Sony music, root kits and “What were they thinking?”

The story about Sony BMG music CDs installing software disguised with a rootkit has been buzzing around the Internet for a week or two now. (I got it here first.) Fellow geeks, I assume you could see this coming….

Some enterprising trojan writer has figured out how to take advantage of it.

And…

Sony is getting sued.

However, we’re getting some help from some of the antivirus companies. Some of them are taking this seriously, and are adding this to their list of malware to be deleted when found. Please note that one of the largest and most popular vendors among home users, Symantec, is only identifying the software, not removing it as they should.

Home PC users, you might take this as a data point in your purchasing decisions.

One of these days, the music industry and the movie studios are going to learn that trying to lock their content up too tightly is always going to backfire. If they’d just make it easily available for reasonable prices with reasonable restrictions, they will make money in sinfully large piles.

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