Sony’s DRM can be (ab)used to hide anything on your PC.
Which would you prefer – a PC without a place for viruses to hide or one that you can listen to your favourite Faithless CD on?
The Register have an excellent summary of the current news that Sony think it is acceptable to compromise your PC in order to make sure you don’t do any more than play one of their CDs. Meanwhile, the (ab)uses of Sony’s DRM rootkit have begun already, just wait until the virus writers get busy (virus scanners cannot see these $sys$… files). So, the question is, who wants to guess how many people have put one of these “protected” CD’s into their PC’s CD-ROM drive?
Hiding files and processes from even the system administrator should have set off alarm bells in the developer’s heads from the very start. Surely First 4 Internet (the guys who wrote the DRM software) knew they were opening a can of worms when they wrote this stuff – if not, well, they shouldn’t have been writing stuff like this.
If anything this whole fiasco is a clear indication that commercial considerations like DRM are undermining the development of safe software. Meanwhile just don’t buy Sony/BMG CDs they’ll root your PC.
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