“Worse than you think”
The Inquirer: Sony DRM is worse than you think. Charlie Demerjian points out something I missed in the fun of this effed-up collection of bad steps by big business: to remove the rootkit from an infected system, you have to compromise your privacy:
If you go to the Sony page … you have to give Sony your email at the very least, and according to the WP story, Sony then grills you about your reasons for not liking being rootkitted
The article also draws the connections between this action and the anti-Analog Hole bill. This example makes it pretty clear that the recording industry’s claims should be dismissed out of hand, and no way should they be trusted with the internals of any hardware that ends up in your hands.
November 7th, 2005 at 10:04 am
[…] This isn’t to let either Sony or First 4 off the hook. If anything, the dangers created by the rootkit decloaker prove my point that these folks are not to be trusted with holding one’s coat, much less installing software on one’s computer. Mark puts it better: “First 4 Internet’s failure to imagine this control flow [that crashes XP] is consistent with their general failure to understand Windows device driver programming.” […]