The cover-up is the crime: Sony, after news of its rootkit exploits (Sony's DRM warning text garners something like 24,000 hits on ecommerce sites, suggesting that it was widely deployed on Sony CDs produced over an 8-month period) went from a blog to hit the Washington Post, CNET and other media, is now offering a patch that turns off the rootkit's file cloaking (but doesn't remove the underlying code) that basically is aimed at preventing Sony customers from using iTunes to listen to their purchase. Completely removing the software - not easy and, in some cases, impossible, even for experts - renders your purchased disc unusable.

CNET makes the case that the patch isn't the issue: the real issue is that Sony crossed the line from honest to evil - fully, intentionally embracing hacker techniques developed by a company called First4Internet (more about them in a bit) that could easily render a Sony customer's computer partially disabled (CD stops working) or useless (can't boot at all).

A couple years ago I wrote about a creepy company called Cyveillance (which, somehow, continues to exist despite poor, and at this point, ancient, technology), which is very much in the same 'big brother' camp as First4Internet. Cyveiillance, at least when I wrote about them, shares a trait with First4Internet: they are ready to violate the very laws their clients are purportedly paying them to uphold.

CNET calls their technology 'code [that] tells a whopper.' I compared Cyveillance to a 'a coarse, unshaven, itchy guy with his hat pulled down lurking near your half-open bedroom window.' Both images are apt, and am I naive to think that big corporations, just out of concern for shareholders, would refrain from marginal/illegal behavior?

Unlike Cyveillance, Sony only uses this reprehensible technique on paying customers: so let's shoot the guys who are buying our stuff? Am I alone in thinking these guys are not serving shareholder interests well? Hack the paying customers and make it hard for them to hear the CD they purchased? Yikes. It's easier, and much smarter, to steal the music, than buy it, if your purchased CD makes your CD player, and possibly your whole computer, unusable.

Anyway, perusing the First4Internet site, I have learned some amazing things, not the least of which is that First4Internet maintains a database of 20 million pornographic images, all in the name of protecting our children and institutions. For starters, First4Internet staff is hereby invited to stay the heck away from my children, computers and institutions...
Comments 9:31:23 PM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures