Sony has gone way too far!

Sony is trying to protect its intellectual property by preventing people from coping music CDs. In this quest, I think they have gone way too far.

In a recent discovery made by Mark Russinovich a rootkit (see definition below) was found on his system after playing a music CD with copy protection. If you are interested in the details of Mark’s findings click here.

After purchasing a music CD on Amazon, Mark was playing it on his computer. At the same time he was using the latest version of RootkitRevealer (RKR) and discovered something intercept kernel-mode application APIs by patching the kernel’s system service table. He traces it to a device driver by the name of Aries.sys, whose cloaking code hides any file, directory, Registry key or process whose name begins with “$sys$".

Sony has licensed a "content protection scheme" from a company called First 4 Internet to try to "protect their investments." My suggestion to Sony is to start thinking about ways to use technology and not to spend time fighting against it. Something the music industry is not talking about is the fact that record sales increased during the time of Napster. I do not condone stealing of content, but Sony and the music industry need to wake up and take advantage of technology and not do malicious things to customer’s computers.

[Definition: A root kit is a set of tools frequently used by an intruder after cracking a computer system. These tools are intended to conceal running processes and files or system data, which helps an intruder maintain access to a system for malicious purposes. Root kits are known to exist for a variety of operating systems Root kits are known to exist for a variety of operating systems such as Linux, Solaris and versions of Microsoft Windows. *source WikipediA.]

Thank you, Sony, for pre-installing rootkits for the hackers to use to attack your customer’s computers. I think it is disgusting that companies like Sony think it is OK for them to use hacking techniques.

Hope we will see a backlash from customers.