Maybe Sony's Strategy Is To Convince You To Never Use A CD In A Computer

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the oh,-sorry-about-that dept

The Sony rootkit saga continues. While the company released a patch that only took off the cloaking ability, but didn’t actually help uninstall the software they surreptitiously installed, it seems that there are plenty of other problems with the “patch” as well. Ed Felten noted yesterday that there’s a lot of other stuff in the patch, which Sony doesn’t bother to tell anyone about. And, obviously, at this point, hearing Sony say “trust us, it’s fine” isn’t particularly reassuring. On top of that, the original researcher who discovered the rootkit has found that the patch could crash Windows on some computers. The chances are apparently pretty small, but they’re there. The other thing he discovered is that, once again just like spyware products, the copy protection phones home to Sony, potentially passing on information, such as your IP address. To be fair, it doesn’t look like it’s doing anything bad when it phones home (just checking for updated lyrics and album art), but Sony certainly doesn’t reveal anywhere that this action is happening, which should only raise more questions about why anyone should ever feel safe using a SonyBMG CD again. Of course, maybe that’s the point. The record labels have regretted for years that CDs now play on computers (it was an afterthought to them), because that’s what opened up this whole file sharing concept in the first place — and, so now they’re trying to make people think that CDs don’t belong in your CD-ROM drive, and delivering sneaky malware might just be one way to get that point across.