Sony are a Shower of Bastards

Greetings, gentle readers.
I may not have a great deal of time here, so I'll be brief, and hope to provide a more extended monologue later. The news of the week involves Sony-BMG.
Here's the deal: their new "Copy-Protected" CDs are supposed to be a great move forward to restrict the free distribution of music and thus provide more revenues for corporations and greater royalties for artists. Huzzah.
The theory goes like this - if placed in a computer, the CD will autoload its own player, and then give the user an option of making 3 back-up CDs. Once those have been made, the CD content will be no longer burnable, and therefore, no mass black-market distribution can begin.
Here's what actually happens - the CD will load up a player program, and also install a "cloaked" program in your computer's system registry which does a number of potentially harmful things, and is exceedingly difficult to remove.

1. Sony didn't ask permission or tell anyone that these discs do these things. This is a bit of a sticky legal issue.


2. The "rootkit" which installs itself has no uninstall program.


3. The software causes some system instability and can affect performance as well as creating a number of opportunities for Blue-Screens of Death. See below.


4. The cloaking system that the rootkit uses to hide itself can be used by other malicious software to avoid detection by virus scanners. This is a big security issue.


5. The software in your computer “calls home”, which is to say that when you play a CD, it reads your computer hardware configuration, and the information about the CD and transmits that data to Sony. This is somewhat of a privacy issue.

This sinister tale of corporate insanity was discovered by Mark Russinovich just a couple of weeks ago on Halloween. The offending MalWare was written by a UK company which has been operating at a loss for the past little while, and has a CEO who was formerly an executive at Sony.
I’m not going to tell anyone to avoid buying Sony-BMG compact discs, but if you’ve already accidentally infected your computer, see the below link for instructions on uninstallation/disinfection.
People who doubt my veracity or who want to see the full information on the specifications and technical analysis of the software should also visit the aforementioned below link.
Mark Russinovich’s blog is located at http://www.sysinternals.com/Blog/ and the whole sordid affair is detailed there. Those of my treasured readers who are also fans of ancient Scandinavian literature might find much there to astound and amaze. Or at least pleasantly divert.
Until then, good night England and the colonies.
Cheers and take care everyone.

-mARKUS
¥Justice for the 96¥