Sony music seems to be trying to force consumers to not play their music on their pc. The latest Van Zant CD works fine on a regular player, but accessed on a pc, it installs a hard to remove root kit that intercepts numerous system calls. Attempting to remove it by normal means can leave you with a non-functioning OS.

More information:
http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/01/sony_rootkit_drm/
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/31/2016223&tid=172&tid=158

Ouch I hate programs that make you hack the registry in order to remove them. This is one instance where windows system restore would come in handy that is if you remember that it is there and remember to make a backup first before installing the program.

easier solution: boycott the vendor

:)

easier solution: boycott the vendor

:)

Yes I can't argue with that one.

Definately the sort of thing that will motivate people to buy cd's rather then download off peer to peer networks...

From SlashDot:
"California has filed a class-action lawsuit against Sony (http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/) and a second one may be filed today in New York. The lawsuit was filed Nov. 1 in Superior Court for the County of Los Angeles by Vernon, CA. It asks the court to prevent Sony from selling additional CDs protected by the anti-piracy software, and seeks monetary damages for California consumers who purchased them. The suit alleges that Sony's software violates at least three California statutes, including the "Consumer Legal Remedies Act (http://www.harp.org/clra.htm)," which governs unfair and/or deceptive trade acts; and the "Consumer Protection against Computer Spyware Act (http://pub.bna.com/eclr/sb1436.htm)," which prohibits -- among other things -- software that takes control over the user's computer or misrepresents the user's ability or right to uninstall the program (http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/11/more-on-sony-dangerous-decloaking.html). The suit also alleges that Sony's actions violate the California Unfair Competition law (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cacodes/bpc/17200-17210.html), which allows public prosecutors and private citizens to file lawsuits to protect businesses and consumers from unfair business practices. EFF has released a list of rootkit affected CD's (http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004144.php) and Slashdot user xtracto also has a list. (http://slashdot.org/%7Extracto/journal/121088)"
(
Read More... (http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/05/11/10/0024259.shtml?tid=233&tid=17)

Hope they win, set a precident against this crap.

No kidding. Nice to know that they are breaking the law and someone with $$ is calling em on it.

i wont even buy their hardware because of this junk.

I don't buy any of sony's items....they aren't all people think they are.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4441928.stm

Sony is recalling the cd's.

However, work by respected net expert Dan Kaminsky found that more than 500,000 networks have at least one machine on them using XCP.

But they sure left a nasty mess behind them....

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4441928.stm

Sony is recalling the cd's.



But they sure left a nasty mess behind them....


Well I guess that is the least they can do.

I'm hoping this mess costs them a fortune.

Course, they'll blame those nasty filesharers for the profit loss, not their own stupidity and incompetence.

We can only hope that they learn something from this lesson.

Companies most of the time place blame on other external things...which ticks me off. I think people would be more likely to buy from them if they admited mistakes....

Saw this on slashdot and figured I would add it to this post.

Posted by Zonk on Thursday November 17, @08:49AM
from the when-will-it-end dept.
An anonymous reader writes "With some help from Sabre Security, Sebastian Porst and Matti Nikki have identified some stolen GPL'd code in Sony's rootkit. Ironically the code in question seems to be VLC's demux/mp4/drms.c -- the de-DRMS code which circumvents Apple's DRM, written by 'DVD' Jon Lech Johansen and Sam Hocevar."

Notice that it says GPL'd code not LGPL which is different.