this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Ah Sony Music is involved.
Remember the time Sony Music installed a rootkit on peoples' computers via commercially purchased CDs because hacking paying customers' computers seemed like a good way to combat piracy?
Pepperidge Farm Remembers.
I can't believe I hadn't heard of this.
And then they just paid some settlements, recalled some CDs, and continued to operate as if nothing has happened. Bloody hell.
I remembered there was a Part II to the story that made it even worse, but did not remember those details. Should have read my own link! Thanks for highlighting that because it truly is the icing on the cake.
I fucking remember. Had been the last time I bought a CD from a major label!
Edit: Spelling
I remember, way back when, I think it was one of Natalie Imbriglia's first albums, I stuck it into my PC's CD-ROM drive and something odd happened.
I could listen to a digital copy of the album via an included player and files that were in some locked weird format.
My CD drive couldn't see the normal CDDA portion of the disc just this little data area with a digital copy.
Wasn't impressed.
That schema was popular for a while. That weird format was probably Windows Media Audio (wma).The audio data was still there and was accessible with the right software/firmware combo. But sometimes those disks would auto run and inject malware. This was usually the Sony root kit. Sometimes that malware would disable your system's ability to access the audio tracks. Because for way too long windows machines would autoplay anything that was plugged into it and EVERYTHING ran as administrator. Most CD drives back then had firmware that could play the CD audio directly from the drive to your speakers, bypassing the OS entirely, so most people would never notice a difference until they tried to rip the tracks themselves.
Some older games worked this way too, without the malware. The software would be on the data portion and instead of copying big wave file to your PC (because mp3s weren't really a popular thing yet and drive speeds were slow), they would just play the audio from the audio track portion of the disk. You could sometimes pop those disks into a dumb CD player and listen to the audio directly as long as you skipped the data track at the beginning. You could burn your own disks like this around the same time. I remember making a few mixtapes on CD that stored a CD label/envelope tracklist as a PDF and mp3s of the CD tracks themselves on a data track at the end. Putting the data at the end allowed you to play it in a dumb CD player without having to skip the data track.
Why yes I did boycott Sony nearly 30 years ago.
The worst part was the response from someone high up at Sony was "most of the people who [had the rootkit installed on their PC against their will] dont know what a rootkit is anyways, so why should I care?"
Really was the tip of the privacy era iceberg if you ask me.
I worked for a startup that had as main investor a company called InterTrust. Our office was inside their building.
InterTrust was a patent portfolio that belonged to Sony and Philips. All they did was sue people. One day they were able to sue Apple on some stupid patent, and there was much rejoicing at the office.
Yup, I got rootkitted by those fuckers just installing their bullshit software for my mini-disc player.
I hate when you need to install different software for whatever camera, music player, whatever that you had. Luckily that is pretty rare that proprietary software is required nowadays.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ofxFrwzDHM&t=41s
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=1ofxFrwzDHM&
https://piped.video/watch?v=1ofxFrwzDHM&
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I still miss my mini-disc player! I loved using it to record songs from the radio. I felt like I was truly living in the future, having such vast storage space (like, 50 low-quality songs, lol).
I always wanted one, but by the time my disposable income and the price of a player met, they were on their way out. Always seemed like a really cool bit of personal tech to me though.
I loved my minidisc player. My first was a Sharp but that was stolen in a robbery. So I replaced it with a Sony NetMD which I loved even more. Due to the new compression, depending on the length of the albums, you could fit 3 or 4 onto one disc. Also it docked with the PC, so labelling and ripping was really easy. I bought a compatible in line remote which had a backlit LCD display which I loved. The chewing gum stick battery lasted ages and if it did run out of power, I could screw on a little compartment that's held a AA battery and keep me going.
I loved that little player.
I remember Sony forcing everyone to use their proprietary SonicStage software and proprietary ATRAC3 audio file format with their Mini Disc players. Nothing else would work on their products. Thank goodness big industries don't influence governments worldwide, or we'd be heading into some kind of dystopia DRM-laden in every aspect of our lives. Oh wait...
That's when I stopped buying anything made by Sony.