There is nothing that destroys your faith in your fellow man quite so much as the sight of rank stupidity in full action.
Today's case in point is SunnComm's decision to sue a Princeton graduate student for explaining that holding down the shift key disables their (expensive) DRM scheme. I'm sure many other qualified people will talk about the chilling effects of the DMCA. Many others will want to talk about the implications that Sunncomm makes when they claim that disclosing the nature of a file they place on your computer is violating their rights. Instead, I want to talk about what this implies about Sunncomm itself.
Sunncomm complains that Halderman's description of the security file and the shift key to disable the Autorun feature "significantly damaged SunnComm's reputation and caused the market value of SunnComm to drop by more than $10 million." I don't think that it was Halderman who has made the "erroneous assumption" here.
Sunncomm makes this claim, while stating on their website that they are listed only on the OTC board (i.e., they are not regularly traded) and that they have, according to their website, "to date ... earned only insignificant revenue from sales of its products." Given that, I fail to see how Sunncomm can make any claim about its "market value," considering that by most measures of market value, they have none.
And this leads to more insidious problem. I think that perhaps Sunncomm's engineering talent is the key to why their sales revenues are "insignificant." They have been "in the news" for at least 2 years, according to a factoid on their website. And the best their engineers could come up with was to rely on a "magic cookie" on the user's hard drive and an autorun program, either of which is easily defeatable by knowledge that a modestly informed computer user could defeat?
This is tantamount to "encrypting" text with ROT-13, and suing people for circumventing it. It would be funny, if it weren't so terribly pathetic. My guess is that the engineering managers there got desperate for a solution and ran with the best they could come up with, under pressure from higher management and/or their funding sources.
I should hope that whoever is bankrolling Sunncomm would scrutinize their engineering division. If this is truly the best that they could come up with, Sunncomm has many deeper issue to resolve than one clever graduate student and a PR black-eye.
Posted by brent at 19:27