Sony Gone Wild

At last week's Ohio Free Culture meeting, we spoke about the use of a "root-kit" as advanced digital rights magagment (more accurately known as digital restrictions management) in certain Sony CDs (see additional coverage from Harvard Free Culture).
A root-kit is

a set of tools frequently used by an intruder after cracking a computer system. These tools are intended to conceal running processes and files or system data, which helps an intruder maintain access to a system for malicious purposes.

In the past week a large numbers of things have occurred. First, the mainstream news media picked up the story on Thursday, November 4. The next day, Sony has released a "fix" for it. This fix requires the insecure program active X, which in turn requires insecure program Internet explorer. Additionally, as the orginal discoverer, Mark Russinovich found

I dug a little deeper and it appears the Player is automatically checking to see if there are updates for the album art and lyrics for the album it’s displaying. This behavior would be welcome under most circumstances, but is not mentioned in the EULA, is refuted by Sony, and is not configurable in any way. I doubt Sony is doing anything with the data, but with this type of connection their servers could record each time a copy-protected CD is played and the IP address of the computer playing it.

As we predicted, Sony has left itself open to lawsuits. An Italian organization, Association for the Freedom in Communication Electronic Interactive, has gotten involved with legal authorities about possible legal actions.

Additional Info on DRM:
EFF: Writings and documents related to DRM
EPIC: Digital Rights Management and Privacy
Public Knowledge: DRM