Sony, rootkits, and the escalation of the DRM war
Posted Nov 3, 2005 6:17 UTC (Thu) by
Duncan (guest, #6647)
Parent article:
Sony, rootkits, and the escalation of the DRM war
This was one of the things that finally pushed me off of MSWormOS, to
Linux, when I otherwise would have been upgrading to what I began to call
eXPrivacy.
I realized (as my newsgroup posts from the time confirm) that the
"activation" code MS was shipping in "eXPrivacy" was setting a precedent.
Sure, at the time, the code collected a "somewhat limited" amount of
information on the computer hardware, then weakened that rather more by
bitmapping specific information to a small number of bits (ranges for disk
size values to fit in 2 or 3 bits, IIRC) or hashed it (as they did with
the computer's MAC address and disk ID, IIRC), and MS claimed even that
wasn't stored in a way directly retrievable by user, but the precedent was
clear -- MS had decreed it was acceptable to spy on users and transmit
information obtained locally back to the mother ship for tracking
purposes. That precedent crossed the line -- I was simply *NOT* willing
to accept it, both in principle, and because I knew that once MS made it
OK, it would be equally OK for every other software maker, many of which I
trusted substantially less than MS.
A few years later, and spyware has become a household term. There are
anti-spyware distributors similar to the AV distributors that have been
with us for some time. Now we see music companies distributing root-kits
on their CDs, and there's really no end in sight. Unfortunately, not
enough other folks saw it coming as I did, or cared enough about it if
they did, to refuse to have a part in it, period, or we'd not be in the
position we (as the computing community, of which Linux is still a part,
tho it doesn't affect us so directly) in, today.
Fortunately, others had this idea about software freedom, that the /user/
actually had some rights that needed considered, long before I came along,
and Linux was available to jump to. I now consider that the best computer
choice I ever made, bar none, and competing for the best /choice/ I ever
made, bar none.
Ironically, while I had discovered the land of software freedom and had
been increasingly thinking about switching for a couple years, I have MS
to thank for actually pushing me into it, as I'm honestly not sure if I'd
have ever given up the decade of experience I had on MS by that time, if
they hadn't.
I've often said that the clearest demonstration of whether MS thought
themselves a monopoly was the move to activation. They /knew/ what
happened to the companies before that had tried to force dongles in the
name of copy protection -- they got marginalized by the competition, in
some cases MS itself being that competition, and wouldn't have made the
same mistake with activation, if they thought there was any competition to
move to. That they did this at the time of the monopoly trial and STILL
got away with it...
Anyway, I'm fortunate that there was an alternative for me. To that
point, I'd personally spent quite some portion of my income over the
several previous years buying MS, because the OS and my (hobbyist)
programming platform was something I wasn't going to trust to pirate
sources even if I HAD found it moral to do so. As well, I had been active
in the IE/OE 4, 5, and 5.5 public betas, and had been in line at midnight
for the release of Windows98, so yes, MS definitely lost a loyal customer!
What a way to move in such a short time, but if freedom software such
as Linux hadn't been available, the other choice was a complete reversal
-- NEVER buying anything from MS, pirating EVERYTHING, because that would
have been the only way to keep out of the activation net.
Fortunately, it didn't come to that, and I didn't have to hobble my
conscience.
(Actually, the hardware makers ought to thank MS too, because MS' loss has
been to a large degree the hardware maker's gain. I've had a dual Opteron
system for nearly two years now, my first dual processor system, and just
today upgraded to 4x300 G Seagate drives, which will soon be running Linux
kernel based RAID, the first time I've ever had a RAID system, neither
hardware upgrade of which I would have had money for if I had continued
spending on MS and software in general at the rate I was.)
Anyway... despite the Sonys of the world, the /good/ news is that at least
most of the rest of the world seems to be slowly wising up to MS and the
consequences it brings with it, and is gradually beginning to make choices
supporting software freedom for themselves, too. Too bad the US, yet
again, seems to be pulling the tail of the clue train, both technically
and freedom wise, as it seems to be doing more and more often, lately.
Duncan
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