Our friend Sony again

The mind boggles.

Apparently Sony was not first made aware of the rootkit problem when Russinovich published it on Oct. 31, but much earlier: F-Secure notified Sony DACD on Oct. 4, and they forwarded the email to Sony BMG on Dec. 7.

Read it all, but I can put the loveliest quotes here:

"This e-mail, which we have also reviewed, seems to be about a routine matter," says Hesse. "While it did introduce the notion of a 'rootkit,' it did not suggest that this software was anything but benign."

"F-Secure had a conference call with executives of First4Internet on Oct. 20. It says First4Internet argued that there was no real problem because only a few people knew of the vulnerability XCP created, and said an update of the XCP software, due out early next year, would fix the problem on all future CDs."