The Mandelbear's Musings

Aaron Perzanowski and Deirdre Mulligan have just posted a wonderful pre-publication paper called "The Magnificence of the Disaster: Reconstructing the Sony BMG Rootkit Incident," which will shortly be published in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal. Exhaustively researched and footnoted -- but written in clear, non-lawyerese prose -- The Magnificence of the Disaster comprehensively analyses the madness that led Sony-BMG to install dangerous, illegal rootkit anti-copying software as well as spyware (produced by a company founded to supply Elvis impersonators, no less!) on millions of its CDs, leading the company to enormous financial and legal penalties.

on Boing Boing, as usual. One really must be grateful to Sony -- they've done more to discredit DRM than all the rest of us put together. But I'm still going to boycott them!

From Boing Boing, a third Sony roundup, a malware feature comparison, and a great image (from Collapsibletank).

Cory Doctorow over on BoingBoing has posted a great Sony anti-customer technology roundup and time-line. Oh, and the latest? Sony's "uninstaller" adds a security hole of its own. Apparently it installs a scriptable-by-anyone ActiveX control.

Sony's DRM-enforcing rootkit apparently includes the LAME MP3 library, which is published under the LGPL. (A blog article can be found here) So not only do their CDs illegally trespass on your PC, but they violate LAME's copyright at the same time (by failing to make the source available)!