Last Updated on: 10th November 2013, 01:25 pm
If any of you out there own or are planning to own a copy of the new Beastie Boys CD”To the Five Boroughs,” you might want to take a look at
this article from The Register
before you lay down your cash.
It seems that the fine folks over at Capitol Records are shipping CD’s that contain a virus that is designed to prevent you from ripping the tracks to your hard drive.
This isn’t the first copy protected CD to hit the market and personally I think that any CD that contains such protections isn’t really a CD at all because it doesn’t meet the technical standard of what is supposed to be a CD and because they are defective and have the potential to cause dammage to people’s computers and not work properly in some stereo systems, but that’s not the point. What makes this one especially worrying is that the CD has the capability to install files on your computer without first getting your permission to do so, and worse than that, without even so much as having the common courtesy to mention it at all, not even after the deed is done.
Removal instructions are provided in the article that I linked to above along with a way to prevent yourself from being infected by such malware in the future. But I’ve got an even simpler way to protect yourself than that, just don’t buy any CD that contains an anti-copying mechanism. It’s that simple.
