Sony Settles With FTC Over Rootkits

The FTC has struck a deal with Sony punishing Sony for the rootkits it included on millions of CDs in 2005. The deal is exactly like the Texas and California settlements — $150 a rootkit. The settlement isn't final yet. There will be a 30-day public consultation. American citizens who read Slashdot might want to put in their two cents. Comments will be accepted through March 1 at: FTC, Office of the Secretary, Room H-135, 600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20580 (snail mail only). Here is the FTC page announcing the settlement.

What about OS????/

[threeofnine]

I am an Aussie, this means nothing to anyone outside the USA, it would be good to see Sony pay US$150 to everyone they infected with their shite.

how does this multiply out?

[acidrain]

Is that $150 per cd "sold through" or $150 per customer who is aware of the lawsuit and actually files to get their cheque? Because I imagine those are entirely different numbers. Also, for those who would like to see Sony hurt worse for this, do remember that that this is more than enough. Any company pulling a stunt like that again will be ignorant, not unconcerned.

So when are desktop OS's going to come installed inside a secure virtual machine OS that is capable of detecting rootkits and possibly doing a little extra scanning on the side? That is long overdue.

Re:What about OS????/

[grimJester]

This site [doxpara.com] has maps of the spread of the rootkit. It looks like they were sold in the US and western Europe, with stray copies spread around the wordl.

Re:150? If by 150 you mean 150ml

[GringoCroco]

From wikipedia

Originally, the only symbol for the litre was l (lowercase letter l), following the SI convention that only those unit symbols that abbreviate the name of a person start with a capital letter.
In many English-speaking countries, the most common shape of a handwritten Arabic digit 1 is just a vertical stroke, that is it lacks the upstroke added in many other cultures. Therefore, the digit 1 may easily be confused with the letter l. On some typewriters, particularly older ones, the l key had to be used to type the numeral 1. Further, in some typefaces the two characters are nearly indistinguishable. This caused some concern, especially in the medical community. As a result, L (uppercase letter L) was accepted as an alternative symbol for litre in 1979. The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology now recommends the use of the uppercase letter L, a practice that is also widely followed in Canada and Australia. In these countries, the symbol L is also used with prefixes, as in mL and L, instead of the traditional ml and l used in Europe. In Britain and Ireland, lowercase l is used with prefixes, though whole litres are often written in full (so, "750 ml" on a wine bottle, but often "1 litre" on a juice carton).
Prior to 1979, the symbol (script small l, U+2113), came into common use in some countries; for example, it was recommended by South African Bureau of Standards publication M33 in the 1970s. This symbol can still be encountered occasionally in some English-speaking countries, but it is not used in most countries and not officially recognised by the BIPM, the International Organization for Standardization, or any national standards body.

so Europeans that use "l" instead if "L" are American, you say ...

Re:How About...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yay, more Intarweb stupidity...

Listen.... it doesn't matter that they're separate departments. Its. The. Same. Company. Saying "Oh its just the music department, all those other departments are ok," is just a cop-out. At least be honest that you don't really care.

You seemed have missed some fundamental facts. IT'S NOT THE SAME COMPANY! IT"S NOT A DEPARTMENT! IT'S A SEPARATE COMPANY! There's a *reason* it's called "Sony BMG" instead of "Sony Music Entertainment" (here's a hint, Sony doesn't own all of it), just like MSNBC is called "MSNBC" instead of "Microsoft Cable News" or some sillyness like that...

Then there's the way that Sony has to invent their own wheel every time, rather than using (see Mini-Disc, Memory Stick, UMD Discs (PSP), etc)established standards

What "established standard" should Sony have used instead of developing MiniDisc? There were no optical recordable disc standards, nor standards for perceptual lossy audio codecs (MPEG1 wasn't even a paper spec yet).

again their tendency to create their own standards such as the Memory Stick rather than use existing technology (like SD cards).

Uhhh, how could Sony have used SD when at the time Memory Stick was introduced SD didn't exist yet?

tell them

[zogger]

That's the kind of stuff that needs to go to the FTC comments on this case. Encourage your friend (and he to any of his friends who might also have gone through the same deal) to write in what happened to them. This, in his case now, became part of accessibility laws, he is being discriminated against because of the extra cost and hassle of having to use that particular software, yet the settlement makes no provisions for that. Use that angle.

Re:individual doing this would go to jail

[Adambomb]

Because avoiding jail time is expensive, and how many individuals have deeper pockets than even an average sized corporation?

Sad, but true.