Sony Rootkit may Lead to Regulation

An anonymous reader writes "Computerworld has a story about DHS officials meeting with Sony to read them the riot act, following the rootkit fiasco. From the story: 'A U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official warned today that if software distributors continue to sell products with dangerous rootkit software, as Sony BMG Music Entertainment recently did, legislation or regulation could follow.'"

Comments

WTF?

[smash]

So if a 15 year old crashes his school's webserver by getting a bunch of friends in IRC to click on it too many times he can be prosecuted, but if a global megacorporation does something far more insidious (effectively, SELLING you TROJANED media), then "we need regulation"?

Why are people not in jail for this yet?

(yes, that was a rhetorical question).

smash.

Re:WTF?

[lennart78]

According to www.opensecrets.org Sony has, over the years, ponied up millions of dollars in contributions to political parties. I haven't seen that 15 year old script-running-juvenile matching that.

Re:The recent Sony experience

[anagama]

I recently (about 2 weeks ago) had to buy two new monitors for my office. My business partner mentioned she saw a sale on some Sony LCD -- I said "no way" and we got something else. Had Sony not gone out of its way to be evil, I would've said "sure". Perhaps "Sonied" will be a term for companies that shoot themselves in the head with their marketing practices. I'd rather see that than a lot of customers being screwed.

No malicious intent?

[erroneus]

While Sony's software was distributed without malicious intent, the DHS is worried that a similar situation could occur again, this time with more serious consequences. "It's a potential vulnerability that's of strong concern to the department," Frenkel said.

Would someone please define malicious? I think it WAS malicious.

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The American Heritage dictionary:
malicious (m-lsh's) pronunciation
adj.

Having the nature of or resulting from malice; deliberately harmful; spiteful.

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Thompson-Gale Legal Encyclopedia:
Malicious

Involving malice; characterized by wicked or mischievous motives or intentions.

An act done maliciously is one that is wrongful and performed willfully or intentionally, and without legal justification.

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I'd say that given Sony's generally agressive posture with regards to personal/individual fair use and copyright infringement, I think they could easily be characterized using words like "angry" and "vengeful." And regardless of the emotional component, it was certainly wrongful, willfull, intentional and without legal justification.

Re:The recent Sony experience

[luvirini]

Vaio was one of the more popular laptop models for our salesforce. It has now been dropped from list of approved products.

Mod Parent Up.

[SeaFox]

To have the government threaten to enact legislation is like having a parent wave their finger at a naughty child warning him not to break ANY MORE of the neighbor's windows.

Laws have already been broken and all we're seeing is warnings implying this may be made illegal in the future.

And yet, the cynic in me...

[Crash Culligan]

...thinks that DHS would love for this to happen again.

From TFA: Baker stopped short of mentioning Sony by name, but Frenkel did not. "The recent Sony experience shows us that we need to be thinking about how to ensure that consumers aren't surprised by what their software is programmed to do," he said.

I could almost see them thinking, . o O (...and the best way to do it would be to stringently regulate consumers' computers, so that we can watch for intrusions of this sort in future and prepare for them. Oh, do it again Sony? Ohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohsnausagesohplease!)

Could someone sue StarForce spreaders please?

[LarsWestergren]

I was about the download the demo for Battle for Middle Earth 2 the other day, only to read that the goddamn DEMO comes with the StarForce malware.

According to Wikipedia, Ubi Soft, Digital Jesters and Codemasters routinely use StarForce on new games. Forget about consoles, THIS is what might kill PC gaming permanently.

Important distinction

[AlphaSys]

Another exaple of our tax-dollar-paid servants not applying themsleves to the task mentally:

"A U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official warned today that if software distributors continue to sell products with dangerous rootkit software, as Sony BMG Music Entertainment recently did, legislation or regulation could follow."

The important thing to keep in mind is that, while SONY may have a software division, the product sold wasn't even a software product at all, and no disclosure of a software product was discussed in any terms of sale, etc. The whole software angle was completely surrepetitious. It's not just "software distributors" that need policing here. When it boils down to it, this SONY division had no business "engineering" software into their product; they had little grasp of the ethics or the technical implications of what they were doing... or at least that's what they tell us now. For all we know, they were fully aware and just did it anyway thinking plausible deniability was all they would need when it came to light. If indeed they thought so, they would seem to have been prescient - nothing has happeded because of it. I for one am a bit surprised at that.

Re:You haven't figured it out yet?

[Fred_A]

You might also want to keep in mind that "true capitalism", as well as "true communism" are mind constructs that are completely impossible to setup in the real world because there is no way that most people are actually going to play nice. If they can screw you to increase their benefit, they will. Which is why an external regulatory agent is needed (even though that idea is apparently blasphemous to the US mindset).