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2005-11-14 Home Front: Culture Wars

Sony root kit designed to destroy your CD/DVD burner -The Register

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Posted by 3dc 2005-11-14 11:47|| || Front Page|| [1 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 I should point out that the Military should make it very clear not to play Sony CDs in any DOD equipment.

Posted by 3dc 2005-11-14 12:18|| 2005-11-14 12:18|| Front Page Top

#2 Title is misleading. The Sony rootkit does not damage hardware. Attempts to remove it can 'disable' your CD drive -- at least until you reinstall Windows.

Turn off autoplay and/or buy Slysoft's AnyDVD product, which not only protects your PC but also allows you to play protected music CDs without installing any DRM software.

Posted by Iblis">Iblis 2005-11-14 13:18|| 2005-11-14 13:18|| Front Page Top

#3 A story back in the days of the IBM PC XT was of some individual who notified IBM of a way to make his computer violently blow up. They immediately sent to representatives to see him.

Their 5 1/4" floppy drive could operate either clockwise or counter-clockwise. He wrote a simple program to make it go back and forth between the two. It set up a resonance and overheated so much that the floppy drive blew up.

They thanked him for his demo, got a copy of his program, and gave him a brand new, top-of-the-line PC AT as a thank you. At the time, about a $5,000 computer.

Posted by Anonymoose 2005-11-14 13:31|| 2005-11-14 13:31|| Front Page Top

#4 A story back in the days of the IBM PC XT was of some individual who notified IBM of a way to make his computer violently blow up. They immediately sent to representatives to see him.

Their 5 1/4" floppy drive could operate either clockwise or counter-clockwise. He wrote a simple program to make it go back and forth between the two. It set up a resonance and overheated so much that the floppy drive blew up.

They thanked him for his demo, got a copy of his program, and gave him a brand new, top-of-the-line PC AT as a thank you. At the time, about a $5,000 computer.

Posted by Anonymoose 2005-11-14 13:31|| 2005-11-14 13:31|| Front Page Top

#5 Title is misleading. The Sony rootkit does not damage hardware. Attempts to remove it can 'disable' your CD drive -- at least until you reinstall Windows.

Or much simpler; until you install Linux. Decent distributions like Mandrake,Suse and to a lessser degree RedHat/Fedora beat Windows installation (ie when YOU have to do it instead of getting it preinstalled by the manufacturer) hands down.

A story back in the days of the IBM PC XT was of some individual who notified IBM

That was ever my dream damaging hardware with software, the victory of spirit over matter, the ever lasting goal of platonician philosophy. Eventually I learned how to do it but I refrained.

As an aside, one day I learned of the F00F a bug in the Pentium II where a certain illegal instruction launched it into an internal loop (ie processor never went to next instruction). This was a dream for malware authors since it could be triggered from ANY program on ANY operating system. Of course I tried. The box froze. I hut the reset key. Like foreseen nothing happened: the reset key forces a known address into the processor so next instruction executed will be that one but here the bug caused the processor never to go to next instruction. I powerd it off, restarted and... nothing. For a second I feared to have damaged the processor but I thought that in fact the processor had continued getting power from the alim condensers. I powered it off again, waited five minutes to let the condensers exhaust and the processor die; powered it on and it restarted.

BTW the Linux people came with a patch within 2 days. It involved a clever trick who made the trapping of illegal instructions causing a page fault so the processor branched to page fault handling instead of hitting the bug. I have heard that in the Windows world it took months until there was a fix. :-)

Posted by JFM">JFM 2005-11-14 15:45|| 2005-11-14 15:45|| Front Page Top

#6 Note: the link does not point to The Register.

Posted by Bomb-a-rama 2005-11-14 17:00|| 2005-11-14 17:00|| Front Page Top

#7 The classic story is of the Motorola 6800 HCF instruction, as described in the Jargon File.

Posted by Eric Jablow">Eric Jablow 2005-11-14 19:24|| 2005-11-14 19:24|| Front Page Top

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