Sony, You, and Root kits

[Phantom_RAcast]

Yeah, I'm tempted to buy a sony CD just to screw around and attempt to stop it from installing itself

[dnd]

thats bad, sony is dead IMO

[Serpent7]

Yeah, I'm tempted to buy a sony CD just to screw around and attempt to stop it from installing itself

Would disabling Autorun do it? I seriously doubt it, the files will probs install themselves anyway...

How about searching for the most recently created files, or do these files evade that? MS-DOS; scanreg /restore afterwards?

[Phantom_RAcast]

Would disabling Autorun do it? I seriously doubt it, the files will probs install themselves anyway...

How about searching for the most recently created files, or do these files evade that? MS-DOS; scanreg /restore afterwards?

After a bit of searching:
http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10...ights.html
its probably installs itself when your forced to play it from the media player it comes with, that you have to use.

[Serpent7]

Well, after reading that entire article, I've decided not to buy any Sony CD's for a while. :S

[Phantom_RAcast]

California Class Action Lawsuit
A class-action lawsuit has been filed on behalf of California consumers who may have been harmed by anti-piracy software installed by some Sony music CDs. A second, nationwide class-action lawsuit is expected to be filed against Sony in a New York court on Wednesday seeking relief for all U.S. consumers who have purchased any of the 20 music CDs in question.

Experts say the Sony CDs use virus-like techniques to install digital rights management software on computers. Windows users cannot listen to the protected CDs on their computers without first installing the software, which hides itself on the users' system and cannot be uninstalled by conventional removal methods.

The California lawsuit, filed Nov. 1 in Superior Court for the County of Los Angeles by Vernon, Calif., attorney Alan Himmelfarb, asks the court to prevent Sony from selling additional CDs protected by the anti-piracy software, and seeks monetary damages for California consumers who purchased them.

The suit alleges that Sony's software violates at least three California statutes, including the "Consumer Legal Remedies Act," which governs unfair and/or deceptive trade acts; and the "Consumer Protection against Computer Spyware Act," which prohibits -- among other things -- software that takes control over the user's computer or misrepresents the user's ability or right to uninstall the program. The suit also alleges that Sony's actions violate the California Unfair Competition law, which allows public prosecutors and private citizens to file lawsuits to protect businesses and consumers from unfair business practices.

Himmelfarb was on a plane at the time of this writing and could not be reached for comment. But a court-stamped copy of the lawsuit he filed is online here (PDF).

Scott Kamber, an attorney in New York, said he plans on Wednesday to file class-action suits targeting Sony under both New York consumer protection statutes and a federal criminal statute that allows civil actions.

"This situation is particularly egregious and surprising from a company that should be familiar with concerns people have with programs crashing their Windows computers," Kamber said. "What Sony is saying with this software is that 'Our intellectual property is more deserving of protection than your intellectual property,' and Sony can't be allowed to get away with that."

Sony spokesman John McKay declined to comment on the suits.

I wouldn't be surprised if other lawyers and law firms around the country are also preparing to file similar suits.

As I wrote in a story last week, "Sony's move is the latest effort by the entertainment companies to rely on controversial 'digital rights management' (DRM) technologies to reverse a steady drop in sales that the industry attributes in large part to piracy facilitated by online music and movie file-sharing networks like Kazaa and Limewire."

Experts who studied the Sony program said it has a built-in file-cloaking feature that could also be used by attackers to hide viruses and other files on a user's computer, and that conventional means of removing the anti-piracy software renders the user's CD-Rom drive inoperable.

In response to public criticism over the invasiveness of the software, Sony last week made available on its Web site a "patch" that would prevent its software files from hiding on the user's system. But according to further research by a variety of security experts, that patch can lead to a crashed system and data loss.
http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/security...awsui.html

I wonder how many more lawsuits are gonna pop up against sony.
Apparently people on WoW have learned something from Sony. There stealthing
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/04/...s_wow_bot/
More on this at sysinternal
http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/11...r-now.html

[Serpent7]

Phew. At least there's a patch now, but I wouldn't trust it.

[Phantom_RAcast]

Slight update
Sony's rootkit-style DRM software, XCP, designed to prevent copyright infringement, looks like it's breaching the terms of a copyright agreement itself.

In fact it contains code written by the Motion Picture Ass. of America's villain of the week for several years running, 'DVD Jon' Johansen, who was dragged through the Norwegian courts by the MPAA using a very dubious extension of US law, for circumventing the DRM on DVDs. Johansen eventually prevailed in having the spurious charges against him thrown out.

The irony of a company using code from someone who circumvented DRM to develop an even nastier form of DRM - without even saying "Thanks!" - will surely feature in geek trivia quizzes for years to come.

The British company that developed the DRM software for Sony, First4Internet Ltd, has included free software code covered by the Free Software Foundation's LGPL, a cousin of the GPL, amateur sleuths have discovered.

The LGPL, or Lesser General Public License, was designed to protect author's rights for chunks of code rather than finished programs.

It's a complicated area, with subtle distinctions between rights over code that is compiled into, and distributed as part of the final binary program, or code that is only called at as the program is executed. But it is pretty clear cut that First4Internet has used code without observing the terms under which it's distributed - terms backed up by the power of copyright (one of our greatest inventions).

And we all know what happens to people who don't respect copyright.

Sebastian Porst discovered code from the LAME project, mpglib and VideoLAN in the XCP copy restriction, which has caused Sony so much grief. Jon Johansen is a contributor to the VideoLAN project.

"I just want to mention that the function that can be found at virtual offset 0x10089E00 in ECDPlayerControl.ocx is the function DoShuffle from a GPL-ed file called drms.c written by Jon Lech Johansen and Sam Hocevar (Google for it)," notes Sebastian.

A parallel, and even more exhaustive forensic examination of the XCP code was undertaken by 'Muzzy' - who published his findings here.

So why is First4Internet in such trouble? If you use LGPL code, the licence requires that you acknowledge the provenance of the code you're using - with a clear notification and an assurance that you can provide your own source code on request. It's designed to deter lazy programmers such as... well... the kind employed by First4Internet Ltd.

FSF attorney Eben Moglen told us this evening he couldn't offer a statement on what the organization planned to do next.
http://www.theregister.com/2005/11/18/so...ringement/

[pink]

thats bad, sony is dead IMO

Frankly I agree. Find an online stock market site and view the graph of Sony over the last couple of years... lets just say their favourite direction is down... WAY down. This is just another example of Sony's bad ideas. One of the dumbest things I can think of that Sony did was ship out a bunch of PSP's that had a faulty square button on them and refused to repair them when the customers wanted to return them. They even admitted they knew they were faulty when they shipped them... hehehe, stupid Sony.