Bogus Sony Backtrack

It would seem that Sony have made a token effort to support their malware based CD protection system. You can now go to the Sony site and get a patch for it. But how easy is that, and what does the patch actually do?

Of course, if you actually are a music pirate and downloaded your music from the internet, you won't have any bother from the Sony system - it only troubles ligitimate and honest purchasers of original CDs.

So, I thought I'd try to download this alleged patch, just out of curiousity. I thought I'd start with www.sony.co.uk, given that I'm naive of Sony's gigantic corporate structure an' all...

From sony.co.uk I found a link to www.sonymusic.co.uk. I located a search box on their site and typed in 'cd protection patch'. Guess what I got back?

Unable to find any results for the given search criteria say Sony... Oh dear. Maybe there isn't a patch after all, or could it be they don't really want you to find it?

Well, I thought of some other things I could type, but the search box does claim to be an artist browser, so I don't really expect it to work. However, there's no other means of search on their site, so you really don't have much hope of success. There's no mention of any protection patches in the news section, so where am I supposed to look? There's no support area, so it seems sonymusic is a dead end.

Next I tried www.sonybmg.com, which Google located for me when I tried searching for Sony BMG (two words that just love to be together). Something about that site made me think I wasn't going to find any computer support there. I resorted to more Googling: "sony bmg cd protection patch support", but all I found were people complaining about it.

Looks like that the patch is either not real, or fairly well hidden. I don't fancy your chances of finding it without either getting lucky, or spending hours looking. As for what it does when you get it, if it actually exists, well that's anyone's guess.

As for what Sony are doing, it's now well documented: Mark Russinovich's article takes the whole sorry mess to pieces and explains exactly what it does (and how to get rid of it).

posted by Peter Wake @ 10:46 pm