, 2005-11-22
The big story the last few weeks has been the Sony BMG rootkit and in fact, it's the kind of story for which columnists drool: a big company does something unbelievably dumb that violates basic security principles. If you don't know what I'm talking about (and if you really don't, I'm amazed - you need to follow the news more!), you can read excellent coverage on SecurityFocus, plus a good write-up on Wired, or catch up with a timeline of events brought to you by Boing Boing (parts one, two and three).
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Sadly, in software industry, not too many know what they are doing, including security aspect of their software, but they are all too keen to take money from their customers and then imposing on them all forms of unfair restriction in the EULA. At the same time taking no responsibility. Software seems to be treated so much differently from other goods and services.
I am so glad to see the debate of DMCRA, which is LONG LONG overdue to counter the anti-consumers provision in DMCA and in software's EULA. And I sincerely hope wisdom and common sense would prevail to put DMCRA above the silly DMCA.
One of the reason why many AV companies have not declared that they have tools to remove ALL traces of the Sony DRM rubbish may be largely held back by their lawyers for fear of the DMCA big-stick.
Even to date, MS has not declared that they will remove Sony's DRM rubbish even though it is buried deep into the kernel and could make your CD drive disappeared if tempered. MS like most are removing the cloaking part.
Given the fact that Sony (by association with) and F4I have stolen other's IP and software, other's removing their stuff should not be viewed as carrying out circumvention process. They should be called reclaiming of the IP for the rightful owner.
In fact anyone should now be able to disassemble and reverse engineer the Sony & F4I software - that is all LGPL/GPL requires of users of their software to make them available.
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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/columns/370/32730#32730