Re: Sony DVDs and the Mac


gee5 wrote:
I just purchased the movie Basic Instict 2. The disk is not named
that. It's named ROOT. That has me a little concerned based on news
in the recent past that Sony had a root program they installed deep
inside people's computers.

The disk has the usual audio/video TS folders. But there are other
files as well. There's an autorun.inf, a dvd-rom.exe (436 kb) and a
go.exe (56 kb). In addition to those, there is a folder with a three
mpegs. The autorun.inf file runs the dvd-rom.exe program which in turn
runs the go.exe file. It's full of commands and other suspicious stuff
(to me).

Can someone take a look at these and render an opinion about the
security aspects of these programs regarding the Mac? I'm curious to
know what would happen if I were to run the disk using windoze on a
Mac. Would it just affect windoze or would it affect the Mac OS as
well? I'm running it on an external CD/DVD burner with my G5 and it
seems okay so far.

Is this anything like the previous notable attempt by Sony to program
people's computers presumably to prevent copying?

Gee5

There does appear to be protection program that clears files in hard
drives in DVD Recorders. Whether this applies only to Windows I don't
know !

All I can suggest is not to try and copy the newer commercial DVDs. I
can't see you doing any damage to your computer other than losing files
from your hard drives !

Ernie Lee

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