When Two Stories Collide

Two interesting stories have been increasingly in the news this week.

The first story is the Warden software that Blizzard is using with World of Warcraft to detect cheaters. In order to prevent players from installing mods that allow them to cheat in WoW, Blizzard's WoW software runs a program called Warden that scans what else the machine is doing, looking for hacking programs and the like. Obviously, the privacy implications of this concerns a lot of people, as this is somewhat akin to spyware, but imo, I think it's a necessary evil when it comes to online games.

The second story has to do with DRM (digial rights management) on Sony CDs. Sony, in a bizarre anti-consumer move, put a rootkit on one of their DRM's CDs. When you put this CD in your computer, it installs software on Windows to hide certain files from the user, with the ultimate goal of making sure the user can't copy the CD or run the CD under iTunes. Unfortunately, this creates a security breach in the user's computer -- and since there's no warning that the CD is going to install this software, a lot of people are upset about it. Sony, of course, denies that the software is harmful.

What makes these two dissimilar stories particular interesting is that they collided today when hackers figured out that they could use Sony's DRM to hide their hacks from the Warden. That undermines Sony's stance that their DRM isn't harmful, and also makes WoW more susceptible to hacking.