Ah Sony Music is involved.
Remember the time Sony Music installed a rootkit on peoples' computers via commercially purchased CDs because hacking paying customers' computers seemed like a good way to combat piracy?
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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I can't believe I hadn't heard of this.
Sony BMG initially denied that the rootkits were harmful. It then released an uninstaller for one of the programs that merely made the program's files invisible while also installing additional software that could not be easily removed.
And then they just paid some settlements, recalled some CDs, and continued to operate as if nothing has happened. Bloody hell.
I remembered there was a Part II to the story that made it even worse, but did not remember those details. Should have read my own link! Thanks for highlighting that because it truly is the icing on the cake.
I fucking remember. Had been the last time I bought a CD from a major label!
Edit: Spelling
I remember, way back when, I think it was one of Natalie Imbriglia's first albums, I stuck it into my PC's CD-ROM drive and something odd happened.
I could listen to a digital copy of the album via an included player and files that were in some locked weird format.
My CD drive couldn't see the normal CDDA portion of the disc just this little data area with a digital copy.
Wasn't impressed.
That schema was popular for a while. That weird format was probably Windows Media Audio (wma).The audio data was still there and was accessible with the right software/firmware combo. But sometimes those disks would auto run and inject malware. This was usually the Sony root kit. Sometimes that malware would disable your system's ability to access the audio tracks. Because for way too long windows machines would autoplay anything that was plugged into it and EVERYTHING ran as administrator. Most CD drives back then had firmware that could play the CD audio directly from the drive to your speakers, bypassing the OS entirely, so most people would never notice a difference until they tried to rip the tracks themselves.
Some older games worked this way too, without the malware. The software would be on the data portion and instead of copying big wave file to your PC (because mp3s weren't really a popular thing yet and drive speeds were slow), they would just play the audio from the audio track portion of the disk. You could sometimes pop those disks into a dumb CD player and listen to the audio directly as long as you skipped the data track at the beginning. You could burn your own disks like this around the same time. I remember making a few mixtapes on CD that stored a CD label/envelope tracklist as a PDF and mp3s of the CD tracks themselves on a data track at the end. Putting the data at the end allowed you to play it in a dumb CD player without having to skip the data track.
Why yes I did boycott Sony nearly 30 years ago.
The worst part was the response from someone high up at Sony was "most of the people who [had the rootkit installed on their PC against their will] dont know what a rootkit is anyways, so why should I care?"
Really was the tip of the privacy era iceberg if you ask me.
I worked for a startup that had as main investor a company called InterTrust. Our office was inside their building.
InterTrust was a patent portfolio that belonged to Sony and Philips. All they did was sue people. One day they were able to sue Apple on some stupid patent, and there was much rejoicing at the office.
Yup, I got rootkitted by those fuckers just installing their bullshit software for my mini-disc player.
I hate when you need to install different software for whatever camera, music player, whatever that you had. Luckily that is pretty rare that proprietary software is required nowadays.
I still miss my mini-disc player! I loved using it to record songs from the radio. I felt like I was truly living in the future, having such vast storage space (like, 50 low-quality songs, lol).
I always wanted one, but by the time my disposable income and the price of a player met, they were on their way out. Always seemed like a really cool bit of personal tech to me though.
I loved my minidisc player. My first was a Sharp but that was stolen in a robbery. So I replaced it with a Sony NetMD which I loved even more. Due to the new compression, depending on the length of the albums, you could fit 3 or 4 onto one disc. Also it docked with the PC, so labelling and ripping was really easy. I bought a compatible in line remote which had a backlit LCD display which I loved. The chewing gum stick battery lasted ages and if it did run out of power, I could screw on a little compartment that's held a AA battery and keep me going.
I loved that little player.
I remember Sony forcing everyone to use their proprietary SonicStage software and proprietary ATRAC3 audio file format with their Mini Disc players. Nothing else would work on their products. Thank goodness big industries don't influence governments worldwide, or we'd be heading into some kind of dystopia DRM-laden in every aspect of our lives. Oh wait...
That's when I stopped buying anything made by Sony.
All these lawsuits do is show me new cool stuff that Internet Archive has.
First the Streisand effect led to her home. Now it leads to her entire discography. Poor Barbara Streisand.
Yes, and please back up as much as possible while you're there. If they take it from us, we build our own Internet Archive, with blackjack and hookers.
Notable upload: Leaked FarCry 1.34 source code (without assets)
Some comments:
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What How
Thanks for sharing!
This source compiles with few modifications in Visual Studio .NET 2003 (MSVC 7.1)
see screens:
https://i.imgur.com/PjEAFn5.png
https://i.imgur.com/3obty91.jpeg
Game assets needed from version 1.33 (build 1.1.3.1395)
Crazy how amazed I was by those graphics back in the day. Definitely haven't aged that well but it doesn't look awful.
Someone needs to archive the Internet Archive before we lose it
Just took a look, they have tons of live show archives! So cool!
Yeah, there aren't many Pumpkins fans left these days, but the Internet Archive still manages to have a collection that beats the Smashing Pumpkins Audio Archive from the early 2000s.
Yeah, there aren’t many Pumpkins fans left these days
Woah woah woah. There are plenty of Pumpkins fans left these days. Damn did that make me feel old. Give us another twenty years before you issue such statements please, Sir or Madam.
Here is how record companies have treated their own precious assets: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire
10s of thousands of original master recordings lost forever. They should fucking be paying archive.org for preserving these artists' works
*Edit: and of course Universal is one of the plaintiffs. I hate these fuckers so much
*Edit: and of course Universal is one of the plaintiffs. I hate these fuckers so much.
Yep
The same music industry that made it impossible to have open mics in my city because their reps lurk around like little beady eyed trolls threatening to sue coffee shops and taverns over amateur musicians playing covers?
They suck the joy out of music and the day they finally wither and die will be a great day for intellectual freedom.
What? That's insane!
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Time to donate to the Internet Archive again: for those who want to and can afford it: https://archive.org/donate/
Just something funny: First time I donated to archive.org my bank blocked my card due to being a "suspicious payment".
I had to physically go to the bank because due to security reasons I couldn't unblock it in internet banking.
The high security looked like this:
"Hello. You blocked my card due to suspicious payment."
"OK, what's your name"
"[name]"
"I see. Did you make that payment?"
"Yes."
"OK, I'll send an e-mail to management. It should be unblocked in a few hours. Have a nice day."
"Bye."
They didn't want to see my ID card, not even the debit card. Nor sign anything. Just and only hear my name. "Security".
I had my insurance company ask me for my phone number for security purposes. It was an old one I had since replaced and forgotten, so they read it out to me and asked me to confirm it.
This has happened to me with my own bank sometimes, though thankfully all I have to do is call them, report the blocked payment, and answer the same useless questions that don't really prove anything security-wise, and that's it. I'm not sure why they insist on doing this song and dance, but at least I don't have to drive all the way to one of their locations to get it resolved, lol.
I mean it'd be a terrible shame if Frank Sinatra and Billy Holiday went broke and had to come out of retirement because of the internet archive's actions, maybe the labels a have a point here...
Pretty wishful thinking to suggest any of this effort is in support of the actual artists.
You missed the sarcasm. Sometimes hard to get in text. Both of those artists are long dead.
However, their heirs could still be getting royalties if the artists were savvy.
No, I got the sarcasm, I wanted to note the fact that these music labels are most definitely doing this in their own interest rather than to benefit artists.
This is disappointing to hear
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The labels' lawsuit filed in a federal court in Manhattan said the Archive's "Great 78 Project" functions as an "illegal record store" for songs by musicians including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday.
Representatives for the Internet Archive did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the complaint.
The Internet Archive is already facing another federal lawsuit in Manhattan from leading book publishers who said its digital-book lending program launched in the pandemic violates their copyrights.
A judge ruled for the publishers in March, in a decision that the Archive plans to appeal.
The labels' lawsuit said the project includes thousands of their copyright-protected recordings, including Bing Crosby's "White Christmas," Chuck Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven" and Duke Ellington's "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)".
The lawsuit said the recordings are all available on authorized streaming services and "face no danger of being lost, forgotten, or destroyed."
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Sony Music responsible for recently threatening to take radio streaming apps to court for streaming radio stations outside the UK under some false pretence.
They also couldnt give a crap about vinyl quality for their artists and have had entire reissues that were faulty and never repressed. They're seriously starting to piss me off recently. Going to donate to Archive.
Good on ya. Up the archive!
RIAA really likes to bite the hand that feeds them, and always gets surprised when it doesn't go well.
They shall fail miserably
I feel so hopeless, so pissed, all these news and how these corporations are destroying open web. I really had hope with new generations being more tech savvy and more online would push for openness of web, instead I've come to realize that new generations are really into apps and not going beyond that, not interested in deeper look into software and tech - as long as the gadget works and no matter any subscription cost or microtransactions or surveillance.
I try to be hopeful, but damn it is hard to stay optimistic. I've been trying little by little to push friends and family in a nice way into using Firefox, alternatives to big corporate software and so on, but I understand it takes too much effort for someone who is not really interested in these things. But I will be advocate of open web forever myself.
Edit: okay unfair to expect anything from new generations, and of course there are more tech savvy people than there probably use to be, but had hoped for a huge change in that demographic.
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