DRMed CD Warning

[rejectomorph]

This page is written mostly in Geek, but it contains a timely warning for anyone who is playing recently-acquired CD's on their computer. It's a weblog entry by Mark Russinovich of Sysinternals, telling about his experience with software surreptitiously loaded onto his computer by a CD made by Sony. He sums it up thus:

"The entire experience was frustrating and irritating. Not only had Sony put software on my system that uses techniques commonly used by malware to mask its presence, the software is poorly written and provides no means for uninstall. Worse, most users that stumble across the cloaked files with a RKR scan will cripple their computer if they attempt the obvious step of deleting the cloaked files."

Yet another compelling reason to refuse to buy the increasingly malicious products of the decadent and corrupt record industry.

Incidentally, something strange happened when I loaded this page on Opera. All of the test of the webblog entry following the first couple of paragraphs reversed before the page was fully loaded- I mean, each individual word came out backward, so that Sony become ynoS. The comments and other sections of the page were unaffected. I fetched the page with Firefox, and it displayed correctly. Apparently some quirk with Opera. I'll inform them of it.