Rewind your tech memory to November 2005 and you'll find Sony (more particularly
Sony BMG) embroiled in a massive PR hoo-ha. The cause? A particularly damaging brand of corporate paranoia that saw thousands of music buyers' PCs infected with a malicious root-kit that stole their privacy and opened them up to attack from trojans and other malware.
Well now two US lawyers have published an exhaustively researched study into the scandal, says
BoingBoing. And with a title like 'The Magnificence of the Disaster: Reconstructing the Sony rootkit incident', you know it's going to be
a cracking read [PDF link]. The study explains how Sony BMG got itself into the mess in the first place, how it came to chose two particularly flawed DRM schemes and how it tried - and largely failed - to dig itself out of a hole subsequently.