Sony Liable for Damages

OK, so they haven't been found liable yet. But they should be.

You may or may not have heard the news that Sony BMG has succumbed to the bean-counter's disease. It's that ever eternal quest of the accountant to promote penny-wise and pound-foolish solutions to insignificant problems. Invariably they make things worse.

Take the news this week that Sony BMG has been putting self-installing rootkits in their music CDs as a part of their content protection scheme XCP. It hides Sony's hidden monitoring program from the computer's owner, and is so poorly implemented that hackers are now freely using it to hide their own malware.

The first example I've read about is how losers are using it to hide their cheats from Blizzard's servers when playing World of Warcraft online. I've been vocally in favour of public beatings for these online cheaters for years now, but it's not that big of an issue for the rest of the world. It should be.

Rootkits have been around for a while. But thanks to Sony, there are potentially millions of computer users out there with their root kit in their computers. Every one of them will hide files with "$sys$" in their prefix. It won't be more than a few days before the less capable hackers out there are integrating Sony's root kit into their own small minded schemes.

Now we hear that Sony's patch to remove their rootkit is instead causing user's Windows OS to crash. Lovely. Incompetent f***s.

I hate lawyers, lawsuits, and people who use them. In most instances they've become an impediment to liberty and the pusuit of happiness. But in this case, I hope someone sues Sony's ass into oblivion.