Today’s Sony DRM rootkit stories….
Amazingly I haven’t seen any big Sony news today, but there are a couple stories out that are worth noting… First up is freedom-to-tinker with their take on the lawsuits announced yesterday and the one thing that isn’t getting much press coverage, the MediaMax DRM software. XCP is the name of the rootkit that Sony had used for Digital Rights Management that’s caused all the fuss lately, through it’s way of hiding in the system, it’s security vulnerabilities, it’s difficulty to remove (damage to the system) and vulnerabilites in the uninstaller. Well…
of course, the MediaMax uninstaller has the same issue, it’s hard to get an uninstaller for it and on top of that, they point out the problem is in a flawed approach to content protection. It’s noted that the (Electronic Freedom Foundation’s) EFF’s lawsuit against SONY mentions the MediaMax software. (Among other things it increases security risks in a number of ways… requiring you to run as administrator, running a process constantly as a system service, etc. etc.)
They sum it up nicely…
It’s important to recognize that these problems are caused not by any flaws in SunnComm and Sony’s execution of their copy protection plan, but from the nature of the plan itself.
Meanwhile, Spyware Confidential is covering yesterdays suggestions to Sony on how to notify their customers of the problem with the software, and word of artists upset with Sony’s recent problems. There was also an article (1st of several?) rounding up information on rootkits, good article for a primer on what they are, some recent examples, etc. A good read…