I'm not sure how many of you have been following the Sony CD DRM hysteria* on the web, but it is a pretty hot topic on some tech forums and among some World of Warcraft players.

This gem from Slashdot made me giggle:

"Also on this topic, Matt Nikki in the comments section discovered that the DRM can be bypassed simply by renaming your favourite ripping program with "$sys$" at the start of the filename and ripping the CD using this file, which is now undetectable even by the Sony DRM. You can use the Sony rootkit itself to bypass their own DRM!" "


* link at: http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html

Some bad typing ate my reply.

Mark has an update. His blog is pretty much required reading for people like me. [I'm one of the people who owns his book...a must read for you REAL windows types :) ]

http://www.sysinternals.com/Blog/

Driver shims that sit in the CD stack are pretty common with "advanced" copy protection schemes. So, it's not unusual. I'd comment more, but the slashdot threads have done it MUCH more justice.

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/07/1221209&tid=233&tid=207&tid=10

WoW. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/04/secfocus_wow_bot/ for real? haha

For real. The patches are supposed to "fix" the problem by making the directory visible in the file structure, so I'm betting the WoW hackers will keep using the old version.

I'm wondering how long it will take before everything in one of the mmorps is no drop, including the coin. That seems to be about the only way to keep everyone honest.