How to get rid of SecuRom, NOW
jolrei:
Quote from: angelyne on 2007 October 16, 17:06:49
It is malware, but the difference between Securom and the stuff in the wild is that it's malware used by legitimate companies. So they have to show some restraint, unless they want to be the target of multiple lawsuits.
My understanding is that Sony has already been the target of at least one lawsuit related to SecuROM, precisely because of the malware characteristics of this sort of copy protection. Your argument PHAILS!
Quinctia:
I have one of the audio CD's with the copy protection they got sued over. It's not restrained. I really only lucked out in the fact that I was running a 98SE system at the time, and the installation was limited to a .dll. I still could only delete it from the command line, however. The rootkit was installed on XP machines.
It's really a shame, because I love the band whose album I bought, and they really deserved a lot of support, but I held off on suggesting people buy their music until it was available in digital formats, like on iTunes, because of the horrid junk on the CD.
You say it's unbelievable that SecuRom could mess with a firewall. You would think it'd be unbelievable that an audio CD would contain a rootkit that disabled functions on a computer, just because someone wanted to, say, listen to the CD on their computer or rip copies of it to use in their portable music players. But Sony already did that--it's not really a stretch. Also, keep in mind that messing with a firewall doesn't necessarily mean that SecuRom intentionally messes with firewalls; sometimes corporate incompetance has the same results as corporate maliciousness.
angelyne:
Quote from: jolrei on 2007 October 16, 17:33:55
Quote from: angelyne on 2007 October 16, 17:06:49
It is malware, but the difference between Securom and the stuff in the wild is that it's malware used by legitimate companies. So they have to show some restraint, unless they want to be the target of multiple lawsuits.
My understanding is that Sony has already been the target of at least one lawsuit related to SecuROM, precisely because of the malware characteristics of this sort of copy protection. Your argument PHAILS!
tut tut. My argument did not PHAILS. Since I said that if they don't show restraint they will be the target of lawsuits and they were. And that Sony fiasco was far from showing restraint. That was a train wreck of gigantic proportions. They deserve all the lawsuits they are getting.
However, unless there is another incident that I am not aware of, at that point they were installing a rootkit on people's computer. That all of itself was pretty damn rotten to begin with. But to make matter worse, their rootkit worked by hiding any process, file or registry key that started with $sys$, IIRC. Holy security vulnerability Batman. I would think, hope, expect, that after being sued, lambasted, publicly humiliated, drawn and quartered (maybe not that yet), they have learned SOME lesson. Maybe not quite enough, but anyway. They didn't get sued for Securom but for something called XCP. Unless they got sued again and I don't know about it.
And no, I don't work for Sony, Ea, Securom or anyone remotely related to them. It's just that, when everyone is forwarding to "all the people they know" dire warnings about aid infected needles in cinema seats, I'm the person who is on the net, checking the story out.
I don't panic easily. I don't like hearsay. As JM calls it "lies and propaganda". I want explanations and information that make sense, before I am convinced of anything. And so far, I am not convinced. I've googled it. I've seen many people complain that their antivirus, especially AVG, and and securom don't like each other (which isn't really surprising). I've seen lots of people wonder if it's a rootkit. I've seen many other say no, it's not. ( I don't think so either....that XCP WAS a rootkit, no doubts about it). No mention of firewalls.
I think there is no doubt that it's a really crappy piece of software and a really bad idea on EA's part to implement it. They should have kept on using whatever the heck they used before. I hope's someone ass on the line for this stupid decision.
angelyne:
Quinctia, I remember that incident clearly. I was following it at the time. That was unbelievable. And that stuff was naaaaasty. Almost impossible to remove without making your system unstable. It was a nasty piece of business. Then after the uproar, they finally, reluctantly agreed to provide a means to remove it. But you had to send them a request and they would email you back some kind of key that was only good for that one computer. And to make use of the key you had to install an activex component that introduced another security vulnerability. What a shambles that was.
Read about XCP here. It's enough to make your hair stand on your head, to know that this was somehow done by a big corporation. Although they probably had no idea just what it was they bought. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XCP
dano:
Quote from: dano on 2007 October 11, 17:54:12
...
FYI, ever since I started using this fix, my graphics problems have apparently gone away. I have a fairly recent Nvidia video card (7600GS) & ever since I installed BV I've been having crashes. The whole screen would freeze & then get corrupted (like random pixels were shifted right or left). My computer would either reboot by itself, or I'd have to do a hard reboot myself. I kept updating my drivers to the most recent beta drivers from Nvidia, but it never helped.
After I did these steps, I haven't had this happen. I even tried to cause it, by setting all my graphics options to high and going to the CAS screen. Not sure why this fix would have that effect, but I'm glad it did.
Whoopsie, spoke too soon. :-[ This is still happening occasionally, although with much less regularity than before. Never mind...
dano
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page