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US Entertainment Industry To Congress: Make It Legal For Us To Deploy Rootkits
An anonymous reader writes "The hilariously named 'Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property' has finally released its report, an 84-page tome that's pretty bonkers. But there's a bit that stands out as particularly crazy: a proposal to legalize the use of malware in order to punish people believed to be copying illegally. The report proposes that software would be loaded on computers that would somehow figure out if you were a pirate, and if you were, it would lock your computer up and take all your files hostage until you call the police and confess your crime. This is the mechanism that crooks use when they deploy ransomware."
The RIAA tried to get an amendment added to the Patriot Act in 2001 that would do the very same thing. This is domestic terrorism on different level, but terrorism just the same.
Director Richard Ellings, Deputy Director Roy Kamphausen, Casey Bruner, John Graham, Creigh Agnew, Meredith Miller, Clara Gillispie, Sonia Luthra, Amanda Keverkamp, Deborah Cooper, Karolos Karnikis, Joshua Ziemkowski, and Jonathan Walton.
I wish news articles put faces these types of outrages. The above people are the commission.
Not entirely true. They are still making money. Rather, they blame any dent in their optimistically inflated projections of future earnings on piracy.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Does steam need root? I needed root to install it (like any piece of software) on Arch linux, but it runs at low privileges. Also if you run the windows version under Wine it is completely unprivileged and only active in your assigned WINEPREFIX.
Steam has root access? That's news to me. I run as a non-admin user, and have never seen elevated privileges outside of Steam client updates. Games are stored in ~/Library so there's no higher access needed for installing and updating games. I don't see any kexts or system level daemons.
What makes you suspect Steam is doing what you claim?
-- Using the preview button since 2005
Right... and it shows what happens when you assume. Steam runs as a regular application... the DRM is checked by the application since each game and sub-app is launched by the Steam client itself.
It's probably one of the best-behaved apps I've seen on my Mac, Windows box or Linux box :)
"Of course, it stands to reason that if they are looking to make this practice legal, they are probably already engaged in it."
I should also be pointed out -- just in case any readers didn't realize it already -- that this "Commission" is not part of government or any official body that I know of.
The very fact that they put "theft" in the name of the Commission is telling. Copyright and patent violations are NOT "theft". They involve a completely different area of the law.
Right... and it shows what happens when you assume. Steam runs as a regular application...
Right... and it shows what happens when you assume. Steam starts SteamService.exe, a service that runs with System privileges.
Try to install and run Steam in a restricted user account without ever granting any elevated access.