CITP Blog is hosted by Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, a research center that studies digital technologies in public life. Here you’ll find comment and analysis from the digital frontier, written by the Center’s faculty, students, and friends.
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I wrote yesterday about the security risks imposed by the SunnComm MediaMax copy protection technology that ships on some Sony CDs. (This is not to be confused with the XCP…
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More Suits Filed; MediaMax Insecurity Remains
Yesterday two lawsuits were filed against Sony, by the Texas Attorney General and the EFF. The Texas suit claims that Sony’s XCP technology violates the state’s spyware law. The EFF…
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Does Sony's Copy Protection Infringe Copyrights?
The Sony copy protection debacle has so many angles that the mainstream press is having trouble keeping track of them all. The rootkit. The spyware. The other spyware. The big…
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Not Again! Uninstaller for Other Sony DRM Also Opens Huge Security Hole
I have good news and bad news about Sony’s other CD DRM technology, the SunnComm MediaMax system. (For those keeping score at home, Ed and I have written a lot…
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Immunize Yourself Against Sony's Dangerous Uninstaller
Jeff Dwoskin and Alex Halderman have developed a simple tool that can immunize a Windows system against the dangerous CodeSupport ActiveX control that we have written about over the past…
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Update: Sony Uninstaller Hole Stays Open
Earlier today Ed Felten and I reported a serious security hole opened by the uninstaller that Sony provides to users who want to remove the First4Internet copy protection software. Further…
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Sony's Web-Based Uninstaller Opens a Big Security Hole; Sony to Recall Discs
[This post was co-written by J. Alex Halderman and Ed Felten.] Over the weekend a Finnish researcher named Muzzy noticed a potential vulnerability in the web-based uninstaller that Sony offers…
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Don't Use Sony's Web-based XCP Uninstaller
Alex Halderman and I have confirmed that Sony’s Web-based XCP uninstallation utility exposes users to serious security risk. Under at least some circumstances, running Sony’s Web-based uninstaller opens a huge…
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Sony Shipping Spyware from SunnComm, Too
Now that virus writers have started exploiting the rootkit built into Sony-BMG albums that utilize First4Internet’s XCP DRM (as I warned they would last week), Sony has at last agreed…
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SonyBMG DRM Customer Survival Kit
Here’s a handy bag of tricks for people whose computers are (or might be) infected by the SonyBMG/First4Internet rootkit DRM. The instructions here draw heavily from research by Alex Halderman…