Sony Abandons Copy-Control Music CDs
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Sony&#39;s music unit is abandoning its CDs that use built-in technology that limits copying them, after pushing the program for two years.
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SONY&#39;S music unit is abandoning its CDs that use built-in technology that limits copying them, after pushing the program for two years.
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Sony's Walkman entered a new era Thursday, as the company introduced two new models capable of playing not just audio, but also video. Sony also announced it would shutter its Connect music download service, effectively killing its ATRAC format in exchange for Windows Media.
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Tacit admission of defeat IFA 07 Sony will next year kill off its Connect digital music download service, Register Hardware has learned. Its Walkman products will instead Windows Media technology, the consumer electronics giant told its customers today.â¦
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Now shows can be recorded without anything physical to record them on. The same goes for music. The days of tape-cassette&#39;s are long-gone, but CDs could be on their way out, too.
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Its proprietary audio technology was a flop, says Sony, as it announces at a Berlin consumer electronics trade fair it will shutter its Connect digital music store and open its portable media players to other formats.
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Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the world's second largest music company, will this month become the last of the big four majors to drop copy protection software on music downloads, also known as digital rights management (DRM).
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(InfoWorld) - A line of USB drives sold by Sony installs files in a hidden folder that can be accessed and used by hackers, a Finnish security company charged Monday, raising the specter of a replay of the fiasco that hit Sony's music arm two years ago when researchers discovered that its copy protection software used rootkit-like technologies. According to F-Secure, the fingerprint-reader software included with the Sony MicroVault USM-F line of flash drives installs a driver that hides in a hidden directory under "c:\\windows". That directory and the files within it are not visible through Windows' usual APIs, said F-Secure researcher Mika Tolvanen in a posting to the company's blog Monday. "[But] if you know the name of the directory, it is possible to enter the hidden directory using [the] Command Prompt, and it is possible to create new hidden files," said Tolvanen. "There are also ways to run files from this directory." All of this -- and the fact that the directory goes unspotted by some antivirus scanners -- is similar to the Sony BMG rootkit case in late 2005. Then, researchers spotted rootkit-like cloaking technologies used by the copy-protection software Sony BMG Music Entertainment installed on PCs when customers played the label's audio CDs. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleged that Sony had violated federal law and settled with the company earlier this year. Before that, Sony paid out nearly $6 million to settle cases with U.S. states. "This isn't the same code, recycled," said Mikko Hypponen, F-Secure's chief research officer, in an interview Monday. "Sony doesn't do any of its own development in this area; it looks like a Chinese company did it. But the similarities lie in the fact that like the Sony BMG rootkit, this software uses a hidden folder and hides files in it." More important, he said, is another trait shared by both. "This can be used to hide malware," Hypponen charged. By mid-November 2005, less than two weeks after the first reports that the Sony BMG copy protection software used rootkit-style technologies, Trojan horses using the Sony code to hide from security software popped up in the wild. Hypponen is convinced the same thing can happen here. "This will be trivial to use," he said. Both Hypponen and Tolvanen pointed out that the MicroVault software is cloaking the folder for good reason: To protect the fingerprint reader's authentication files from being tampered with or circumvented. The issue, said Hypponen, is that Sony's left the door ajar. "What's not justified is that others can use this folder," he said. "If Sony was only hiding its own files, no one would object." F-Secure first notified Sony "about a month ago" that its rootkit-sniffing software, BlackLight, had reported hidden files on a system with the MicroVault software. "We never got a reply," said Hypponen. Sony did not respond to a Computerworld request for comment Monday.
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The message against illegally copying CDs for uses such as in file-sharing over the Internet has widely sunk in, said the company in it&#39;s recent announcement to drop the Copy-Control program.
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Sony has decided to give up on the music and video download business, choosing to focus on its struggling PlayStation group instead. The closing of Connect would also mean the loss of at least 20 jobs, paidcontent.org reported over the weekend.
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No flowers, please (Almost) Forgotten Tech Toshiba's decision to end its production of HD DVD players and recorders effectively marks the death of the optical disc format once touted as the natural successor to the phenomenally popular DVD.â¦
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Sony's three-year effort to beat Apple's iTunes Music Store is over.
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And then there were none Sony BMG, the last major record label that won't sell you music without DRM kneecapping will reverse its stance in February, according to a report today.â¦
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Amazon.com said its digital music store will now offer songs from Sony BMG Music Entertainment without  digital rights management protection.
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Executives from Nokia and Philips published an open letter today calling for the European Commission to consider scaling back, if not eliminating, imposing levies on digital recording media and playback devices, including DVRs and MP3 players. But the alternative may be a hard sell: increased DRM.
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Sony Corp. is removing a chip from the European version of its new PlayStation 3 (PS3) game console, a move that cuts costs but means users cannot play some of their old games.
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The Japanese electronics giant threw in the towel on its HD DVD technology, announcing that it would no longer develop, produce or market disc players for the format.