RobsHouse.net

When really nasty people want to take over your computer, they write a rootkit. A rootkit hides certain aspects of what your computer stores and what it does so that you don't recognize that it is there and that it owns your ass.

A very smart fan of the Van Zant brothers named Mark Russinovich discovered that a CD he bought on Amazon installs such a rootkit in order to implement their Digital Rights Management (DRM) copy protection scheme. The rootkit intrinsically changes the way your computer works by hijacking function calls to programs you want to run and doing something else with them. This particular rootkit is badly programmed, resource intensive, and breaks your computer if you happen to find and delete the files.

In other words, Sony owns your computer.

Furthermore, this mean mofo is hard to remove. Really hard. If you've never heard of the registry, and don't know what named pipes are, you'll simply never get rid of it. Your spyware removal software won't touch it, and only brilliant hackers with l33t m4d skillz stand a chance.

Worst of all, it opens up a large and beckoning window of opportunity for other attackers to leverage the breach in security that Sony created as soon as you put their CD in your CD drive.

Sony owns your computer.

So who is the real victim here? Let's see... have you ever heard of the Van Zant brothers? Maybe not, but they are probably great musicians who sing about ideals, ethics, love, emotions and other really cool human things. Would you buy their CD? Hell no! You'd read the reviews on Amazon.com and be dismayed that the majority of reviewers advise you not to buy the CD. Here's a sample from one review:

No offense to the brothers Van Zant, but I'll never buy this CD because it's copy protected. I don't have an MP3 player and I don't download music illegally, but I DO make mix CDs from my own discs, so I couldn't do that here. This is an infringement of my fair-use rights and I refuse to go along with it - and so should you.

So to me, the real victims are the musicians. Nobody will ever buy this CD on Amazon.com, they'd be crazy. And after reading about Sony's brain-dead DRM, I'll never buy one of their copy protected CDs. Never.

Link to the full story

PS. There are hundreds of CDs with this crap for sale.