Bad November for Sony

Sony, whose open public products sales are dropping, and that have been announcing waves of job cuts, took a big mediatic blow by the beginning of the montg. The reason is the latest anti-copy device they put on audio CDs.
It's Mark Russinovich who let the cat out of the bag and discovered Sony, to protect their music files, would install on their users' PCs a "Rootkit". That is a small software that will go and hide deep in the OS and manage to stay there, invisible. Well hidden there, this Rootkit will monitor the use made of protected songs and may prevent their illegal use.
This installation of some kind of a Trojan horse raised a huge claim in the computing world, as this Rootkit may potentially result in security leaks. F Secure descripted one, and explained its manual desinstallation can't be done. Things got even worse when anti-virus editors decided to register it as a malevolent software.
Other consequences ensued. Smart guys studied the system Sony created to hide it that well, and based on it managed to cheat when playing WoW !
Ever since, even if Sony officially proposed a patch that would wipe it, things didn't improve, as complaints were placed in many countries against this quite borderline behaviour.
And it's not over yet, as a real Trojan now takes advantage of this Rootkit to take remote control of infected machines.
Sony made a step too far in anti-copy protection devices, and it will be quite hard for them to get out of the quagmire it led them to.