A while ago in talking about CRAPWARE I blogged this post: CRAPWARE, Spyware, Adware, Spyware, It's All A Weed To Me. I used one of my grandfather's quotes, "A weed is anything that is growing where you don't want it to."
That pretty much sums up my thoughts about rootkits as well. Mark Russinovich has a recent blog post where he talks about his definition or a rootkit in light of the recent episode with Symantec and concedes that perhaps Symantec's use of cloaking technology should be called rootkit-like technology. That said, he also states, and I agree, that regardless of the intent behind using cloaking technology, he doesn't think there is ever a case for it.
Here's my take. Bottom line, I agree with the Department of Homeland Security Official in commenting about Sony's Rootkit Fiasco:
It's very important to remember that it's your intellectual property -- it's not your computer. And in the pursuit of protection of intellectual property, it's important not to defeat or undermine the security measures that people need to adopt in these days
I also think my grandfather's wisdom comes into play here as well. While the Symantec issue is certainly different from a DRM scheme to protect intellectual property, both attempts involve an invasive insertion of a piece of software onto a user's computer. I'm not a paranoid conspiracy lover, but in this day and age where technology makes a lot of monitoring possible I find this very troublesome.
Here's another example. When we are talking about monitoring devices being installed in cars in Great Britain that can pinpoint a car anywhere, how long before that kind of technology gets used to send out speeding tickets?
While it might seem counter intuitive, if a cloaking technology needs to be installed for software to do its thing, then it should made obvious to the user and not cloaked away in some EULA. Spell it out so my mother understands it. Common sense, and my grandfather, says that if you can't do that, then you've got something to hide.
In any event, I'll be adding rootkit and root-kit like behavior to my list of weeds.
