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Where are the Prosecutors?
a_greer2005 wonders: "In the past 5 years, we have seen plenty of virus writers in the United States brought to justice both criminally and when possible financially. In the past couple of weeks it has been discovered that Sony has shipped a rootkit, which is worse than the common spyware or virus, so I ask you, where are the law suits? Is anyone planning criminal/civil action at all? Does Sony frighten the entire legal industry? If nothing is done about this, will we have ANY right to tell a company 'NO' in the future when it comes to DRM worms -- Is this but a sample of things to come?" Update: 11/12 10:20 PM EDT by C :Whoops! Missed the fact that we've already reported on the fact that California has already started a class action suit against Sony (thanks to the posters that caught this). New York may soon follow. However that is only 2 states out of 50. Is there a possibility of more to follow?
Looks like the corporation defending copyrightsmay have some copyright problems of their own.
A computerexpert, whose name is known by the redaction, discovered that the cd "Get Right With The Man" by "Van Zant" contains strings from the library version.c of Lame. This can be conluded from the string: "http://www.mp3dev.org/", "0.90", "LAME3.95", "3.95", "3.95 ".
It's easy to take legal action and be successful against a single person, especially one who often is very young and simply cannot afford to hire good legal counsel. On the other hand, it's not so simple to take legal action and be successful against a huge corporation with ties high up in the government and loads of money to protect themselves. Legal action is being pursued in several states and by several different parties, but due to the fact that this is a major corporation with very important friends in high places they will receive nothing more than a slap on the wrist.
"A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing." - Alan Perlis
They're right here: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/10/00 24259&tid=233&tid=17
Tim Dorr
Owner/Manger
A Small Orange
A rootkit is a set of tools used by a hacker to hide his presence on a system and maintain 'root' privileges (Administrator on Windows). While Sony's DRM app does hide its presence, I don't believe there has been any indication of systems comprimised and hacked into by Sony and I don't think that was their intention. I don't know what it is, but I wouldn't call it a 'rootkit'.
This is what you get when you allow large corporations to dictate your laws: they will only be enforced when it suits those corporations. And when you allow nearly all laws to defend only the interests of the very rich at the expense of everyone else, a travesty of justice is the inevitable result.
Well, considering the rootkit can easily be carried into the office by people wanting to listen to their protected music at work this software does at least rise to the point of annoyance for corporations too. Not to mention that it phones home, and other malwares have appeared that use the cloaking nature of this software to hid themselves.
It is just a dirty deal.
I spent the better part of an hour yesterday ridding my mothers computer of this "rootkit". Most of that time was spent attempting to restore the use of her CD/DVD drive that went missing after the core DRM code is shut down. Before people get on my case, my mom is no idiot and is very protective of her computer. I asked her specifically if she ran or saw anything run when she put the CD in her drive and I believe her version of events.
She did not install anything
She did not agree to anything
She never saw an EULA
Her computer could not RIP ANY CD's afterwards
All she did was attempt to import a CD into iTunes and from then on out any attempt to import CD's would freeze up her computer, not just XCD protected disks.
So what it seems like you are saying (or at least implying) is this.
If it only FUCKS over the little guy, then fuck it - it's okay.
However, if it fucks over a big fish - then shit - we have to prosecute.
There's something distinctly wrong with that, and I really hope that that was not your intent.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Nope. Class Action Suits are civil actions. Story Poster is asking "Where are the *CRIMINAL* penalties for this"?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
it's not self replicating and doesn't attack other people's PC over the internet or such
Oh. So by that definition ANY rootkit is just peachy.
It's mostly single homer users affected
Where do you think those zombie botnets that send out all the crap spam are located?
That's right. Compromised home users who don't even know something's wrong because their system has been hit with a rootkit. Now Sony has created a powerful new tool for the spambot creators to use. Thanks Sony!