The dawn of a new year should be a time of reflection, of weighing what happened in the last year and planning to make the next 12 months better. I have reflected on the happenings of last year and I would sum up 2006 as The Year of Not Enough Outrage.
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Sure, we were all suitably outraged by HP's boardroom foolishness and the government stepped in and took action, so score one for the forces of good. But that was one of a very few points of light in an otherwise dark, gloomy cavern of misbehavior.
We started 2006 with the Sony BMG Music Entertainment digital rights management (DRM) fiasco still going strong. In late 2005 it was discovered Sony had intentionally installed rootkit software on PCs when users tried to play certain Sony-produced CDs under Windows.
By the start of 2006 we knew that more than 500,000 networks had been infected, including a number of U.S. military networks. We also knew hackers had created malware that could exploit the naïve and poorly written Sony rootkit code. Sony had made a huge problem for us.
The obvious conclusion was that the Sony DRM fiasco was extremely serious - more so than most people realized considering that Sony compromised the integrity of tens of thousands of PCs and thousands of networks. But did the government get involved? No. This was a big company with big lawyers and who in the civil service wants to represent the people when they'll probably just get their head handed back to them.
The burden of prosecution rested on civil suits, several of which have resulted in fines of a scant few million dollars while others won't be settled until 2008.
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