The Devil you know.

Splaetos · Post by **Splaetos** » Mon Nov 14, 2005 3:26 pm

Think people will ever get enough cjones and organization to tell the corporations wh oare trying to incarnate themselves as 'big brother' to get the hell out of our privacy? Starforce antipriacy... sony music cd's... etc ad infinitum.

At that point I knew conclusively that the rootkit and its associated files were related to the First 4 Internet DRM software Sony ships on its CDs. Not happy having underhanded and sloppily written software on my system I looked for a way to uninstall it. However, I didn?t find any reference to it in the Control Panel?s Add or Remove Programs list, nor did I find any uninstall utility or directions on the CD or on First 4 Internet?s site. I checked the EULA and saw no mention of the fact that I was agreeing to have software put on my system that I couldn't uninstall. Now I was mad.

I deleted the driver files and their Registry keys, stopped the $sys$DRMServer service and deleted its image, and rebooted. As I was deleting the driver Registry keys under HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services I noted that they were either configured as boot-start drivers or members of groups listed by name in the HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\SafeBoot subkeys, which means that they load even in Safe Mode, making system recovery extremely difficult if any of them have a bug that prevents the system from booting.

When I logged in again I discovered that the CD drive was missing from Explorer. Deleting the drivers had disabled the CD. Now I was really mad.

http://www.sysinternals.com/Blog/
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051112/ap_ ... protection

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27568

dont worrry though, sony has said we dotn really care about secretly installed rootkits. So obviously we dont right? Oh and grudingly they put a link to the uninstaller on thier page, clearly we needed actual directions to find thier cloaked spyware... how stupid of us >.<

There is nothing illegal about making an infinite amount of backups for your music, games, vidoes, only sharing them with others, or even moreso, selling them to others. Yet companies are employing other satangeeks to not only prevent back-ups but to disable the abilities of your personal computer and report back what you are doing to them... all in secret most of the time. I think starforce drivers are now listed in some eula's but not nearly prominent enough for what they actualy do or can do.

Dont buy from sony.

Dont buy from companies emplying active 'anti-piracy' like starforce.

Basicaly dont buy from anyone who is showing you a product in one hand and concealing the strign to pull it back in the other.

I would include m$ but its a bit hard to not buy anything from them witohut resorting to stealing.

'criticism' isnt enough, people need to actualy wake uo and stop paying compaines who emply secret, or 'quiet' meothds of messing with things they have no right ot mess with.

PKM · Post by **PKM** » Mon Nov 14, 2005 3:32 pm

this actually doesn't effect me since i can't find enough good music to fill a pamphlet let alone a full commercial disc.

Post by **Surgeon** » Tue Nov 15, 2005 11:23 pm

actually it involves everyone with a PC.... basically Sony have been the 1st to have been found out - but look at the fuss created over WoW's "anti-cheat" program that searches your PC.... DRM (Digital Rights Management ??) is a very important thing

The funny thing is Microsoft are going to release a patch to remove any trace of the Sony rootkit - seeing as the rootkit can easily be used (and is being used right now) by several worms / viruses ....

There is a war coming - Big Corporations vs Us, the little people -

This has been a rare sighting of Surgeon!

PKM · Post by **PKM** » Tue Nov 15, 2005 11:34 pm

i bet bill gates's balls that the patch removing sony's spyware will also install a microsoft spy program and that.........hold on guys, there's a microsoft van outside my house.........odd, i didn't call for any support.......is that a helicoptor ?!

Splaetos · Post by **Splaetos** » Wed Nov 16, 2005 12:29 am

they dont need the chopper, they will just remotely disable your OS.

or perhaps make your pc self destruct... then come colelct you at thier leisure.

Post by **Rookie One.pl** » Wed Nov 16, 2005 1:49 pm

Haha, now I'm so glad they cannot do such things to Linux.

Splaetos · Post by **Splaetos** » Wed Nov 16, 2005 7:09 pm

the article on the people who 'cracked' windows activation process and exposed an unused function to remotely disable the OS was interesting... dotn rememebr where it was though.