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That time Sony installed rootkit software on thousands of computers [video]
- vaylian 4y agoAlso interesting: Sony sold laptops with hardware-based virtualization disabled: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/12956/sony_disabled_cpu_virtualization_on_the_vaio/index.html https://www.tweaktown.com/news/12956/sony_disabled_cpu_virtu... It's unclear why they did that, but preventing DRM circumvention might be one reason.
- usrn 4y agoIME most consumer laptops (that aren't Chrome books which have definitely taken over) at best have virtualization turned off (so you can turn it on, potentially breaking some Windows thing.) I've given up on any kind of pre-built piece of consumer electronics more complex than a microwave and newer than the original iPhone at this point. Something happened and it's impossible to get anything that doesn't actively fight you.
- vaylian 4y ago> at best have virtualization turned off (so you can turn it on, potentially breaking some Windows thing.) Yes, but there was no way to turn it on (as the linked article explains)
- erwincoumans 4y agoDoesn't Apple M1 support hardware virtualization? Ubuntu arm64 seems to run at full speed under the hypervisor (Parallels etc), no software emulation.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mobilio 4y agoThey even have framework in OS for that: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization
- Tijdreiziger 4y ago> (so you can turn it on, potentially breaking some Windows thing.) Actually, you must turn it on if you want to use Hyper-V and/or WSL2.
- joenathanone 4y agoWindows 11 licensing requires oems to sell machines with it turned on. MS uses it for a security feature called core isolation.
- Workaccount2 4y agoI think the issue from an OEM perspective is that if their product isn't fighting the consumer, the consumer will use the product to fight them. Which isn't totally unfounded. Apple doesn't want to spend the man hours (or charge the cost) of unfucking iphones that regular consumers fucked with all the freedom they have. Don't mistake this post as a defence of Apple or the like. It's merely a recognition of the issue from their side.
- ineedasername 4y agoThere's an easy solution for this: Make it clear in settings what the risks are if you screw up your device, and also what the repair cost will be. And then charge enough to cover the cost of training new technicians and their salaries.
- officeplant 4y agoApple lets people fuck their devices regularly with their app choices. The appstore doesn't protect anyone against malicious apps that pass validation. I don't see how its any worse than letting us sideload after tapping through a scary warning.
- car_analogy 4y agoWow. Given that weev was sentenced to 3 years in jail for collecting accidentally accessible e-mails from a website [1] (a far lesser privacy invasion than the mildest of Google's telemetry), I can only imagine how packed prisons were with Sony executives for this! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev#AT&T_data_breach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev#AT&T_data_breach
- sofixa 4y ago> leak Auernheimer was a member of the hacker group known as "Goatse Security" that exposed a flaw in AT&T security in June 2010, which allowed the e-mail addresses of iPad users to be revealed. The flaw was part of a publicly-accessible URL, which allowed the group to collect the e-mails without having to break into AT&T's system. Contrary to what it first claimed, the group revealed the security flaw to Gawker Media before AT&T had been notified, and also exposed the data of 114,000 iPad users, You know that someone leaving their front door open by accident is not an invitation or an excuse to enter and collect whatever you want, right? Especially when you're a complete and total piece of shit, some jail time is not an overreaction ( if it was a normal human being, leniency for a first offense is natural and to be expected). As for Sony execs, if only that was the first case white collar crime was brushed off.
- makerofthings 4y agoI’ve heard the “leaving your door open” thing before and I don’t think that’s a good analogy here. That’s not how the internet works. I send requests to other machines and ask them for stuff and whether they respond or not is on them. That some folks make terrible decisions when it comes to how they store their data isn’t really anyone else’s problem. A better analogy might be “In the uk, if you leave something on the pavement outside your house then you don’t want it anymore and it’s Ok if other people take it. I decided to leave a stack of personal data there and someone just took it.”
- lovehashbrowns 4y ago> I send requests to other machines and ask them for stuff and whether they respond or not is on them. So by this logic, SQL injection is perfectly fine? RCE is perfectly acceptable too? After all, my machine is just asking for stuff and the other machine is responding in a way its code tells it to. The open door analogy fits pretty well here, really. Just because you see an opening doesn’t mean you’re allowed in.
- brotheradam 4y agoMost funny is that Sony themselves apparently violated copyright with the rootkit itself: It included code of the LAME MP3 encoder, mpglib, FAAC and others, and they didn't adhere to the licensing requirements of these.
- lizardactivist 4y agoWould definitely not agree to it, but at least it's not as bad as what's going on in your average iPhone or Android. Someone said "put Sony executives in jail for this", but for each of those executives we would have to jail a dozen executives from Microsoft, Apple, Google, Dell, HP, Intel, AMD, and more.
- routerl 4y agoYeah, that's the point.
- xbar 4y agoYou are right. It begs for a persistent, searchable list of such known violations along with the publicly traded entity name (e.g. Sony) and list of division heads (e.g.Shunsuke Muramatsu) that may have held relevant executive positions at the time.
- lexicality 4y agoPersonally I feel like the power and money you get from being an executive should be counterbalanced by taking legal liability for crimes committed by the company under your watch. Yes we'd need to put a lot of people in jail if we did this, but it'd discourage future crimes I feel.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoSony's two mistakes were installing a rootkit if the EULA was refused and not mentioning some of the software in the EULA. Modern devices often invade more of your privacy, but they aren't doing it criminally.
- bregma 4y agoLike banks being too big to fail, these execs are too privileged to jail.
- mewse-hn 4y agoToday's equivalent would be if sony silently rooted your phone so their software could monitor and disable unauthorized music playing on your device, still very very wrong
- yeetsfromhellL2 4y agoThe kid me was so enraged by that incident that I have still not bought a Sony product.
- marssaxman 4y agoLikewise! They completely destroyed their brand as far as I'm concerned.
- chefandy 4y agoAnd even after that, Lenovo still stumbled with the Superfish/SSL Hijacker incident.
- hnburnsy 4y agoThe original blog post from Mark Russinovich who discovered the rootkit... https://web.archive.org/web/20150317040653/http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2005/10/31/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights-management-gone-too-far.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20150317040653/http://blogs.tech...
- nonfamous 4y agoTIL the CTO of Microsoft discovered the Sony rootkit.
- iguessthislldo 4y agoLooks like he also created the sysintenal debug tools for Windows, which brought him to Microsoft after they bought them.
- yabones 4y agoRussinovich is also the author of the Sysinternals tools, some of the most useful for problem solving on Windows machines. He also discovered a rootkit in Norton around the same time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Russinovich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Russinovich Quite an interesting guy.
- snarfy 4y agoI wrote a good portion of MediaMax. I told them it was illegal when they asked me to load the driver before the user accepted the EULA. They said it was a legal 'grey area'. I quit shortly there after. AMA
- bibaheu 4y agoCan you tell us what the driver actually did? How did it "prevent" piracy, and what are your feelings about the allegedly bad software quality?
- snarfy 4y agoThe driver was pretty simple. When a CD was inserted, it checked for a watermark and if there, returned pseudo random sectors of data. To play the CD on PC required using their software player. The software player had the ability to rip the CD to .wma files and this was how you were supposed to use the CDs. This only affected playback on PCs. CD audio players played the discs as normal CDs. I never thought it would prevent piracy. They said it was a success even if only a small percentage are stopped by it. I didn't believe in the software but I do believe in copyright so I took the job. The software was put together by 4 guys on a shoestring budget. It's amazing it worked at all. People read into this and think big Sony/BMG money but in reality it's tiny contractors. Some of us were doxxed back then and was a pretty horrible experience all around.
- bibaheu 4y agoThanks for responding, it's quite interesting story. > When a CD was inserted, it checked for a watermark and if there, returned pseudo random sectors of data. So, if the driver was not running in the machine, the disc would be a standard Data+AudioCD? Nothing else to stop reading it as a generic music disc?
- mnw21cam 4y agoAutoplay. One of the single most stupid default settings in Windows ever since Windows supported removable media, which is a while ago. It's up there with the default of hiding full file names from you. Basically, if you inserted the disc, Windows would see the data partition, and "helpfully" run the installer for you. Then you'd have the driver installed, and it would block access to read the disc as a generic music disc.
- paulywog 4y agoHere's a video about this rootkit made by one of the Windows developers from that era. All of his videos are very entertaining and a unique look into Microsoft engineering from the 90s and early 00s. https://youtu.be/PqWjq2SdzpI https://youtu.be/PqWjq2SdzpI
- DamnInteresting 4y agoYears ago this YouTuber did some paid voice work for me, narrating dozens of my site's non-fiction articles for an audio book. Fast forward a few years, and he started making his own videos about the exact stories he narrated for me. Dozens of them. It's not technically violating copyright law, but it is parasitic and backstabbing. A few examples: Me: (October 2020): https://www.damninteresting.com/how-miss-shillings-orifice-helped-win-the-war/ https://www.damninteresting.com/how-miss-shillings-orifice-h... Him: (November 2020): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkAVE7cspw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkAVE7cspw Me (2006): https://www.damninteresting.com/it-came-from-above/ https://www.damninteresting.com/it-came-from-above/ Him (2017): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbPG8jSud14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbPG8jSud14 Me (2006): https://www.damninteresting.com/the-crypt-of-civilization/ https://www.damninteresting.com/the-crypt-of-civilization/ Him (2021): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0pduckpU-A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0pduckpU-A I recently had someone look through his catalog, and so far he has over 70 videos that seem to be strongly "inspired" by my site's work. I worry he'll shamelessly gobble up everything I have created. Google is already burying me in the regurgitations. Blah. Apologies for the rant, it just pains me to see these poachers reaping all of the rewards for others' research and leg work.
- sleepdreamy 4y agoWhat a snake. You should make a video calling him out with proof, forcing him to respond. Post it all over Reddit/HackerNews etc;
- rubatuga 4y agoThe pain is justified. Social media can be a cruel and hypercompetitive place. Maybe you need better advertising?
- bottled_poe 4y ago> It's not technically violating copyright law Are you sure about this?
- DamnInteresting 4y agoMonths ago I spoke to an IP consultant who had previously helped me when another writer plagiarized my work; the consultant felt this YouTuber's behavior is not actionable, just scummy and shameless. And the YouTube terms of service don't seem to prohibit this sort of parasitism.
- Linda703 4y ago[dead]
- cryptoz 4y agoMost people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care? Additionally, Sony should do it again if they get the chance!