Sony still dragging heels on DRM recall
New York’s Attorney General is trying to hold Sony’s feet to the fire. Over a week after the recall of the Sony discs carrying the controversial DRM Rootkit XCP, affected discs were still available for purchase at several retail outlets. From the betanews article…
Spitzer sent investigators to a number of retail music outlets, who were able to purchase the affected CDs more than a week after they were allegedly recalled, according to BusinessWeek. Stores including Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Sam Goody, Circuit City, FYE and Virgin continued to stock the rootkit-laden albums.
Spitzer did not say if he would file suit against Sony, but, again from the post…
“It is unacceptable that more than three weeks after this serious vulnerability was revealed, these same CDs are still on shelves, during the busiest shopping days of the year,” Spitzer said statement.
“I strongly urge all retailers to heed the warnings issued about these products, pull them from distribution immediately, and ship them back to Sony.”
–update 2:20PM EST 11/29/05–
You thought they were dragging there heels???
It turns out they were first notified of the problems with their implementation on October 4th, almost a full month before the October 31st “discovery” of the XCP rootkit and it’s capabilities.
Business Week has the article and details. (F-Secure apparently notified them on the 4th of October. Sony claims they were quickly trying to find a fix and announce the problem and release the fix at the same time, but the blog post on the 31st forced them to scramble with a quicker response. (“And it would’ve worked if it hadn’t been for those darn kids….”)
–update 9:45PM est 11/29–
Sunbeltblog is picking up on this. and Good Morning Silicon Valley
–update 11/30/05–
freedom-to-tinker has picked up on this today AND the deafening silence prior to the announced discovery of other anti-malware tools.