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Sony BMG Admits Disc Fix Floppy
John Stith
Staff Writer
2005-12-09
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Sony BMG continues to look for new ways not to cause problems for themselves as professors at Princeton said they discovered the patch Sony and SunnComm distributed to fix security problems in the MediaMax content protection software causes more harm than good.
 | | Sony BMG Fix Questionable |  |
Earlier this week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation got Sony BMG to fix their MediaMax content protection software by getting a patch issued from SunnComm. The Princeton professors showed a bug in the patch that really didn't fix the problem. It altered it somewhat but the vulnerability is still there.
The professors have advised people not to even put these CDs into computers, claiming the problems is as bad as the notorious rootkit row of November.
It's too bad for Sony. They've done a right royal job of ticking off the masses and some of their own artists in addition to the blogosphere. All this started back in November with Mark Russinovich revealed a root kit on a couple of CDs he had. The rootkit had been part of the XCP program put in place by Sony as one method of digital rights management.
It turned into a PR nightmare for Sony after some misspoken words by the president of Sony BMG's global digital business, Thomas Hesse. Even some of Sony BMG's artists were have problems because groups like Van Zant were told by Sony they could lose well over half of the projected sales for the coming month, which is right in the middle of the holiday shopping season.
The XCP problem affected over 50 different CDs and the MediaMax issue affected 32 discs. Nearly 100 discs being affected during the holiday season is decidedly bad for business. Particularly since the people who purchase these discs probably aren't the main offenders anyway.
While Sony BMG has agreed with the Princeton professors, they still have to swallow a lot of dung to work this out and it's still three months away before the PS3 is slated to hit stores. Sony has some problems they've got to work out, particularly since the lawsuits have already been filed from places like Texas.
About the Author:
John is a staff writer for SecurityProNews covering cyber security.
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