No, that’s not a Batman TV series-style exclamation, it was a problem for an old people’s home in Sweden. A pile of apples had begun to ferment and a couple of elks got drunk on it and started causing trouble! Full story here.
Technically there’s not actually anything very amusing about this, but I just find the idea of drunken elks funny for some reason. No? Maybe it’s just me then.
Did you know you enter into an agreement whenever you buy a CD from $ony? The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a virtual rights campaign group, have read through the 3000 word end-user license and kindly summarised the highlights:
1. If your house gets burgled, you have to delete all your music from your laptop when you get home. That’s because the EULA says that your rights to any copies terminate as soon as you no longer possess the original CD.
2. You can’t keep your music on any computers at work. The EULA only gives you the right to put copies on a “personal home computer system owned by you.”
3. If you move out of the country, you have to delete all your music. The EULA specifically forbids “export” outside the country where you reside.
4. You must install any and all updates, or else lose the music on your computer. The EULA immediately terminates if you fail to install any update. No more holding out on those hobble-ware downgrades masquerading as updates.
5. Sony-BMG can install and use backdoors in the copy protection software or media player to “enforce their rights” against you, at any time, without notice. And Sony-BMG disclaims any liability if this “self help” crashes your computer, exposes you to security risks, or any other harm.
6. The EULA says Sony-BMG will never be liable to you for more than $5.00. That’s right, no matter what happens, you can’t even get back what you paid for the CD.
7. If you file for bankruptcy, you have to delete all the music on your computer. Seriously.
8. You have no right to transfer the music on your computer, even along with the original CD.
9. Forget about using the music as a soundtrack for your latest family photo slideshow, or mash-ups, or sampling. The EULA forbids changing, altering, or make derivative works from the music on your computer.
This all seems massively draconian, but it also makes me wonder what other products have similar restrictions on them that I may have unknowingly broken.
Source here.
Additional: $ony are now being sued over the rootkit software.
DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. Essentially this is a system that is set up to prevent you copying CDs on a PC. Sometimes this stops you from being able to rip the tracks to an MP3 player, but mostly it’s about restricting what you can do with the music that you have legally paid for. As you can probably guess from my tone, it’s not something I’m a big fan of.
Many years ago, manufacturers took a group of individuals to court because they had cracked the DVD encryption system. The manufacturers argued that doing this was an aspect of computer piracy and was therefore illegal. The silly thing is that you don’t need to crack encryption to copy a DVD; you just need to copy the information. Cracking the encryption really makes no difference to the whole process. The people were being prosecuted for being inquisitive about something that they had legally purchased in shops.
This brings us back to DRM, because the issue is what rights do you have to use the things that you own? If DRM is correct then the company still owns the music that you have bought from them because of the format it’s recorded in: if you want to listen in a different format then you need to buy it in a different format. Hm.
So, Sony have produced a little bit of software on their CDs that installs itself in your machine without telling you when you listen to it on a Micro$oft Windows PC (I’m not sure if this is also the case for Mac owners, but generally they get away with most things like this). This bit of software makes certain files invisible to the user and operates without the user’s knowledge to filter content that is played on that machine. If it thinks you’re doing something that it doesn’t want you to then it will prevent you from doing it. It hides all files that start with $sys$ so that the user and other programs can’t locate them. This behaviour is commonly associated with another type of software called a ‘rootkit’.
A rootkit is a piece of malicious code that integrates itself with the Windows operating system to hide itself and any other files that it fancies running, such as trojans and viruses. Rootkits are really nasty pieces of work and notoriously hard to remove. Guess what? There is currently no known way to remove the Sony rootkit and current methods will break Windows to such a degree that you have to wipe your entire hard drive and start again. This is some bad hoodoo.
To summarise what we’ve got so far: Sony have published a piece of software that automatically hides files on your computer on the basis of their file name, that destroys your machine and all files on it if you try to remove it, and apparently this is legal.
Installing a rootkit on a machine is quite tricky, but once you’re there you own it completely and can run whatever you want without the system ever knowing.
It was only a matter of time before the next step happened, but, now that Sony are kindly installing rootkits on their customers’ machines without their consent, a trojan has appeared that gives itself the file name $sys$drv.exe in the Windows directory, and anyone with the Sony rootkit installed won’t be able to see it while their machine is merrily used for distributing junk email, recording credit card numbers typed into websites, or simply sending out any files stored on your machine such as website passwords.
Congratulations Sony, through your dedicated interest in preserving your own profits to the massive detriment of your customers, you have once again re-earned your appellation ‘$ony’. And they were doing so well…
The trouble is, because $ony have made the rootkit, it’s uncertain whether blocking it is an illegal act. Anti-virus software manufacturers know that this software is a problem that essentially mugs a computer and leaves it bleeding in the gutter, but they also know that DRM companies have a strong history of over-zealous litigation and extremely deep pockets. So what do you do? Protect your clients’ machines and risk bankruptcy or allow the rootkit to be installed and struggle to find a way to overcome the massively exposed system flaws that it creates?
A little more about the trojan here.