The Pre-History Of The Sony Rootkit: Programmers Begging For Free Code

from the so-that's-how-it-works dept

The Sony BMG rootkit fiasco continues. We'd noted earlier that there was plenty of evidence suggesting that the actual copy protection technology was making use of open source code, breaking the license (irony?), but now some folks have dug up a bit more of the background. Boing Boing has posted two separate old newsgroup emails from people at First4Internet, the company that created the rootkit, asking for help in creating the technology in the first place. The first one asks about crippling a CD-ROM drive and the second one begs people for free code to help build in copy protection. No wonder there's misused code and people have pointed out what bad programmers the company must employ.