Sony’s rootkit DRM continues to get them into trouble.

The state of California has filed a class-action suit against Sony over their rookit DRM, stating that it violates at least three CA statutes, and a New York lawyer is planning a class-action suit for all Americans affected. Mark Russinovich at Sysinternals posted that getting the uninstaller requires adding yourself to Sony’s spam list, and that the uninstaller opens the door for system crashes since it tries to unload the cloaked Aries driver while running. Today we also have the first report that a trojan exploiting Sony’s DRM has been spotted.

Any CD with the label shown should probably be avoided unless you want the rootkit. The EFF has a post that lists some of the rootkit installer CDs. It’s interesting that they list “features” of their rootkit, although they forgot “allows others to hide processes on your machine”. What’s amazing is that someone at Sony probably thought nobody would discover it.

I posted bbmrtg v1.8 up on deadcat today. Changes in version 1.8 are:

• support for routers2.cgi added (Chris Blank)
• changed bb*unit to default to ShortLegend value if necessary
• added support for nopercent, noo, and noi MRTG options
• fixed TRON output to properly display bb*host name
• cleaned up some HTML errors

I’m looking at developing support for trends or moving averages instead of hard values for determining green-yellow-red status levels. There are times when I want to know if a value is outside the normal expected range instead of just being over or under a fixed threshold.

I also plan to update mrtg-rrd.cgi next to support selecting different graph types. The default area graphs aren’t always the best choice for displaying two unrelated values. At times two lines would be better.