Texas sues Sony over CD rootkit

You may have been following the controversy over Sony's decision to ship a CD with software on it that takes over the computer it runs on, preventing the owner of the computer from removing the copy protection software, and also allegedly acting as spyware (sending information back to Sony). There's a new development: the Texas Attorney General has decided to sue Sony for this decision. The lawsuit surprised the hell out of me; since when does government stand up for the people to a corporation like Sony? On the national level, government has been bought by the media industry. It seems local governments may still have a role to play in curbing the abuse of customers.

Of course, this issue is mostly academic for me; the first thing I do with a new music CD is get a full-quality (lossless) digital copy onto my computer... running Linux. Then I put the CD away and listen to the digital copy. So far, I've only had to go back to the originals once, when I decided to use a lossloss compression format (flac) rather than a lossy format (mp3/ogg). But the real point is, since I'm running Linux, I don't have anything to fear from Sony's rootkit or any other Windows-based copy protection.

Of course, I don't distribute the result, I just listen to it.

UPDATE: Wondering how big a deal this is? Researchers have discovered a way to guage the spread of Sony's rootkit through the internet (by analyzing DNS cache data, if you're curious). They produced a graphic showing the spread. It's a big deal, folks.

Posted on 2005-12-04 16:11:44.0 by matthew@triggerfinger.org

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