Slashdot Mirror
Sony Warned Weeks Ahead of Rootkit Flap
pdschmid writes "Business Week has an article describing how Sony BMG had been warned by F-Secure on Oct. 4 about the dangers of their rootkit protection, but failed to do anything until Oct. 31 when computer-systems expert Mark Russinovich revealed the rootkit in his blog." From the article: "Sony BMG officials insist that they acted as quickly as they could, and that they expected to be able to go public and offer a software patch at the same time. However, Russinovich posted his blog item first, forcing Sony BMG to scramble to contain the crisis. It recalled millions of CDs recorded by 52 artists, including Van Zant, Celine Dion, and Neil Diamond. Plus, it offered exchanges to customers."
Why didn't Slashdot tell us before?!
...when a company becomes bigger than its customer base.
Van Zant, Celine Dion, and Neil Diamond
They should have left the rootkit in place so we could download some good music directly to these misguided buyers' hard drives.
It recalled millions of CDs recorded by 52 artists, including Van Zant, Celine Dion, and Neil Diamond. CDs by these artists should have been recalled anyway, rootkit or not.
That they were lying is one possible explanation. Looking on the bright side, another possibility is that they're just incompetent. OK, OK, let's keep politics out of this discussion.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
"I'm a recall coordinator. My job was to apply the formula. It's simple arithmetic. It's a story problem. A new car built by my company leaves Boston traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now: Do we initiate a recall? You take the number of vehicles in the field (A) and multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B), multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement (C). A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
The only thing more dangerous than a file named -rf is renaming it -rf\ /
Wouldn't that be an upload?
Phony Sony put its CDs on a shelf
Phony Sony had a rootkit which installed itself.
But all of Sony's lawyers and all of Sony's PR men,
Could not put the integrity back into Sony again.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
True, and you should never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence. Though in fun world of corporations, the two seem to go hand in hand.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
But why is the rum gone?