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posted by takyon on Sunday November 01 2015, @11:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-gift-that-keeps-on-giving dept.

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.]


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by SrLnclt on Sunday November 01 2015, @12:40PM

    by SrLnclt (1473) on Sunday November 01 2015, @12:40PM (#257140)

    I haven't bought a Sony product in a decade, and have no intention to do so any time soon. I'm guessing I'm not the only one here.

    Unfortunately the general population is stupid when it comes to things like this.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by digitalaudiorock on Sunday November 01 2015, @03:52PM

    by digitalaudiorock (688) on Sunday November 01 2015, @03:52PM (#257173) Journal

    I haven't bought a Sony product in a decade, and have no intention to do so any time soon.

    Hell...I refuse to even own a blu ray player made by anyone. It's a godless anti-consumer format born out of Sony's massive conflict of interest and stuffed up the public's ass. I'll have no part of it.

    It's hard to imagine that at one time, Sony was the one fighting a battle with the recording industry regarding their bullshit copy protection concerns over DAT tape recorders.

  • (Score: 2) by Justin Case on Sunday November 01 2015, @04:47PM

    by Justin Case (4239) on Sunday November 01 2015, @04:47PM (#257183) Journal

    I haven't bought a Sony product in a decade

    Same here. Problem is, in the last decade we've seen several other companies striving for, though not equaling, Sony's level of abomination. Where do you draw the line?

    And why aren't people from Sony in jail over this!!!

    It is abundantly clear from this and other events that the law has no legitimacy, and you are morally right to do whatever the fuck you please, as long as you don't hurt those who haven't harmed you.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Myrddin Wyllt on Sunday November 01 2015, @11:57PM

    by Myrddin Wyllt (5849) on Sunday November 01 2015, @11:57PM (#257311)

    I also began boycotting Sony products after the Rootkit thing, although that probably didn't cost them a lot of business (maybe a lost PS3 sale, and a couple of CDs).

    The main thing I took away from it was an appreciation of just how bad a company Microsoft were - I had used Windows as my main operating system since my first PC in the mid nineties, and although I was a bit underwhelmed with XP, I liked W2K and was essentially a happy little microsoftee.

    When the Root Kit story broke, I was expecting a wrathful storm to issue from Mount Redmond, damning Sony to the seventh circle of Hell for their despicable behavior. Instead we got nothing, not even a patch for ages. I hit the internets to find out why MS was being so weak in their response, and found an eye-opening amount of stuff about what sort of company they were (that's where I first came across slashdot). It may sound obvious to all of us now, but I was just a mainstream computer user and didn't even realise that people had real issues with Microsoft at the time.

    I had already bought 'Linux for Dummies' a couple of years earlier and installed the included Red Hat 7 as a dual boot with W2K, but just as something to play with. Within a month I was running Slackware (10.1 I think), and Windows was relegated to 'use it when you have to' status - when they dropped support for W2K it got wiped completely, and I've never looked back.

    I still consider the exposure of the Sony Root Kit to be the point when I started taking free / open source software and open standards seriously, just because it illustrated how messed up the alternatives were.