You gonna shoot, shoot!

November 22, 2005 3:16 PM

Tejas to Sony BMG: "Reach for th' sky, varmint. Now turn around reeeeal slow. And keep them hands where ah can see 'em." The rest of the necktie party is forming up over here. Popcorn?
posted by jfuller (31 comments total)

And phooey on you you anit-tag person! They should totally take this to Texas Justice. Or give Sony the death penalty. Oh I know, how about a country western shoot-out. We can setup a ghost town and have some cowboy (or Troy Aikman with a bag full of tootballs) standing in the middle of the dusty road and then Sony can come over the hill on horseback. That would be nice. Or some other absurd Texas stereotype. We could go on and on and I suspect we will. I also suspect that jfuller is a Texas insider!
posted by panoptican at 3:24 PM on November 22, 2005

I like the second link. That google site is something.
posted by srboisvert at 3:24 PM on November 22, 2005

Tejas?
tejas is a christian camp
Tejas is the ZZ equivalent of Yes' most abstract and compelling oeuvre
Tejas is right around the corner
Tejas is a no-go
Tejas is to a stock Harley-Davidson what a '65 GTO is to a Volkswagen
posted by JParker at 3:28 PM on November 22, 2005

Tejas
posted by vacapinta at 3:35 PM on November 22, 2005

Man, I can't decide which would be more embarassing right now: actually working for Sony, or being in a band signed to a Sony record label.
posted by mullingitover at 3:56 PM on November 22, 2005

Oh, and of course, F*ck Sony.
posted by mullingitover at 3:57 PM on November 22, 2005

Instead of Tejas, call it Baja Oklahoma. That annoys them more.
posted by BrandonAbell at 4:11 PM on November 22, 2005

mulling... : I'd think that the bands would be more irritated/annoyed than embarrassed. Unless they approved the DRM, in which case they had better be embarrassed. It's my understanding that Sony put the DRM on the CDs without letting the bands know until after the fact. I know that Switchfoot has been apologising for the rootkit ever since their album came out, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of the other bands are doing the same (I've not bothered to look).
posted by jlkr at 4:17 PM on November 22, 2005

It just keeps getting worse for Sony BMG...

"...it doesn't take much to make this a multi-million host, worm-scale Incident".
posted by normy at 4:35 PM on November 22, 2005

Might I recommend groklaw's coverage here?
posted by kaemaril at 4:35 PM on November 22, 2005

Huh? You linked to a google search? If that's okay then I have about 12,000,000 FPPs just waiting...

Shitty tags, shitty post, important topic.
posted by Elpoca at 4:41 PM on November 22, 2005

RIGHT ON! Pile on, come on, everyone get in on that class action! Yeah, baby yeah!

F*ck S*ny!
posted by Hildegarde at 4:42 PM on November 22, 2005

wow that's some amazing internet snooping. A full-on map of (some of) the name servers all over the world that are serving request to this sony virus. It's weird that there are so many hits in Germany and eastern Europe, but almost none in France. (ands a few in Spain). Is that the result of English speaking people buying American CDs? (England is lit up like a Christmas tree)
posted by delmoi at 4:50 PM on November 22, 2005

normy's link shoulda been the front page post if anything was going to be.
posted by Wolfdog at 4:51 PM on November 22, 2005

Wolf, Normy:

I'm glad you guys like my maps :) I'm trying to build ones w/ political borders.

It is important to realize that those maps only reflect name servers that have gone to connected.sonymusic.com, and though 100% of infected systems have gone there, not 100% of systems that have gone there have the rootkit. The real scandal here is what Bruce Schneier finally went on the record with:

Where are the security vendors? Why is it, three weeks after the exploit is discovered -- an exploit Sony has admitted should not have been released -- why is our best source of infection data only what one researcher with a DNS scanner has been able to find?

As each day passes, this becomes a bigger and bigger question.
posted by effugas at 5:16 PM on November 22, 2005

delmoi--

Thanks to you too. According to the per-country breakdowns (To Sony | To First4Internet) France is fairly well represented (actually, it seems to reflect more fear of the rootkit than actual evidence of infection.)

It's worth realizing that I can't see every name server, either.
posted by effugas at 5:19 PM on November 22, 2005

I'm hoping all this flap is scaring the living bejeezus out of all the other record companies out there, who will now hopefully just give the hell up on this stupid DRM crap once and for all. It's done, it's over, it's busted. The hackers and crackers will always be able to break it, no matter what they do, Microsoft's "Trusted Computing" notwithstanding.

People don't want that crap, they're not going to buy it. Sony's dismal sales of their "portable music players" proves it.

The cork is out of the bottle, and the ability to make money by controlling a physical media bottleneck is rapidly disappearing. All "content" sellers out there had better be paying attention, because this is going to happen to any sort of "entertainment media" that can be translated into digital form.

Happily, that can't be done to original works of art, or actual live performances done by human beings in front of other human beings yet, so creative people will still find ways to make a living adding value to what they do in some way other than selling it on paper and plastic.

The Penny Arcade boys (and others like them) know how to do it. Record companies and publishers, pay attention to webcomics!

Oh and Sony... sell off your content divisions. Sony Music is destroying your hardware sales, with their foolish insistence on stupid DRM tricks. Unload them, ASAP. Sony Films will have the same problem when downloading movies is as fast as downloading a 4MB mp3, although the problem will be less because people go to the theater and it's easy and cheap to buy DVDs now.

Innovate, or at least react to your market, or you're dead.
posted by zoogleplex at 5:19 PM on November 22, 2005

Texas has executed more people than any other state. Who will be first against the wall?
posted by Eideteker at 5:25 PM on November 22, 2005

Can someone explain why Sony only put the DRM in a few select releases, and why those releases were chosen? Was it still being piloted?
posted by spinoza at 5:28 PM on November 22, 2005

spin--

Yes, what we've seen from letters to retailers is that Sony was about to release this in 100% of their music releases.

This is no longer going to happen. Retailers are furious.
posted by effugas at 5:40 PM on November 22, 2005

effugas, do you have a link? Why are they furious? Pulling lucrative merchandise and delaying other merchandise right before holiday consumer orgy?

Oh my... they really, really screwed the pooch on this one, didn't they.
posted by zoogleplex at 6:09 PM on November 22, 2005

The fallout is extending to the whole Sony brand, not just the record label. A buddy of mine bought a laptop last weekend. He had planned to get a Sony, but after this little brouhaha, he ended up getting a Toshiba.
posted by Obvious Fakename at 6:34 PM on November 22, 2005

I thought NY and CA filed class-action suits a while ago.

normy's link shoulda been the front page post if anything was going to be.

And that was news a week ago.
posted by mrgrimm at 6:39 PM on November 22, 2005

Obvious--

I'm sitting in front of a 50-strong stack of PS2 games right now. I'm now getting 360 the day it's out of false shortage.

My next camera? A Fuji F11 instead of a Sony T9. I have several gigs of photos from my beloved Sony DSC-F88.

Links:

Insider tip on angry retailers
100% of Sony CD's will have this

Keep throwing questions up; I'll answer anything that doesn't violate confidentiality.
posted by effugas at 6:51 PM on November 22, 2005

zoogle--

CD's are a great gift item (~$15, reflect knowledge of person, etc) and creating doubt against them just encourages stuff like iTunes gift certificates or whatever.
posted by effugas at 6:57 PM on November 22, 2005

I, too, will not buy anything else from Sony, with the exception of video game stuff because I work in the game biz. That is also a completely different division from the music and music hardware parts.

It's a shame because all my home A/V equipment is all Sony, several thousand dollars worth. I was going to get one of their 42-inch flat screen HDTVs next year, but I'll buy from someone else instead, most likely. And as my components age I'll probably just replace them with a Mac Mini stack or other Apple-based media center system.

I won't buy any UMD-media movies for my PSP, either, nor am I likely to go see any Sony movies for a while... though I'm sure I'll have to break that at some point. In any event I'm glad I bought my Imogen Heap CD direct from her, even tho it cost a bit more to import it - her excellent CD is one of the ones affected by Sony's DRM. (Happily she'll still sell you one online, if you like it, which I encourage.)

I stopped buying BMG stuff - at least, as much as possible, because they're a huge conglomerate and it's hard to avoid it - a decade ago, for personal reasons related to the music biz.

On preview: effugas, thanks, cool links. Yes I hadn't considered the actual "sales," in that people won't buy Sony CDs for Xmas which will really hurt the retailers who have already paid wholesale for them, as opposed to a major headache getting product on the shelves. At least they're returnable; I bet Sony will see an unprecedented and outrageous amount of their entire catalog coming back to them in the after-Xmas return cycle.

Wow. I just hadn't thought about that angle at all. What a huge nightmare for them. How much anyone wanna bet that within the year, Sony Japan unloads Sony Music USA?
posted by zoogleplex at 7:07 PM on November 22, 2005

From what I can tell, Sony Consumer Electronics hates Sony Music only a little less than they hate Apple.

Whatever the Japanese translation of I Told You So is, is faintly echoing all the way across the Pacific into my Seattle apartment as we speak.
posted by effugas at 7:15 PM on November 22, 2005

Well, I know they've recalled them all, at least. Are people allowed to return infected CDs to stores?
posted by graventy at 7:17 PM on November 22, 2005

I just wonder if it would be possible for consumers to go after the retailers that sold them the Sony CDs as well.
posted by MegoSteve at 7:28 PM on November 22, 2005

Nice work, effugas!
posted by StickyCarpet at 8:52 PM on November 22, 2005

Grav--

I believe so, though stores simply don't have replacement stock. I hadn't realized the problem of wholesale purchases earlier; realize that CDs just aren't the sort of thing that might get subject to recall.

Mego--

If Sony had attempted to stonewall (which they sort of have, when it comes to accurate infection data, but not in terms of the consumer experience), I think the retailers would have been the next target. I know I sure considered going around to every store in the area and Legally Informing (TM) stores they were selling infected discs.

Sticky--

:) Thanks!
posted by effugas at 10:20 AM on November 23, 2005