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11/02/2005: "More on the Sony DRM issue (Updated)"
The Sony DRM issue that I posted about yesterday has appeared in a lot of places:
- Bruce Schneier believes that Mark has a reasonable lawsuit against Sony in the U.S. (I agree), and that Sony has possibly violated the Computer Misuse Act in the UK
- The first of two Slashdot posts.
- The second of two Slashdot posts.
- The Register talks about how removing Sony's CD 'rootkit' kills Windows.
- Techdirt talks about the "mock surprise" everybody in the tech industry has been putting on.
- J. Alex Halderman in Freedom to Tinker demonstrates how the hiding mechanism in the DRM allows any rootkit to hide under its backdoors, thus making all computers less secure.
- Freedom to Tinker has another article centering around a response from First4Internet (the makers of the software) trying to say this isn't a problem, and saying they have "to new ways of cloaking files on a hard drive".
The first Freedom to Tinker article listed is very important to understand -- by putting software onto a computer that hides its existance, Sony is making it vastly simpler for other malicious programs to also latch into the same mechanism for free and hide themselves under the same cloak. So far we know little about what Sony's DRM actually does (other than preventing raw digital data being read from CDs), but it is not hard to see how it allows for other uses, such as spying on your activites, setting up spam gateways, hooking into zombie networks, uploading private files, etc. None of these are far fetched scenarios, as there already exist viruses, worms, and trojans to do all of them.