Comment Re:Outrage! (Score 3, Insightful) 258
I was the biggest Sony geek. My TV, DVD player, receiver, console - all Sony. After the rootkit trick, I will no longer buy Sony electronics. Sony was great when they were an electronics company, and not a content owner. They are more concerned with making sure their electronics protects their content rather than building consumer electronics people want. I'm very disappointed, but there's plenty of other quality electronics companies that I can switch to - Toshiba, Samsung, etc.
I doubt that my boycott will have much effect on Sony. They won't notice that my electronics shelves no longer carry the Sony brandname, just as they haven't noticed I haven't purchased more than 5 music CD in over 5 years. I'm sure they chalk that up to illegal music downloads, but really, if you look at my music collection, I don't really have anything newer than 5 years ago.
I'm not a Microsoft fanboi. My everyday work computer is a powerbook with OS X, even though most of my servers are Windows. However, I fail to see how Microsoft is implicated in Sony's rootkit. Sony wrote the rootkit. Sony hid it. Sony installed it regardless of whether the user agreed to it or not. If you're arguing that Microsoft is responsible because it requires users to be administrators in order to install it, and average users are running administrator accounts, that would be disingenuous. This would have occurred regardless because even if it used a UNIX style administrator/user scheme, once the average user put their DRM CD from Sony in the drive asking them for administrator privileges, they would have done it. Why? Because it's a music CD from Sony. Same thing would have happened on OS X where the user is not administrator by default. A dialog box appears asking for admin privileges in order to install software that "enhances" the CD experience, and the user happily gives it because it's something they bought from a store in shiny shrink wrap, and not downloaded from the untrustworthy internet.
Funny that Sony's rootkit exploited consumer trust because they themselves don't trust the consumer.
I doubt that my boycott will have much effect on Sony. They won't notice that my electronics shelves no longer carry the Sony brandname, just as they haven't noticed I haven't purchased more than 5 music CD in over 5 years. I'm sure they chalk that up to illegal music downloads, but really, if you look at my music collection, I don't really have anything newer than 5 years ago.
I'm not a Microsoft fanboi. My everyday work computer is a powerbook with OS X, even though most of my servers are Windows. However, I fail to see how Microsoft is implicated in Sony's rootkit. Sony wrote the rootkit. Sony hid it. Sony installed it regardless of whether the user agreed to it or not. If you're arguing that Microsoft is responsible because it requires users to be administrators in order to install it, and average users are running administrator accounts, that would be disingenuous. This would have occurred regardless because even if it used a UNIX style administrator/user scheme, once the average user put their DRM CD from Sony in the drive asking them for administrator privileges, they would have done it. Why? Because it's a music CD from Sony. Same thing would have happened on OS X where the user is not administrator by default. A dialog box appears asking for admin privileges in order to install software that "enhances" the CD experience, and the user happily gives it because it's something they bought from a store in shiny shrink wrap, and not downloaded from the untrustworthy internet.
Funny that Sony's rootkit exploited consumer trust because they themselves don't trust the consumer.
