One Aging Geek

Monday, November 07, 2005

Freedom to Tinker: CD-DRM Rootkit: Repairing the Damage

I own a Sony device, one of the first generation Minidisc players. It was useful for excercising back when I was doing that. I guess it's still in my dust-covered gym bag. The thing ran for over 50 hours on a single AA battery. And I had a set of about five discs with music that was good for excercising. I've tried using my hard-disk iRiver MP3 player for the same thing and have had two near disasters due to dropping it.

Luckily my player is too old to have this "improved" software that attempts to enforce DRM more tightly.

I heard Paula Le Dieu quoting Joi Ito in a podcast from IT Conversations that I listened to recently. He was speaking to a bunch of media executives and said to them about DRM: "You will win. You will convince your audiences that they are not to use your content." ([clip]).

SonyBMG and First4Internet are in the doghouse now, having been caught installing rootkit-like software on the computers of SonyBMG music customers, thereby exposing the customers to security risk. The question now is whether the companies will face up to their mistake and try to remedy it.

Updated to get correct source of quote, get quote correct, provide link to IT Conversations clip, and correct some screwed up HTML.

Updated a second time because it seems that Blogger and Opera do not cooperate.