You only have to remind yourself of the infamous “Sony rootkit scandal” to put it into proper perspective.

I recognized that maybe we had abdicated any power with every acceptance of the EULA’s along the way, but remembering the way that Verizon got hit for disabling the bluetooth feature on their phones I had hope that maybe there was some recourse against this kind of thing in the name of good sense. But soon lost steam: after a bit of plotting as to how I could campaign to hit Sony in the wallet twice as hard as they hit consumers I realized something that RW touches on above about the clusters of PS3′s in university labs, think tanks and so forth dutifully churning data en masse to fold proteins and map genomes and something occurred to me that might be behind this outrageous decision, as I had also been reading about the problem of viruses on the net and zombie-bot boxes around the world being shanghaied to evil causes without even the owners knowledge.

There was much flak over this being a response to curb potential piracy as it was announced shortly after a hacker found a hole that apparently was somehow linked either to linux alone or in conjunction with the Play Station Network. It was only in August of last year when they announced the new PS3 model wouldn’t have the “Install Other OS” option at all at which time they (or someone speaking on behalf of Sony) also stated that they had no plans to pull support for the feature on the previous models that already included the feature. Less than a year later, and coincidentally after the hacker announced getting his toe in he door of the PS3, did do just that citing “security issues” which everyone seemed to assume were piracy concerns. I wonder though if maybe the real “security” problem was more along the lines of “national” or “homeland” given the automatic linkup of all that CPU power via the PSN. At least that I could forgive more easily than such a shortsighted attempt at protecting profit. As stated,t the power of the PS3 along with its built in network is widely used for breaking encryptions and actually has a feature built into it for “Folding @ Home” to make use of your CPU time when not gaming. If there is in fact a way to subvert the system from an individual machine, the very nature of its worldwide distribution and homogeneous configuration due to the automatic updates, tI would think the situation could pose some nasty unexpected problems with all the connected machines on the network being manipulated to unfavorable ends which may not have been considered as a side effect of this convenient feature.

This is really unacceptable and inexcuseable behavior but it may just be that Sony didn’t have as much choice in the matter as it first appeared. Given their reticence to communicate with their customers over the stupid “leap year”glitch i can’t imagine them being forthcoming over something that may pose a much larger concern.

Any hardware vendor who bans me from installing custom firmware or operating systems deserves whatever law suit comes their way.

More and more now, you’re being told, in no uncertain terms, you’re not going to actually own anything you pay for, and that you’re not going to have a say in how you use it.

This was bad enough when it first started with internet service and then digital files, but the fact that you’re getting the same with HARDWARE itself should be a wake-up call for you, if it wasn’t already. If people were to actually READ the “terms and conditions”, and vote with their wallets by not supporting these “lease only” products, this would improve the landscape immensely.