Thursday, November 17, 2005

Evil Empire - Have You Got A Newish Sony CD?

You might have missed the recent kerfuffle with Sony and their PC malware that they've been putting on audio CDs. It installs without warning to stop you trying to do evil things with your music - Its called Rootkit and its a prime example of corporations playing hard and fast with the law.

Badly thought out, badly implemented and messing up a PC near you (500,000+ networks in the US has an rootkit infected PC behind it) - if you've got a Sony CD, be careful what you do with it. And if you've been infected, trying to uninstall it can be equally dangerous.

Will Sony be made to pay for it? Will consumers everywhere boycott Sony? Unlikely I think, but Sory Electroincs hopes we all do. It really is shocking what big corporations can get away with.

Posted by Dio Bach at 10:18

4 Comments:

Elise Tomlinson said...: I don't know about the UK, but in the US consumers *have a legal right* to make back-up copies of their CDs or transfer songs from CDs to personal MP3 players much to the horror of the music industry. That's why they're constantly try to circumvent the law.

Have you read UCITA, or the Digital Millennium Copyright Act?
Stupid fuckers!; 2:09 AM
Dio Bach said...: I know the DMCA well - it's affected people I know who run BitTorrent trackers and the like. A real dumb and draconian law. I've just read that its only US CDs that have the software, they must have known they'd get in trouble if they released it here. :); 10:41 AM
Elise Tomlinson said...: Do you mean that Sony, for example, makes CDs for the UK without the software but we get it?

Man, I don't know why this makes me so angry but it really really does. The movie industry is just as bad.; 9:04 PM
Dio Bach said...: Yeah basically its the US, but I'm not sure if they're not sold here, because UK laws would have had them for doing such a thing.; 1:38 PM