Broken Valley [ENHANCED]

Life Of Agony

Product Details

• Audio CD (June 14, 2005)
• Original Release Date: June 14, 2005
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Enhanced
• Label: Sony
• ASIN: B000CDSS40
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (46 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #117,184 in Music (See Bestsellers in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Beware! Spyware included!, November 9, 2005

By	good2bking "good2bking" (Ulm, Germany) - See all my reviews

Customers beware! This CD ontains malware that will damage your Windows OS!

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Contains Sony DRM Rootkit -- Do not buy, November 4, 2005

By	David T - See all my reviews

This CD contains a compromising DRM rootkit which can greatly affect the Windows operating system. Do not buy.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars CD contains DRM software that opens your system to viruses, November 12, 2005

By	Phillip Roncoroni "goodcowfilms.com" (Manhattan, New York) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

As many people may know by now, Sony was recently caught with egg on their face when a security specialist found out that a recently purchased CD (Van Zant: Get Right With The Man) from Sony music not only installed DRM software (digital rights management, to limit and outright prevent copying music to certain devices), but it did so in such a sneaky way that it hid itself entirely from Windows, and opened the system up to security issues such as viruses.

This CD has the same copyright protection, called XCP. When installed, Sony hijacks your computer and installs custom software which:

1) Hides itself entirely from Windows by installing as a rootkit
2) Hides itself in such a manner that any files begining with $sys$ are also hidden. For example, if you install the XCP copy protection software on your machine, and rename "document.doc" to "$sys$document.doc" it then becomes invivisble to you forever.
3) Installs its own custom CD-Rom drivers to hijack your system. It also sneakily names these drivers "Plug and Play Device Manager" to seem as if it's a part of Windows. Trying to delete these drivers manually will disable your CD-Rom drive entirely.
4) Offers no uninstall option until you manually contact Sony

As of my writing this review, Sony has "apologized" for this incident, and claims they will "re-evaluate" this copyright protection software on their CDs in the future.

In the meantime, a virus is currently running wild, which names itself begining with $sys$ in an attempt to hide from the user and virus scanners.

Several class action lawsuits are also pending against Sony right now.

In summary, as you can tell from above, Sony's actions here are absolutely horrible. This is your music. You purchased it, and they should not have any right to dictate how you can use it, let alone install software which compromises your system security.

This is one of the CDs with Sony's XCP copyright protection software on it, and as a result, you should not buy it to send a message to Sony that this will NOT be tolerated in the future.