The story really gathered steam in December of 2005, when it came to light that Sony was secretly installing rootkit technology on the computers of people who had purchased music on the BMG label in attempt to keep them from copying or ripping the content of those CDs. The down-side? They didn’t warn people ahead of time that the copy protection software was a rootkit, in fact they didn’t warn anyone that the copy-protection software was there at all, and even worse, the software they chose was a proven problem-causer for the computers it was installed on (that is to say, it was pretty badly coded) and people’s machines were crashing as a result. Sad, right? You know it.
Anyway, if you haven’t been keeping up on the story, or kept up with it for a while but dropped off, one of our favorite blogs, BoingBoing [ http://boingboing.net/ ] has been on top of the whole thing since it started, and has gotten us back up to date with an excellent timeline of everything that’s been happening, where we stand now, and even an editorial released today in Wired about it and the paper that the fine researchers behind the Freedom-To-Tinker blog [ http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/ ] released yesterday about the entire affair. Stay informed, and disable autoplay on your computer so stuff like this doesn’t get installed when you insert a music CD! Here’s how!
As for that timeline? Here ya go: