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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: 5, Informative) by art guerrilla on Sunday November 01 2015, @02:18PM
easy peasy japanesy:
korporations are in the saddle, and the devil take the hindmost ! ! !
in amerika, it was at least pretended for a while, that korporations had to observe several basic tenets:
1. they were of limited duration
2. they had a specific purpose
3. AND said purpose had to directly benefit The People, NOT JUST STOCKHOLDERS...
NONE of those apply any longer, AND in fact and in practice, korporations are SUPERIOR 'PEOPLE' to people...
compared to 'real' people, they live infinitely long, are vastly more wealthy, wield unmatched power, and are amoral organizations with no accountability...
what could possibly go wrong ? ? ?
(except total destruction of civil society and the planet, but other than those trifles, we enriched some folks...)
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Sunday November 01 2015, @04:58PM
I agree with you, but whenever you are hating on corporations, remember it is governments that allow them to exist, so there's guilt enough to go around.
We need:
* Death penalty for corporations
* The corporate structure cannot shield the people in charge from liability for their actions
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2015, @07:16PM
That's a bit too harsh given the number of innocent people (ie: The lower level peeps) that get shafted.
I'd rather see more risk to the shareholders themselves, since ultimately that is the only reason the corporations act the way they do - to maximize profits for those shareholders, since those shareholders can and do sue/apply pressure/etc whenever they see the corporation acting in such a way that doesn't maximize their profits. Do you play fair, or do you attempt some anti-competitive practice that will earn you billions but at the risk of a 100 million dollar fine if caught? Obviously you act anticompetitively simply because the gains far outweigh the penalty. It happens -every- time.
If a corporation is found to have acted illegally,such as this, then the only appropriate fine should be to equate or exceed any estimated gains they've made in the process. (Something that NEVER happens)
Sure, the first time or two a company is caught with their pants down doing this it'll hurt pretty bad. After all, they were expecting a slap on the wrist. But after that corporations will start to clean up their own act over time simply because the profits will no longer be there. (Actually they'd probably commit economic suicide by wasting all profits in lawsuits trying to fight the fine, but I'm assuming at least a spec of sanity out of them.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2015, @07:41AM
- AUC approves $56 million TransAlta market manipulation settlement (PDF) [auc.ab.ca]
I hope to see more of the same in the coming years/decades.