Creative Zens Ship with Worms

An anonymous reader writes "Engadget reports about 3700 Creative Zen "Neeons" shipped with a virus. The virus in question was the W32.Wullik.B@mm worm. Creative released a statement today to help consumers pinpoint the possibly effected devices."

Comments

Product Liability

[Monte]

Ouch - that's going to be a black eye. Although it isn't the first case of software shipping with malware, IIRC there was some kid's game on CD that included a Bonus Virus inside.

Now a comment and a question for the peanut gallery - it's always been a pet peeve of mine that software companies aren't held to any real sort of accountability for shipping product that is clearly flawed. They hide behind the "shrink wrap" license, and (at least IMHO) get away with murder. Imagine if GM or Ford or Daimler-Chrysler put such a waiver of liability on a sticker on the doors of their new cars. The courts would tear them a new one so fast it'd be like lightning.

The question - what sort of liability does Creative have in this case, and what's fair recompense for shipping a clearly flawed product where said flaw has the possibility of harming the user's computer, data integrity and / or privacy?

How much is enough? Should Creative be given a hard enough pranging to get the attention of other software manufacturers?

Personally, I say "Yes". GM spends a hell of a lot of time and energy making sure their brakes work, I'd like to see software companies (and you all know exactly who I've got my sights on here) make sure they ship product that isn't horribly broken right out of the box.

I guess Zen doesn't run Linux

[AndroidCat]

Come to think of it, how does this worm manifest itself on a player device?

"W32.Wullik.B@mm is a mass-mailing worm that attempts to send itself to all the contacts in the Outlook address book. The worm makes numerous copies of itself in random locations, and moves to a new location when Windows Explorer browses to the folder from which it runs. It can spread to floppy disks and shared network drives under some conditions.

I doubt it executes on the player itself. Can it infect the PCs that you connect the player to for syncing?