Property is Property
The bad news about Sony spyware keeps pouring in. We’ve already seen how the XCP software uses deceptive techniques to hide its presence from the user. Now we learn that Sony’s other DRM scheme, MediaMax installs itself on your system even if you click “decline” on the EULA that pops up on your screen.
This is trespass, plain and simple. No software should ever install itself on a user’s computer without some notification to the user and opportunity to decline. That’s doubly true for drivers, because if they have bugs, they can render your whole system unstable and even introduce security vulnerabilities.
I’ve been a little shocked to see pro-DRM libertarians shrug their shoulders at the recent revelations about Sony’s behavior. (and no, Sony hasn’t been “bending over backwards” to fix the problems) We libertarians believe that property rights are fundamental rights that everyone has a duty to respect. Even big corporations. We don’t think that trespass is OK as long as it doesn’t do too much damage.
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Any program that does not appear in the program directory and have a functional remove program should be considered illegal spyware and any company that uses spyware services should share criminal liability.
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It's shortsighted because opening an exploitable vulnerability on somebody's machine (and this has infected at least half a million machines) is already quite significant damage, even if there are no burning buildings. At a minimum, network administrators will have to spend a great deal of expensive labor to clean up this mess.
It's premature in the sense that this root vulnerability's not going to go away any time soon. The CDs will remain in circulation essentially forever, and (extrapolating from previous worm infections) there will be significant numbers of old unpatched and infected machines on the Internet for at least a decade. Any time a band of crackers wants to bootstrap a botnet, this will be one more pool of targets for them. The full damages from this rootkit are going to be felt by the Internet for years to come.
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