Sony MoFo update

For those of you who are not regular slashdot readers or haven't heard through other means, California's filed a class action against Sony BMG and New York's announced they're following suit. Australia and Italy are investigating Sony BMG for consumer law violations. Sony BMG is going down! Woo-hoo! May they burn and burn and burn.

Ok, that was just me being bitter. I'm sorry. For those of you who don't know what's going on, I direct y'all to Mark's Sysinternals Blog, which broke the story after the dude spent who knows how long reverse engineering the damn virus and finding out what the hell it was in the first place.

http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/11/sony-you-dont-reeeeaaaally-want-to_09.html

That link's actually the last entry. Scroll down for a nifty summary. For the nitty gritty, including a response from First 4 Internet, the company that wrote the rootkit program and a rebuttal to the reponse, I suggest you just read the exploits entry by entry.

For a list of pariah CDs that you should not buy because they contain BMG's bullshit rootkit:
http://slashdot.org/~xtracto/journal/121697
This slashdot journal's got an updated list but it's not as clearly written.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004144.php
This Eff page's got a less-updated list but a brief how-to for identifying bullshit CDs. I warn you now, if you see any of those signs, DO NOT BUY THE CD. Pirate it. You will be better off fending off the RIAA than jumping through Sony BMG's hoops of death trying to get the rootkit off your computer. (Oh, read Mark's Sysinternals entry [the first link] about his analysis of the uninstall program and Sony's continuing bullshitting.)

PIRATE SONY!