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General discussion

Sony's cure even worse than the original disease

Nov 15, 2005 3:43AM PST

Sony's copy protection hole just keeps getting deeper.
It turns out that the uninstaller for their XCP copy protection being distributed by Sony's software vendor First4Internet leaves an ActiveX control on the user's computer that opens it up to 'drive-by downloads' - A malicious program could be installed without user's knowledge by simply visiting a web page. This was discovered by researchers from Princeton (J. Alex Halderman and Ed Felten).

www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=927

One could conclude that First4Internet is a pretty incompentent software developer, and that the executives at Sony who bought this stuff didn't do even the most basic due diligence to see if they were buying and distributing a safe, effective, and responsible product. Good thing they don't sell pharmaceuticals!

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