Fergie's Tech Blog

SysInternals: Sony’s Rootkit: First 4 Internet Responds

Over on the SysInternals blog, Mark Russinovich writes:

First 4 Internet, the company that implements Sony’s Digital Rights Management (DRM) software that includes a rootkit, has responded to my last post, More on Sony: Dangerous Decloaking Patch, EULAs and Phoning Home. They rebut four of the points I raise in the post. Their first statement relates to my assertion that Sony’s player contacts Sony’s web site each time it runs and sends the site an ID associated with the CD the user is playing:

The player has a standard rotating banner that connects the user to additional content (e.g. provides a link to the artist web site). The player simply looks online to see if another banner is available for rotation. The communication is one-way in that a banner is simply retrieved from the server if available. No information is ever fed back or collected about the consumer or their activities.

I speculated that the player sends Sony’s web site a CD identifier as part of a check to see if new song lyrics or artwork was available, which they essentially confirm. Their claim that the communication is “one way” from Sony’s web site is false, however, since Sony can make a record of each time their player is used to play a CD, which CD is played, and what computer is playing the CD. If they’ve configured standard Web server logging then they are doing that. As I stated earlier, I doubt Sony is using this information to track user behavior, but the information allows them to do so. In any case, First 4 Internet cannot claim what Sony is or is not doing with the information since they do not control those servers, and the First 4 Internet response fails to address the fact that the End User License Agreement (EULA) and Sony executives either make no mention of the “phone home” behavior or explicitly deny it.

posted by Fergie @ 11/07/2005 07:39:00 AM