CDs or not? An interesting take on Key2Audio

Erik K. Veland writes "Mathew Ruben of MacOpinion has written a long article titled Celine Dion killed my iMac!. An interesting take on the whole CD-issue, the criminalization of the user and a comparison of the technology to cable box-zapping."

Comments

Instead of Whining about it here...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you send Celine some *ahem* fan mail outlining why you think her latest release is a Bad Thing?

Maybe one of us would give her a clue(tm)...

Apple should take his suggestion

[elmer-12]

The article mentions one good idea for avoiding the service calls - Apple should put in a preference option to ignore the data portion of multi-session CDs.
Or perhaps this is something someone could provide a hack for.
Not providing such a solution, were it possible, I can understand as a boycotting-type action; lots more publicity this way; but users should come first.

Re:Excellent Article

[Drishmung]

There is a sound principal used by the IETF: Be strict in what you produce and liberal in what you accept.

So, the PC should check that the track is corrupt, and recover gracefully.

The problem however, is that the malware CDs, don't just contain random cruft, as would result from a scratch. They contain information that intentionally attempts to deceive.

We can argue that the PC should not react inappropriately to this, but we can also argue that a PC should not react inappropriately to a virus, trojan or other attack: this still in no way exonerates the perpetrator of the virus, trojan or Celine Dion.

As a further complication, it is not even software in the PC that is being attacked, it is firmware in the CD drive itself. Firmware that in many cases is in drives manufactured by Sony. Firmware written by Sony. The PC doesn't even get a chance to react. It asks the drive to read the CD and that's the last the PC hears from the drive.

Assuming the drive doesn't go completely catatonic when it sees such a CD, it should be possible to get the PC to send a "reset and eject" sequence of commands, and Apple should provide a way to do this.

But, maybe it isn't possible. Maybe some drives won't accept commands while they are confused by a malware CD. I don't know, any ./s who do?

Certainly, Apple should provide firmware updates for the drives to prevent the problem, but as I just pointed out, there could be some issues there given where the firmware has to come from.

In summary, while some of it may be Apple's fault, there may be extenuating circumstances---for Apple. I can't think of any for Sony. (And indeed, you won't find the malware CDs for sale in a number of jurisdictions where they are plainly illegal under local consumer protection laws.)