IIRC there was some consumer association action in France back in the day against such hackish DRM practices mandating the labelling of such CDs with a notice that the thing you were just about to buy may not play at all as well as requiring them to drop the CDDA Phillips iconography, all because someone bought a CD and couldn’t play it in his car or whatever. After that one it seems like the DRM scheme was basically dropped around here.

To nitpick your nitpick: there were many attempts to implement DRM even on pure music CDs, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_Control

My personal experience with this was with some import CDs (from Japan) that, from what I recall, messed with the error correction part of the data so that it skipped horrendously in my PC (so it was impossible to rip in cdex) but played fine in (most) standalone audio players.

From that Wikipedia article:

"As the Copy Control discs do not conform to the requirements of the CD standard, they are not labeled with the CDDA logo, which is trademarked by Philips."

> the format doesn't allow for data - it's all sound

Redbook CD-DA has one subcode byte and eight error correction bytes per frame.

Or a properly configured windows. Not even windows 95 would autorun a CD if you didn't tell it to.

> ... if you told it not to.

FTFY

By default, Win96 would run that CD. You didn't tell it to. You had to go change the setting from the default. You had to tell Win95 to not autorun a CD.

Autorunning CDs was the default until windows vista, which is how the u3 usb devices were used for “hacksaw”[0] and “switchblade”[1] attacks.

More on u3: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U3_(software)?wprov=sfti1

0: https://forums.hak5.org/topic/2843-usb-hacksaw-development/

1: https://forums.hak5.org/topic/2361-usb-switchblade-developme...

Its quite incredible how long this was working for. Autorun was a dream for malware.

It was also incredibly convenient - put game CD in drive, game launcher appears with INSTALL / PLAY (depending on the status). Also it was neat to give a DVD with some sliceshow/photos/videos/etc to your grandparents/aunt/uncle/etc who didn't knew much about computers and tell them "just put the disk in the drive and it'll do the rest".

But as usual, one rotten apple spoils the entire barrel.

The way it works today is just as simple. The OS automatic asks permission to run the program.

The UX is certainly worse, especially on Win10 where it displays a tiny popup at the bottom right side (at least in Vista and 7 it had a popup at the center and IIRC the popup even had an icon of the game/program if autorun specified one). For most users it isn't a practical issue though, just a lesser experience. If you are comfortable with computers after a while you ghost through such popups :-P.

Having said that i did have my aunt (who is generally afraid that if she does something wrong the computer will break forever) spell me out the options in a popup (for a photo dvd she got from a photographer for a relative's graduation) over the phone once though, so i'm sure that, if nothing else, it can be a bit unexpected for less knowledgeable users.

... or you could press Shift while the CD was being loaded.

Win96 = Win95OSR?

I think it’s a typo.

Indeed a typo that I didn't catch until after the edit window.