Rick Rubin Discloses Sony Rootkit Called Home

caffeinemessiah writes "Rick Rubin, the legendary music producer, recently signed on as co-head of Columbia Records, which is owned by Sony BMG. In a recent New York Times interview (on pg. 4 of the online version), he discloses, possibly accidentally: 'It was the highest debut of Neil [Diamond]'s career, off to a great start. But Columbia — it was some kind of corporate thing — had put spyware on the CD. That kept people from copying it, but it also somehow recorded information about whoever bought the record...' Seems like the rootkit might have been a little more than your vanilla invade-your-rights-DRM scheme."

Comments

Dup

[astrosmash]

There's an interesting discussion on the same topic over here.

Slashdot proves you're wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he's correct. You're wrong.

http://games.slashdot.org/games/05/11/07/1221209.s html

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."

Re:Won't affect anybody

[Detritus]

Neil Diamond has more talent in his big toe than most of the artists that get airplay on American commercial radio. I'm not a fan of his style of music, but he is an excellent singer and songwriter.