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Hackers really have had their way with Sony over the past year, taking down its Playstation Network last Christmas Day and creating an international incident by exposing confidential data from Sony Pictures Entertainment in response to The Interview comedy about a planned assassination on North Korea's leader. Some say all this is karmic payback for what's become known as a seminal moment in malware history: Sony BMG sneaking rootkits into music CDs 10 years ago in the name of digital rights management. "In a sense, it was the first thing Sony did that made hackers love to hate them," says Bruce Schneier, CTO for incident response platform provider Resilient Systems in Cambridge, Mass.
Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, the Helsinki-based security company that was an early critic of Sony's actions, adds: "Because of stunts like the music rootkit and suing Playstation jailbreakers and emulator makers, Sony is an easy company to hate for many. I guess one lesson here is that you really don't want to make yourself a target.
[...] Noted tech activist Cory Doctorow, writing for Boing Boing earlier this month, explains that some vendors had their reasons for not exposing the Sony rootkit right away. "Russinovich was not the first researcher to discover the Sony Rootkit, just the first researcher to blow the whistle on it. The other researchers were advised by their lawyers that any report on the rootkit would violate section 1201 of the DMCA, a 1998 law that prohibits removing 'copyright protection' software. The gap between discovery and reporting gave the infection a long time to spread."
[...] The non-profit Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has been calling attention to the Sony BMG rootkit's 10th anniversary, urging the masses to "Make some noise and write about this fiasco" involving DRM. The FSFE, seeing DRM as an anti-competitive practice, refers to the words behind the acronym as digital restriction management rather than the more common digital rights management. In a blog post on FSFE's website, the group states: "Despite the fallout of Sony's rootkit experiment, 10 years later restrictions on users' personal property are more prevalent than ever. Restrictions are commonly found in legitimately purchased ebooks, video game hardware, and all manner of proprietary software. It has even found ways into our cars and coffee machines."
We remember the rootkit:
Historical posts below by Bruce Schneier, blog posts which contain a vast resource of information shared by his open community in which anyone can post - more technical and polite than most discussion forums!
November 1: Sony Secretly Installs Rootkit on Computers
November 11: More on Sony's DRM Rootkit
November 15: Still More on Sony's DRM Rootkit
November 17: Sony's DRM Rootkit: The Real Story
November 21: The Sony Rootkit Saga Continues
Old Slashdot stories on the topic:
October 31: Sony DRM Installs a Rootkit?
November 7: Sony Rootkit Phones Home
November 10: California Class Action Suit Sony Over Rootkit DRM
New Slashdot Story: Revisiting the Infamous Sony BMG Rootkit Scandal 10 Years Later
[Editor's Note: Check the Original Submission for additional links.]
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday November 01 2015, @11:49AM
Excellent job, takyon. That thing was nothing but a link farm as it was submitted. crutchy's subs through exec are often better.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Sunday November 01 2015, @02:02PM
Never forget.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Monday November 02 2015, @03:59AM
forget what, again? ;)
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Monday November 02 2015, @05:20AM
Forget what? That a company bought a shitty third party "solution" without knowing jack and shit about how it worked and later found out it was made of snake oil and fail? I hate to break the news to ya but companies do dumb shit like that all the time, the only ones you hear about are the uber fails but anybody who has worked corporate can tell you that PHBs buying shitty third party software based on smoke blown up their asses is pretty much SOP in the business world.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2015, @05:09AM
Take a look at the multimedia markets, and the state of anti-consumer technology practices (let's call a spade "a spade"):
Now notice the list above, and the one most prominently displayed as "widely available DRM-free" is music. The primary reason for this is because consumers, player manufacturers, and other industry players took a stand in the mid-2000's after the ridiculous state of CD Digital Audio DRM practices, as well as the digital download DRM in Apple's Fairplay scheme and Microsoft's various Frankenstein's-monster incarnations of WMA DRM schemes. The Sony DADC unveiling is one of the earth-shaking moments (if not THE moment) that led to the industry standard of music purchasing to be DRM-free. After all, a lot of car manufacturers did not want to deal with the complexity of how their customers would have to jump through all kinds of hoops to "authorize" playback of tracks read by in-car players. Perhaps we're lucky that this happened in 2005 instead of 2015, since nowadays most car headunits can connect directly to phones via USB or Bluetooth, or even directly access streaming services via wireless cell networks. Back in 2005, the primary methods for playing recorded audio were Line-In (sometimes via cassette tape adapter... remember those?), CD Digital Audio, or if you had a very new car, MP3 files burned onto a CD (...but they had to be DRM-free in order to play).
I'm wondering if part of the reason why Microsoft acquired Sysinternals was to silence Mark Russinovich from making discoveries like these. Thankfully, other hackers are out there who are not owned by giant companies leeching off of MAFIAA lobbying dollars. Still, it seems like the media companies are taking a stance of, "We lost the war on unprotected music back in the 2000's, but we can FIGHT BACK! And we SHALL NOT RETRENCH!!" (Ever notice how users of streaming music are essentially eternally renting their music? The RIAA wants it that way, to approach the market constructs of the MPAA's "pay per view" ideal).
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 02 2015, @12:06PM
Which is all fine and good but the original sub wasn't an article, it was a pile of links.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.