Sony’s Rootkit, Still in the News 0
Texas and the EFF are suing:
But The Register doesn’t see any effect on Sony’s bottom line to date:
The poorly written software leaves a PC wide open to hackers, and attempts to remove it can disable the CD drive. Sony Music reluctantly announced a recall and exchange program for XCP-infected CDs last week.
But the rootkit can be easily defeated:
(snip)
Now analyst house Gartner has discovered that the technology can be easily defeated simply by applying a fingernail-sized piece of opaque tape to the outer edge of the disc. This renders session two — which contains the self-loading DRM software — unreadable.
So that (from the same story in El Reg) . . .
“After more than five years of trying, the recording industry has not yet demonstrated a workable DRM scheme for music CDs,” Gartner concludes.
But (still from the same story) . . . .
Placing gaffer tape on the edge of a CD may make it unbalanced and could cause damage to the disc or (worse) drive as it spins at high speed. A better option, as Reg readers point out, might be to disable Windows autorun.
If only Windows listened when we tried to turn off Autorun!
Meanwhile, Sony has given hackers a ticket to a gold mine:
