“If you think things can’t get worse it’s probably only because you lack sufficient imagination.”
Oh, the Sony mess just keeps getting better and better. Not only does the DRM check up on you to make sure you’re making nice through the use of a Rootkit. Not only can the Sony DRM be used to cheat at World of Warcraft. Now the Sony DRM boondoggle has been discovered to phone home!
Yes, Gentle Reader, Sony just wuvs you that much that they want to keep an eye on you through the wonder of the Internet. Yep, that’s right, the same guy who discovered the rootkit has been investigating it more and discovers that SURPRISE! It dials home. Gee, there’s a shocker! An evil corporation trying to usurp someone else’s equipment for their own bottom line? That never happened before.
Sony is, of course, admitting no wrongdoing. And they are still making users jump through hoops in order to uninstall the hideous abortion. There are at least two forms that need to be filled out and your email address is automatically added to their marketing database (and is probably sold to other spam companies, too). Sony has released a patch due to uproar, but it’s poorly tested and doesn’t really work at all. Sony doesn’t even have the balls to call their DRM ‘SonyDRM’. It’s called ‘MediaJam’ and the only way you’d know it is if you checked the Add/Remove programs after the addition of the patch and noticed it there. Hiding in plain sight!
But it gets better! The wonderful software engineers who developed this cowpatty of a system forgot one tinsey little race condition. As a result, you could completely crash your system if you unload the Sony DRM module! Yaaay! Thank you, Sony, for being such complete asses and hiring retarded monkeys to write your code!
First4Internet, the Desaad to Sony’s Darkseid of this travesty, claim 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.” Riiiiight. Why, then, wasn’t this wonderful ad mechanism that dials home previously reported to have done so? You’d think after the whole thing with the rootkit being discovered in the first place, they’d be in a hurry to expose what all it’s doing on someone’s system. Hmmm.
In addition, one user has monitored the network activity that the Sony DRM produces and has discovered that, gee whilikers! It sends out the CD ID to Sony HQ, just as if they were spying on you! Imagine that! But wait, you might say… surely you don’t trust some anonymous yahoo on the Internet? Well, honestly, I’m willing to trust them more than Sony at this point, but yes. This needs to be confirmed. Fortunately, it has. Again by Mark from Sysinternals.
Fortunately, there are some bright spots. First, there’s an unsubstantiated rumor that you can use the DRM technology to defeat itself; just rename your favorite burning software with the $sys$ prefix and even the DRM software won’t be able to find it (again, though, this is unsubstantiated and may not work). The unmitigated evil of this whole thing is finally being picked up by mainstream press (after all the real work had been done by blog journalists, of course). With enough pressure, Sony might relent at least for a while and First4Internet will die smoldering on a pile of other hideous corporations that’ve tried similar things in the past. Good riddance.
You should do your part. Don’t buy Sony products.
References:
http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/11/more-on-sony-dangerous-decloaking.html
http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/11/sonys-rootkit-first-4-internet.html
Somehow when I read the title of the article I was imagining some sort of hilarious/ironic blue screen of death, like a comedy of program errors.
Great reporting as always, and the first but certainly not last article to use the term “hideous abortion.”
Actually, there is a neat picture of a BSOD caused by this DRM technique. It’s in the second reference. Nothing really funny about it, other than the fact that the company claims that there is no way for the technology to cause a Windows machine to become unstable despite it being reproduced right there in blue and white.
Granted, it’s a proof-of-concept that was artificially generated (the program that the guy wrote to cause the crash simply collects an error report from a non-infected machine), but it’s still technically possible despite the claim of the morons at First4Internet.