EFF, State of Texas files lawsuits against Sony BMG

Looks like Sony's not going to get off easy after all. In a press release linked from Digg, the EFF has announced that they are filing a class action lawsuit against Sony BMG over the rootkit fiasco. In addition, Slashdot is reporting that the Texas Attorney General is also filing suit over Sony's anti-consumer practices.

This is an interesting development, especially after Cary Sherman, the president of the Recording Industry Ass. of America, brazenly stated Friday that Sony did nothing wrong.

Maybe this will be a painful reminder to you, Sony, and your ilk... yes, you own the music, but you *do not* own our PCs. Keep your hands off.

Expect more of these suits to come. The defecation is about to hit the rotary oscillator.

More pwnage! Gamers frag Thompson's book in comments on Amazon.com

Double the pwnage, double the fun!

Jack's been taking heat on Amazon.com in the form of reader comments on his new book, Out of Harm's Way, according to an article on Gamepolitics.

In response, he threatened Amazon with legal action if they didn't immediately remove the negative comments, saying:

"If these ALL of these reviews which violate your own "review rules" are not down from your Amazon.com site by 7:16 pm Sunday, November 20, then I shall have to proceed accordingly..."

Well, the deadline has come and gone. There are now a total of 162 reviews, most of which are negative. The few positive comments look like they could easily be straight from Jack himself.

Waiting with baited breath to see how he reacts in the morning...

Jack Thompson disbarred in Alabama, thrown off videogame case

Karma's a bitch, isn't it?

Jack Thompson's behavior is beginning to catch up with him. He was scheduled to appear in an Alabama case, Strickland vs. Sony, where he is suing Sony, Walmart, Take Two Interactive, Rockstar Games and GameStop, claiming Grand Theft Auto caused a man to shoot two cops and a dispatcher there.

Defense attorneys made a motion to have him removed from the case due to misconduct relating to his patterns of harassing behavior toward his critics. He withdrew from the case to prevent the issue from having an impact on the case.

Gamepolitics is reporting that on Friday, Circuit Court Judge James Moore rejected Thompson's attempt to withdraw from the case. Furthermore, he has revoked Thompson's Pro Hac Vice, or visiting attorney admision for the State of Alabama, effectively throwing him off the case and disbarring him in the state. The judge also noted that he was referring the matter to the Alabama Bar for "disciplinary action".

Judge Moore was quite explicit in his comments toward Thompson, saying "Mr. Thompson's actions before this Court suggest that he is unable to conduct himself in a manner befitting practice in this state."

As expected, ol' Jack responded in typical fashion by firing off a letter to the Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission, saying:

"I have had the disturbing experience of appearing before the above jurist in a high-profile wrongful death action, Strickland v. Sony... In my opinion, Judge Moore has violated...the Alabama Canons of Judicial Ethics by his unfortunate, improper, and prejudicial acts in this case, at the expense of three bereaved Alabama families."

Nice going, Jack... you're just dying for a contempt-of-court ruling, aren't ya? Of course, why not? You show contempt for everyone else... why not a judge?

Sony tries to pull a fast one on its customers

Well, seems like a lot has happened since my last post. Looks like Sony is the latest shining example of corporate asshattery.

Many other sites have covered better than I could ever hope to, but I'll summarize:

To "protect" their "intellectual property" (we call it music around here), Sony BMG chose a digital rights management (DRM) product to prevent people from "stealing" their music. The problem is they included a bit of code in their DRM software which hides itself from the operating system, and by extension, the user. This bit of code is what we call in the IT biz a "rootkit". A rootkit is software that is used by hackers to hide the fact that they have penetrated your system to install whatever nasty tools they use to take control.

While Sony says in the fine print of their license agreement that they will install software to allow you to listen to their music on your PC, nowhere do they state that they are making a low-level, fundamental change in how your PC works. Worse yet, any hacker can now hide code on your PC to take control of it simply by appending "$sys$" to the beginning of the file name so that it disappears from sight.

Sony downplays the dangers of the rootkit and publishes a service pack to remove it - turns out the remover doesn't really work, though.

Very quickly, people began to take advantage of the rootkit, first as a World of Warcraft cheat, then as a means to install trojan code to seize control of a PC.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation issues an open letter demanding that Sony recall the CD. They also ask for people who have been infected by the rootkit to contact them regarding the possibilities of a class action lawsuit.

Word spreads like wildfire through the Internet. Many blogs and tech news sites discuss the details of the story. Word eventually spreads to the traditional press, giving the story wider coverage.

Then, to add insult to injury, it's discovered that Sony may have included open source code in their DRM suite (specifically, portions of the LAME MP3 encoder package) without following the requirements of its license, the LGPL. Apparently Sony feels its OK to violate other peoples' copyrights as long as they are protecting their own.

BoingBoing has a detailed timeline of all the events to date.

It's bad enough that Sony treats their customers like criminals - to have them steal other peoples' software to create a software monster that violates the security of their customers' PCs is simply outrageous.

Sony BMG's global digital business division president Thomas Hesse has been quoted as saying "Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?" This, I feel, is the most damning statement of all. In effect they're saying that "our customers are too dumb to notice that we've hacked their PCs, so we'll do anything we damn well please".

The problem, Sony, is your customers include a pretty clued-in group of individuals who *will* catch you trying to pull stunts like this and scream from the rooftops to make sure the non-technical portion of your customer base finds out.

Related Links:
Initial posting on Sysinternals regarding rootkit
Slashdot discussion
Google search for "Sony rootkit"