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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2015, @05:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2015, @05:09PM (#257593)

    Sony's Music and movie arm sabotaged the electronics arm. It may be that people are avoiding Sony products.

    Every time I find out somebody has a PS3, I explain how Sony screwed them over by removing "Other OS" functionality and PS2 backward compatibility (so Sony can just resell the older game you already have on disk).

    It was like 5 years before I bought a CD without the "Compact Disc; Digital Audio" logo. Apparently, while the logo was still present on the actual media, nobody (other than cheap CDs sold for like $2 (public domain FTW)) actually puts that logo on the actual packaging anymore.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @08:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @08:09PM (#258095)

    Every time I find out somebody has a PS3, I explain how Sony screwed them over by removing "Other OS" functionality and PS2 backward compatibility (so Sony can just resell the older game you already have on disk).

    That's only if its still running on its original firmware. With custom firmware, you get back OtherOS and PS2 compatibility, making it well worth purchasing a second-hand PS3 running OFW 3.55 or earlier.