Sony: Seriously Screwed Up

Howard Stringer's only held the Chairman and CEO post at Sony for seven months now, and I realize that it takes time to course-correct a big 'ship' to the degree that the good news evidence of healing starts to appear. By now, however, I don't think it's asking too much to expect that the bad news bleeding should be staunched. And, unfortunately for Sony, the bad news seems to have only increased since Sir Howard took over the helm back in June.

First; the lesser of Sony's two recent major evils. About a month ago, spray-painted graffiti began appearing in major cities across the United States, portraying kids playing with the Playstation Portable game console. Sony has finally confessed to what many folks have long suspected; that it's behind the 'art'. Unlike, IBM, who 4.5 years ago was caught defacing public sidewalks with Linux-related symbols, Sony at least paid a pittance to both the artists and the owners whose buildings the company defaced with Sony's permission. But (and if I'm coming across as an old, wrinkled prude here, versus a hip marketeer with 'street cred', well then too bad) I still find Sony's actions inexcusable. Speaking of 'cred', Sony's campaign lends inappropriate credibility to illegal vandalism, ironically often done by the same highly impressionable age group that the PSP predominantly targets.

And now we come to Sony's more serious sin. Back at the end of October, the news first broke that Sony's non-Red Book-compliant audio CDs were installing rootkits on Windows users' PCs. As this story has developed over the past month-plus, I've been poised to publish a blog post on it a dozen or more times; each time, however, some new and even more twisted element of it becomes public (the most recent bombshell went off earlier today, but we'll get to that in a bit). In the following list, I'm going to attempt to summarize what's known to date; I'll leave it to you to peruse sources such as Ars Technica, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Slashdot, The Register and Wired for next-level details.
1. Sony had previously put a SunnComm-developed DRM scheme on 27 (U.S) of its CDs….one that installed portions of itself on the Windows-powered computer even if you said no to the EULA (End User License Agreement) and that, by overriding existing security privileges, could (in the EFF's words) " allow malicious third parties who have localized, lower-privilege access to gain control over a consumer's computer running the Windows operating system". That vulnerability was finally plugged only today.
2. The latest-generation DRM scheme, called XCP (Extended Copy Protection) was developed by UK-based company First4Internet, and was approved and implemented by Sony on 52 U.S. titles. Its EULA was both ridiculously restrictive and markedly nebulous about the functions of the software it was prompting to install on a user's system.
3. Windows users who had autoplay enabled (this is the Windows default) were prompted by the EULA after they inserted the disc in their system's optical drive. The program load could be overridden by disabling autoplay, by holding down the shift key while booting the CD, or by placing a small piece of tape on the outer rim of the disc (believe it or not), in which case the audio content could be ripped from the CD as normal, using a program such as Exact Audio Copy.

Continued with 'Shame On You, Sony'….