Sony's Nasty CDs & Wal-Mart's Nasty Music Service

Last year, Sony sold some audio CDs that secretly contained rootkits -- essentially a nasty virus, albeit one that doesn’t self-propagate -- that not only seriously messed up your system, but also contained security holes that allowed hackers to mess up your system, too.  They’ve received all kinds of bad press about this, and rightly so, and have since been schooled by the justice system for it.

The settlement allows people who purchased one of their nastyware-infested CDs to get a free replacement along with 3 free album downloads from places like iTunes or Wal-Mart.  The list of available albums is pretty slim, but I can find 3 on there that I’d like to have.  And since I purchased the album "Faso Latido" by A Static Lullaby last year, which is one of the infected CDs, I’m in the money.

Not owning an iPod, I thought I’d check out some of the other download services, like that offered by Wal-Mart.  I won’t even bother to link to their site because 1) their site structure is awful, with ugly unintelligible links that look like they might not even work outside an existing session, and 2) their music download service is IE-only, Windows-Media-Player-only, and Windows-only.  From their FAQ:

How can I get the best performance out of Wal-Mart Music Downloads?

To avoid problems with downloading and playback, please make sure you do the following:

Use Internet Explorer 6.0 or later, or Windows Media Player 9 or later

Disable pop-up blockers

Disable firewalls

Disable download accelerators

Oh, sure, that sounds great!  While you’re at it, why don’t you unplug your computer, put it outside in the rain, and have your dog take a dump on it.

If I’m not mistaken, you can buy songs from ITMS and burn them to a CD, even if you don’t have an iPod, right?  It looks like that’s what I’ll probably do.