Last week Aunty told you about Internet baddies who are loading spyware, adware, and viruses (oh my!) into media files, using a loophole in Microsoft’s Digital Rights Management (DRM) process, and causing the nasties to be installed on the computers of unaware users who think that they are downloading media files.
Shortly after Aunty made that report, a Microsoft spokesman indicated that Microsoft had no plans to address the issue, stating that “Not every problem comes with an automatic technology solution. In this case, the priority is to educate users and get them to understand the importance of not downloading files from untrusted sources.”
In short, “not our problem”.
In slightly longer, “it’s the users’ problem.”
Was there an undertone of “it’s those filesharer’s fault, let them take the risk”? Maybe. Maybe not. But definitely “not our problem”.
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Happily, today Microsoft did the right thing, and announced that they would, after all, be releasing a patch for this DRM hole.
Of course, they still aren’t accepting responsibilty for the problem (should they? Shouldn’t they?), nearly still laying the blame at the user’s feet when they said “While this issue is not the result of any exploit of Windows Media DRM, we do recognize it may cause problems for some of our customers,” and adding that to help mitigate the problem, Microsoft will provide an update to Windows Media Player in the next 30 days.
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