16.11.05

[what i want for christmas]

aibo logoblack aibo dog
Ok, mum, dad, 'chele, steve, and AnYoNe who would like to buy me a christmas pressie....how about a sony aibo.
I met Lassie the other day and can't get over how *real* these dogs are. So, anyone with an extra grand in their pocket I know how you can spend it!!!! champagne aibo dog

posted by Jess @ 11:21   6 comments links to this post

6 Comments:

At 4:55 AM, Blogger Nihilist said...

Sorry, but I refuse to buy anything from Sony given their belief that consumers are evil.

 
At 3:43 PM, Blogger Jess said...

But the doggies are sooooo cute!!! And so unbelievably real...I wonder who actually programmed them. Whoever did must have spent absolute AGES studying the movements/gestures of real dogs.
Tell me about Sony and evil consumers?

 
At 8:20 PM, Blogger Nihilist said...

Cute doesn't cut it, in this case.

Sony and BMG merged a while back. BMG, being a huge music company, ensures that anything that Sony does has horrible amounts of piracy protection on it (dubbed DRM - digital rights management). So, you have these horrible DRM practices from the electronics side of the company, to satisfy the music side of the company.

Now, this is nothing particularly new. The recording and motion picture industries have been horrified by technology since day one. In fact, they took Sony to court in 1984 to ensure that the WalkMan never made it to market. They lost the case. And now Sony is hurting itself.

Moving along... At the beginning of this month a guy named Mark Russinovich (hardcore Windows coder) was poking around with one of the products that his company makes. The product is used to check to see if any 'rootkits' (tools designed to allow a remote use to take complete control of a PC) are installed. He didn't expect anything to crop up, but something did. You can read his whole slew of findings here: http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html

The basic gist: Sony embedded some horrible DRM on a CD. The software then embeds itself on Windows PCs, and actually cloaks itself from the OS. It also insinuates itself so nicely that if you delete it, you'll probably also bork your computer.

So, when that went public, all the tech people went nuts. Generally DRM is seen as a hideous thing, a way of legislating money out of people instead of giving them a valid reason to buy things. But to install clocked software? That can break an OS? That actually periodically connects to a Sony website to tell them what you've been doing? That's a horrible infringment of privacy.

Roughly a week after the story started making the rounds, Thomas Hesse, President of Sony BMG's global digital business division spouted off this gem:

"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it," he asked? "The software is designed to protect our CDs from unauthorized copying, ripping."

And there you go. It is their utter disregard and dislike for consumers. It is their complete intransigence towards the idea of "fair use." If I buy something, and want to make copies of it, I'd better be able to. I did pay for it, after all.

There is a far bigger story to be found behind Sony, and the recording/motion picture industries. Sony wants to create it's own digital world - an all Sony no Internet connection one. That way they can watch the DRM every step of the way, and ensure that people stay locked in to whatever they say.

As to the R/MPI... Content providers want to move to a micro-payment world. The idea is that you basically 'rent' things from them, and for short periods of time. Want to watch a TV show on demand? Sure, at $1.99. However, it'll start deleting itself 30 minutes after you've started watching it. Want to rewind? Good luck. Want to watch it again? Got another $1.99? Bought a CD and want to convert it to MP3? Sure you can do that, but you cannot put it on your MP3 player. That'll cost you $0.49/track.

It's the complete and utter siege of fair use. And I do not like it. Hence my refusal to support Sony.

 
At 8:23 PM, Blogger Nihilist said...

Whoops, I meant "cloaked software."

Also: I should point out that in the Thomas Hesse quote he says "our CDs" when in fact... They are not theirs anymore. The second they are purchased, they are newly owned. So to think that they can do whatever they want after the fact is just brutal.

 
At 5:25 PM, Blogger Jess said...

Hey, did you hear about Sony having been taken to court because they secretly installed spyware on customers hardware.....hrumph! Maybe the Aibo looks cute but is really a high-tech spy machine?!

 
At 6:54 PM, Blogger Nihilist said...

Uh. Did you not read my post? That was all about the spyware (rootkit). C'mon!

 

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