Goodbye Sony

I owned a Sony walkman. It was good. Sometime between then and now something went very wrong over at Sony.

To cut a long story short, Sony's music CDs intentionally infected people's computers. It opened up gaping security holes in the operating system (Macs too), let people cheat in online games, reported back to Sony the songs you were listening to and even got on Microsoft's bad side (of all companies!).

Why? To protect their copyright.

If that wasn't enough (and for any sane person it should be) it has been discovered that in the process of "protecting their copyright", Sony has violated another group's copyright! They used some software that is released under an open source license in their application, without complying with the (very liberal) conditions of its use. Essentially, they are hypocrites to boot.

I have a friend who has decided to boycott McDonalds, in order to do his part in not supporting evil corporations. Well, it's time for me to add Sony on to my black list.

Update: It seems Sony have officially apologised and released a list of affected titles. They are allowing people to replace their rootkitted CDs with normal ones too. It's great that they're doing this, but it only happened after the uproar became deafening -- they should have done it earlier.