Beastie Boys CD installs virus

From The Register...

"A new Beastie Boys' CD called "To the Five Boroughs" (Capitol Records), is raising hackles around the Web for reputedly infecting computers with a virus."

See the rest here

 

just turn autorun off! or use eac and set it to automaticly get the toc from the cd if it's running, rip it and then put the cd away in a box in your wardrobe.
alternatively don;t buy it 'cos the beastie boys have only done about 2 good songs in their career (imoo) so the law of averages says this one will be totall sh*t too.
cheers


julian

 

one step too far, i say!

hope the record company & distributors get what's coming to them for this one.

 

its uncanny how i had that very same cd in the drive when i read this post, fortunately though i have autorun disabled

 

Julian, I think it's MOre that you/I, shouldn't have to! Like MikeD says, surely gone too far?

 

Hi,

Good job I bought this on vinyl.


SCIDB

 

One step too far, I think.

This is not the answer to illegal dowloads, nor is it legal in itself.

I wonder, do the band know about this? I can imagine them not being too pleased at the thought of their music being used to distribute an illegal piece of software. Who knows, this could be the first time a band sues its record label for abusing their CDs?

 

Tom, according to the original article the band are aware of this 'feature' of their CD. However it is part of the record companies policy to install DRM software on the CD and so it is out of the control of the artist. Unless of course they change labels.

 

Copy-protected CDs are becoming a menace, but thankfully, CD-ex seems to be fine at ripping them all. Incidentally, Nero was able to copy Tubular Bells 2003 (which is copy-protected) without any problems.

I notice EMI seem to releasing copy protected CDs with great regularity. When I tried to play a CD of Talk Talk the other day on my work PC. The sound card has been disabled by IT (must remdy that myeself). Although the CD player in Windows 2000 could play the CD as a normal Red Book Audio CD, it was terribly stuttery.

Thankfully, it plays fine on my hifi's CD player at home.

 

Same with Audiograbber. All copy protection seems to do is add a few minutes to the time it takes to copy them, which strikes me as pointless. When you can downloard a free piece of software that will make a perfect copy of the music but without all the crap that comes with it on the original, you wonder what the point of the copy protection was in the first place.

 

Tom, the copy protection will/was intended to deter most members of the public who don't use tools like EAC, CDEX etc. to do their ripping, and instead rely on somehting like windows media player etc.

 

Then we must educate them!