Posted by Goro on 02/25/79 11:31

>From slashdot:
(http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/07/1221209&from=rss)

strider44 writes "Mark from Sysinternals has digged a little deeper
into the Sony DRM and discovered it Phones Home with an ID for the CD
being listened to. XCP Support claims that "The player has a standard
rotating banner that connects the user to additional content (e.g.
provides a link to the artist web site). The player simply looks online
to see if another banner is available for rotation. The communication
is one-way in that a banner is simply retrieved from the server if
available. No information is ever fed back or collected about the
consumer or their activities." Also on this topic, Matt Nikki in the
comments section discovered that the DRM can be bypassed simply by
renaming your favourite ripping program with "$sys$" at the start of
the filename and ripping the CD using this file, which is now
undetectable even by the Sony DRM. You can use the Sony rootkit itself
to bypass their own DRM!" Update: 11/07 14:21 GMT by H : Attentive
reader Matteo G.P. Flora also notes that an Italian lawyer has filed
suit against Sony on behalf of the Italian equivalent of the EFF.
Translation availabe through the hive mind.

--

by my count, once the rootkit was discovered, it took less than a week
(a) haxx0rs to exploit it (WoW), and (b) come up with a workaround.
That's a bit slow, but I'm sure they'll be faster for the BluRay DRM...

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO SONY!

-goro-

[Back to original message]