It's been a while that Sony BMG was busted for their sniffing technology impregneted in some of the best selling music CDs. It was first made to the public almost a month ago and since then the company was slammed over and over again by privacy consious user groups. The evil program, called rootkit is well known for its evasive behaviour. There is not many means to detect it from windows environment other than a few programs like chkrootkit. More on rootkit can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootkit . As part of my Dell laptop, rootkit came preinstalled in my PC as a security feature an dthankfully enough it was documented in the manual.
Even more funnier fact is Sony's use of Open Source technology to implement DRM. Researchers found at least 5 functionalities in Sony's rootkit technology, already a part of LAME, an OpenSource product (ref:- http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-5960222.html). It will be interesting to see how Sony is going to defend the rising lawsuits in several different states in future. At the same time, it will be a good lesson for music industry who are typically getting an upperhand in tracking down and closing P2P softwares like Napstar and Kazaa.
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