Digital Rights and Restrictions
April 04, 2006
Sony, Apple and especially Microsoft illustrate differing approaches to Digital Rights Management.
By Simson Garfinkel
Rootkits and iPods
DRM got a bad name this past Christmas season when Sony, now a major record label, snuck a DRM technology (involving a rootkit) onto several dozen musical discs that it was selling. The discs played just fine in a conventional CD player, but put one into a PC running the Windows operating system and the CD would covertly install a program that was designed to limit what the consumer could do with the disc that he had just purchased. Unfortunately, the Sony software also damaged the PC, rendering the computers vulnerable to attack by hackers and, in some cases, making the computer crash. Sony suffered a huge amount of embarrassment from the incident, was targeted by several class-action lawsuits and was ultimately forced to recall millions of discs.
Source: http://www.csoonline.com/
By Simson Garfinkel
Rootkits and iPods
DRM got a bad name this past Christmas season when Sony, now a major record label, snuck a DRM technology (involving a rootkit) onto several dozen musical discs that it was selling. The discs played just fine in a conventional CD player, but put one into a PC running the Windows operating system and the CD would covertly install a program that was designed to limit what the consumer could do with the disc that he had just purchased. Unfortunately, the Sony software also damaged the PC, rendering the computers vulnerable to attack by hackers and, in some cases, making the computer crash. Sony suffered a huge amount of embarrassment from the incident, was targeted by several class-action lawsuits and was ultimately forced to recall millions of discs.
Source: http://www.csoonline.com/