The Digital Trojan Horse--Revealed!

My latest assignment for my Science Magazine class will be on the infamous Sony rootkit, an evil piece of digital rights management software that Sony has snuck into many CDs to keep consumers from making and sharing mp3s of the music they just legally bought. It’s basically a newfangled pirate catcher. An unfortunate side effect of this music industry giant infecting your computer is that this tricky piece of code cannot be removed from your machine without permanently damaging the security of your computer. I’m excited because I found out accidentally through my daily trawling on boingboing.net that some respectable academic types, two computer scientists from Princeton, are writing an intellectual paper on the whole debacle. I will hopefully be able to interview them and write a pretty compelling piece on the whole controversy. It’s nice to get some technical expertise to backup one’s conspiratorial paranoiac fantasies. Plus, because there seems to be very little high-profile reporting on this topic, as far as I can tell, I might be getting to do some real-world investigating--very exciting!

[Image from: http://www.albany.edu/cetl/about/studios.html]