Thanks for the heads up from Kent Smith and feedback10k on this news. As we reported earlier this week, Sony took the bold move to install without a users knowledge, via some of their music Cd's, a new and quite radical, software type DRM. Unfortunately, this is one Digital Rights Management payload that one cannot easily or safely remove, even if you consider yourself a skilled end user.
Once certain Sony music Cd's are placed in a PC, a 'rootkit' type program is secretly delivered, that utilizes clever cloaking techniques to hide the drivers and files from the PC owner. Now, thanks to security expert Mark Russinovich, the Internet community has been alerted. Since then, this story has spurred massive negative publicity around the web. Sony knows now, that they have a mess to clean up and what a mess this is!
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After tracing the rouge software back to his recently purchased Van Zant CD, Russinovich attempted to uninstall the DRM, but to no avail. "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," he wrote on his company's blog. "Now I was mad." |
Now according to this article at BetaNews, we can read that Sony is offering a "patch" that can be of assistance in ousting this ugly bug. This patch can be downloaded from the Sony BMG's Web site. In addition, another patch is available for anti virus vendors only. Unfortunately, this patch will not remove the DRM, it just makes it visible, you still have to manually get rid of it. Apparently, users will still be unable to delete it without risk of rendering their CD drive inoperable. Customers must contact Sony BMG support for removal instructions. Too little, too late it would seem, especially if you're affected by this issue.
Source: BetaNews
