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"Rights Management"
November 07, 2005 ( geek )
Putting a "Digital" before that... does that really change anything of note? DRM is the practice of restricting what you can do with digital files you've purchased. Like, can you listen to this CD on your computer? Can you copy it? Can you make a mix of it for your car with a few favorite songs from different CDs? Can you back-up a DVD (something I certainly wish was easier, as I just had to buy a second copy of Life and Debt as mine got too scratched). Wikipedia explains DRM.
Of course, the current news is Sony's DRM on recent CDs. It installed a program that kept you from being able to copy the CD, and was forthright about that. What it wasn't so upfront about was that it was doing so using a rootkit -- a blackhat method of getting around Windows' security (what little there is) to hide files from the system itself. And that any program could take advantage of this humongous hole by renaming itself to with $sys$ at the front -- poof! gone.
Any malicious program could use this hole and suddenly be invisible from virus-scans, spyware-scans, etc.
In fact, people immediately, once it got reported, found ways to use the hole to cheat at World of Warcraft, and even to get around Sony's DRM itself using the same hole.
Sony has now provided a (painful, many-email method) way to have in uninstalled (doing it yourself disables your CD-ROM drive completely), but refuses to admit that it was any sort of security blunder.
What's worse, the same guy who discovered this dug further and found that it sends the CD name and your IP information to Sony each time you play the disk, to get updated info on the CD -- even though the license agreement says that this is a one-way data transfer, not bi-directional.
Sigh.
Lots more information from the guy who discovered all this.
Posted by griffjon at November 7, 2005 09:49 AM
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