Sony Rootkit Phones Home

strider44 writes "Mark from Sysinternals has digged a little deeper into the Sony DRM and discovered it Phones Home with an ID for the CD being listened to. XCP Support claims that "The player has a standard rotating banner that connects the user to additional content (e.g. provides a link to the artist web site). The player simply looks online to see if another banner is available for rotation. The communication is one-way in that a banner is simply retrieved from the server if available. No information is ever fed back or collected about the consumer or their activities." Also on this topic, Matt Nikki in the comments section discovered that the DRM can be bypassed simply by renaming your favourite ripping program with "$sys$" at the start of the filename and ripping the CD using this file, which is now undetectable even by the Sony DRM. You can use the Sony rootkit itself to bypass their own DRM!" Update: 11/07 14:21 GMT by H : Attentive reader Matteo G.P. Flora also notes that an Italian lawyer has filed suit against Sony on behalf of the Italian equivalent of the EFF. Translation availabe through the hive mind. Update: 11/07 15:18 GMT by H : It does appear that in fact Sony does see through the $sys$ - see Muzzy's comment for more details.

Comments

Re:I wonder...

[mrcolj]

I'm sorry but no one with a degree could not see the difference between a generality and a stereotype. Your whole post is about how you're the exception to apartment to his generality, but not negating his generality. We've all lived in apartments--it was called COLLEGE, and maybe young-married-poor. Most people who are in apartments are so because they can't afford a house or don't have the financial accuity to understand that they CAN afford a house. So yes, mathematically, apartments are generally inhabited by the lower end of society.

Re:The EULA didn't advertise this

[OverlordQ]

Why dont you read the GP i was replying to you fucking moron, they were talking about not knowing the DRM was on the CD period.