Friday, December 30, 2005

Would you install software made by these people?

Every once in a while I hear about people who have gotten a bad haircut and were offered another one as a compensation. I always wondered about it: if they fucked it up the first time around, why would anyone get another haircut from the same hairdresser, considering that the damage is cumulative? And what happens when they fuck up again? Sounds like a sure recipe for the hairstyle of the Russian Civil War hero Kotovsky, which I suppose is OK if that's what you want, but which in any case is not a thing people normally want to pay for.

Well, turns out that hairdressers are not the only ones who are offering such "corrections". Our old friend Sony BMG has reached a tentative settlement with the customers who are suing it. It is offering a new normal CD instead of the "Cd product", another downloaded CD from a list of more than 200, $7.50 (or alternatively three downloands and no $7.50), a promise to stop making CD products with XCP and to provide a software to uninstall that, ahem, technology (I think the proper term is malware).

Somebody please explain me: considering the fine quality of the software that originally came with the CD product, and the even finer quality of the software that they then provided to uninstall the software that originally came with the CD product, is there still anyone in the world who would voluntarily install or use any kind of software provided by Sony BMG?

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