Sony CD's hack customers

According to a report from the Open Source legal news website GrokLaw.net Sony has been up to some fairly unscrupulous antics to control how customers use their CD's... and their computers.

A media storm struck a few days ago when it was revealed that some Sony CD's deployed a rootkit when the CD was used with a computer. A rootkit is an advanced technique pioneered by hackers and writers of virii which alters the computer operating system itself (not just the contents of the drive) usually to avoid detection since virus detectors rely on the operating system to function and fail if the system itself is infected.

Sony's rootkit apparently was installed without clear permission from the user and provided no means to be uninstalled, ever. It was meant to protect Sony's copyright by stopping copying of CD's (which one might note is not always illegal). But the thing that really got computer nerds worked up was that software was being installed on customers systems without warning or permission which could both make the system unstable and make it vulnerable to exploitation by hackers. If there was a problem the user would first of all have no idea that the rootkit was there and might be responsible, they'd also have no way of removing it (even if they weren't using the CD anymore) and there'd be no fix from Sony coming along to make it better.

After all the pressure Sony finally backed down and provided instructions to remove the rootkit and suspended and further manufacture of the offending CD's. This was speeded by the fact that a virus was found which explointed a weakness in the rootkit and virus protection companies like Symantec have been flagging both the virus and the Sony rootkit as infections and removing them.

The latest report, however, is from a blogger who discovered that some Sony CD's were installing spyware on customers computers (before the customer agreed to a wordy license agreement that didn't clearly spell out what was being installed). The software aimed to interfere with attempts to rip MP3's from the CD and also sent private user information to Sony for undisclosed purposes. If you put the CD in your computer but don't agree to the license agreement the software is installed and started but not set to run everytime your computer starts up.

So there you go, for all those pro-business types who say that there are a few bad apples but most companies are just trying to be good corporate citizens: Sony is one of the biggest media labels in the world, it's treating its customers like criminals, monitoring them, invading their privacy, controlling their computers and what customers do with them including copying for backup purposes, which is perfectly legal, and doing so with a complete disregard for the stability and security of those customer's machines.

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