-tard-ed.

There's been a lot of debate about whether virus scanners etc will be coded to remove this or not.

[evildr]

From what I was ready it is not that the DRM allows other strings to hide in it but that the software actually installed it's own rootkit on the machine. Other rootkits can prefix their strings with the same prefix sony uses for the rootkit to recognize it's own material. As a result anyone can write a string that Sony's kit will instantly incorporate into itself and essentially give the strings author access/control of it's functionality. I haven't checked all the details yet though so I can't swear on it.