[KillerShots]

This could cause interesting things to happen quite soon. The tension is building; will there be an explosion? How long will people put up with this? I've no intention of ever putting up with it, and haven't yet encountered such a problem that couldn't be easily bypassed.

This new stuff of installing crap on the machine without my consent is just plain criminal. They aren't the only ones doing it, and they're going to step all over each other and create a huge mess... on my machine. No thanks.

Also note I'm not just talking Sony - it also includes StarForce (and any company that uses it), and similar things. I'm kind of curious how Microsoft is going to take its final stance (completely supporting it or eventually throwing it off), as I note that though they seem to be leaning towards supporting it (by not including it in their malicious software removal tool), they still only employ what I'd call "reasonable" copy protection schemes (make as many copies of your OS & office suite as you want - just use only one of each).

 

[KillerShots]

Hmph... if you're worried about stuff being installed without your consent, re-configure your box so nothing can be installed without a password. It's difficult (but not impossible) to do with Windows, but *nix does it by default.

*It wants me to install some unnamed program to listen to my CD... what should I do?

>No f'in way, throw that thing in the garbage and never buy anything from anybody involved with that CD again (At least, that's MY response - maybe people / corporations will learn the hard way)

Honestly, I've stopped caring what happens with Windows users and their programs. Either Microsoft will take a hard stance against this, or they will openly embrace it (though at the moment, it appears they are openly embracing it). If such should happen to me, I look at the offending source code and re-write it (up to and including my CD-ROM driver in my kernel). GPL/BSD software is capable of many things atm, and certainly more than covers multimedia (including making legal backups of copy-protected discs).

 

[KillerShots]

Have they? Yet they still support DRM and such - that's what I'd call embracing it.

 

[KillerShots]

I'll just say one thing: Universal hard locking on consumer PCs would make my job nearly impossible. Therefore it won't happen. I'd say more, but I can't.

 

[KillerShots]

It seems my organization has taken note of the Sony rootkit. That's bad news for Sony. A bit more information about it for you to digest here and here. Read both links and you should be able to make an attempt at manually removing it without going to Sony's site. Also of interest is that this rootkit is not effective against 64-bit windows systems, and that the rootkit uninstaller both installs a new rootkit and phones home to Sony whenever you use it.

 

[KillerShots]

Actually, I did that simply because I don't like to have things running before I get a chance to look at them. Never smart to execute unknown programs. Then again, I've also started running most of my games under linux now through a windows emulator - hard to infect that, I'd just wipe the game's partition out (each game has an isolated windows environment with its own registry - they can't see each other).

 

[KillerShots]

That works as long as you remember to do so. Personally, I wouldn't trust myself well enough to remember to do that for every single new disc I put into my machine.