Re: Why is Microsoft watching us watch DVD movies?

From: Konrad Rieck (kr@roqe.org)
Date: 02/22/02 

Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2002 16:26:50 +0100
From: Konrad Rieck <kr@roqe.org>
To: bugtraq@securityfocus.com

On Thu, Feb 21, 2002 at 11:42:13AM +0100, Patrick M. Hausen wrote:
> > and a cookie which uniquely identifies a particular WMP player. With
> > this two pieces of information Microsoft can track what DVD movies are
> > being watched on a particular computer.
>
> _This_ on the other hand is an unfriendly attack on anyones privacy.
> Does someone know if CDDB does similar things?

The Compact Disc Database (CDDB) protocol is used to query the database at
cddb.com (http://www.gracenote.com) for information on audio tracks, but it
is software independent and several different players and libraries make use
of CDDB.

A query includes the following components related to privacy

    hostname
    login
    libname # Name of the player or library
    libver # Version of the player or library
    cddbmail # cddb-test@submit.cddb.com

See the perl package CDDB-1.08 for more information at
http://www.perl.com/CPAN-local/authors/id/R/RC/RCAPUTO/CDDB

In my opinion the above information are not sufficient to generate profiles
about individuals, although they allow the generation of general statistics.
But this is rather normal for a database service. ;)

Regards,
Konrad 

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