Odds and Ends

Sony`s spyware

Sony Music has spyware installed in some music CDs. When you play the CD on your computer, this spyware (called a rootkit) installs and phones home via the internet. To phone home, it has to make a DNS query from a nameserver. Some half a million nameservers have reported these queries.

Somebody made a nice graphic of the number of namserver queries in Asia. KL is nicely lit up in this graphic (bigger than Singapore at least).

After a huge backlash, Sony has decided to stop this spyware install, especially since some viruses appeared (3 so far) that take advantage of the backdoor installed by this spyware;-)