{"id":1865,"date":"2012-09-30T17:41:07","date_gmt":"2012-09-30T23:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/?p=1865"},"modified":"2012-09-30T17:41:07","modified_gmt":"2012-09-30T23:41:07","slug":"thanks-for-the-rootkit-sony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/?p=1865","title":{"rendered":"Thanks for the rootkit, Sony"},"content":{"rendered":"

You think I’d be leery of installing any software on a Sony branded disc after the horribly unethical way that the Sony rootkit scandal<\/a> went down years ago.\u00a0 But I was a fool.<\/p>\n

The long story short: I installed Blu-Ray writing software from Sony on my Windows XP laptop, and that software installed something called SafeDisc onto my laptop.\u00a0 I didn’t even notice it was there until I tried to play Age of Empires II: The Conquerors<\/a> on that laptop.<\/p>\n

This is a game I own, and the whole point of the SafeDisc rootkit is to stop “pirated games” from playing on a system.\u00a0 Now here is another reason why DRM is just a fucking bad idea.\u00a0 Look at this picture of these two game discs.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The disc on the left is a copy (OMFG!) that I made of a game called Lords of the Realm II<\/a>.\u00a0 I made the copy of the original – which I bought – so that the original game disc would not get any more scratched up and degraded than it already is.\u00a0 I happen to play this game a lot.<\/p>\n

And I played it a lot on my laptop, even with the “SafeDisc” rootkit surreptitiously installed.\u00a0 So FAIL for the SafeDisc rootkit there.<\/p>\n

The disc on the right of the image is another game disc I bought, and the SafeDisc rootkit decided that it was a copied disc and that the game shouldn’t be allowed to load.\u00a0 Fail #2.<\/p>\n

And not only does this rootkit fail miserably at what it is supposedly intended to do, but it also changed about 269 different files on my system.\u00a0 I habitually scan all my PCs with anti-malware software, and when I used ClamAV<\/a> from my Linux partition to scan, I suddenly noticed that many Windows system files and many files belonging to my Avast Windows Antivirus had been “infected”.<\/p>\n

So, it’s off to nuke-and-pave land I go.\u00a0 I am currently reinstalling Windows XP, and if I have time today I will try to install Linux Mint Debian Edition Xfce on part of that HD too.<\/p>\n

And then I can be free of Sony’s god damn rootkit shenanigans.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You think I’d be leery of installing any software on a Sony branded disc after the horribly unethical way that the Sony rootkit scandal went down years ago.\u00a0 But I was a fool. The long story short: I installed Blu-Ray writing software from Sony on my Windows XP laptop, and that software installed something called […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4,26],"tags":[241,368,424,423],"class_list":["post-1865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-linux","category-windows","tag-drm","tag-malware","tag-rootkit","tag-sony"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1865"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1865\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1869,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1865\/revisions\/1869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}