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Thu, 10 Nov 2005

[14:53] The Sony DRM Debacle and why I like Sysinternals
This post is partly in relation to the current Sony DRM debacle but before you all groan and change channels I must absolve myself of the crime of "posting old news". As I've whined previously I just don't have time to keep up with the real world right now. Even my lunch hour is spent reading the manuals for the software we are inflictinginstalling at work (because no-one else seems to have).

So anyway, I only stumbled upon the whole Sony DRM thing on Monday (the 7th, a full week late) whilst on a completely different mission:

I had to verify that a lot of machines were up to the task of running the software we are installing - things like CPU being beefy enough, enough RAM and free disk, certain versions of Windows/IE etc. I knew that the psinfo utility from Sysinternals could give me that information but due to the volume of machines I needed the output in tabular format rather than human readable format. No probs I thought, the -c option will dump the output in CSV format. Hurrah! Then I found that the Kernel Version and possibly the Processor Type fields might have a comma in them. Obviously this might wreak havoc with a comma seperated file. I noticed that the -t option allowed you to specify your own delimiter. I wanted tabs and I tried all sorts of ways to get the -t option to accept a tab character but it refused. I dealt with it by getting upset because I couldn't use the delimiter I wanted. In the end I e-mailed the author, one Mark Russinovich, a quick note saying that there was an error in the documentation on the webpage, that the downloadable version didn't seem to match the documentation version and I slipped in a request "Can I please have an update to psinfo.exe to allow TABs to be passed to -t", hoping that my other information, like a sacrifice to the gods, would provide me with some kind of credit/karma. Imagine my surprise when he e-mailed me back today:

Thanks for the correction.
I've attached an update that supports a tab delimiter. The current posted version is 1.71, this version is 1.72.
-Mark
with a swanky new version of psinfo attached to the email! VERY big thank-yous to Mark for making my life just that little bit easier :)

Not only do Sysinternals provide an awesome trove of information and a set of FREE (even for commercial use) utilities - they update on demand within 48 hours!!! The help for psinfo now specifies the tab delimiter: -t The default delimiter for the -c option is a comma, but can be overriden with the specified character. Use "\t" to specify tab.

And where does Sony come into this? Well, in case you've been living under the same rock that I have, the latest move in the Music Industry vs The Consuming Public from Sony is a VERY excitingly interesting piece of DRM work that is effectively a Windows rootkit. Mark picked this up first in his blog on the 31st.

If you haven't already, I highly recommend you go and check it out. He provides a very thorough analysis of the software in question and all but provides a step-by-step tutorial on discovery and disassembly of said software. Since its publication, the article has gone on to raise merry hell for Sony - there are articles and podcasts everywhere and, to my knowledge, at least two class action lawsuits have been launched. There have even been rumblings reported from Microsoft regarding the way in which Sony are abusing their OS.

I don't think there's going to be any kind of "Battle of the Titans" action here; I do suspect that Sony might be adopting Microsofts DRM solution real soon though...

UPDATE: Seems someone has written a Trojan that uses the Sony DRM software to hide itself.

category: /tech | permalink | Comments suspended due to spamwhores