Sony does the bully thingie

I'm not into the whole gaming scene --last RPG game I owned was Diablo II-- but the news about Sony doing the bully dance just pissed me off royally. Here's the background.

We all know that all the high tech thingamajingies by these asian makers are always released first in Japan and only months later in North America and Europe. Want the latest cellphone? Try shopping in Seoul. Want the coolest add-on for your PSP? Tokyo is the place to be. So what's a hardcore gamer to do? That's what some smart entrepeneur in Hong Kong thought about before starting up Lik Sang. Lik Sang is (or was) an online retailer specialized in supplying those same high tech gadgets to buyers in North America and Europe. Buying directly from the source country, mainly Japan, Lik Sang would then resell the goods to those gamers who couldn't wait half a year to get their hands on the latest hardware. That's until Sony sued Lik Sang in a London court last year for copyright infringement and other crap to stop the online retailer from selling PSP consoles in Europe before their official release there. This week the same London court ruled in favour of Sony, paving the way for other manufacturers to initiate action against Lik Sang.

According to Lik Sang's website, they have decided to close shop because "With this precedent set, next week could already be the stage for complaints from Sony America about the same thing, or from other console manufacturers about other consoles to other regions, or even from any publisher about any specific software title."

The sucky thing is that Lik Sang was not selling pirated software or consoles. All they did was buy from Sony and resell to people who wanted these products. The precedent is that, if you live in Europe, you can't sell your used console to someone else. The console that you bought and belongs to you to do as you wish. You can't sell it if you don't like it anymore. You can't get rid of it if you get a newer better one. In other words, once you buy a Sony console you're stuck with it like it or not. Hurray for your rights to resell something you legitimatelly buy. Hurray for Sony.

A pig in my pooter

One thing I've taken pride of is that I keep my machine crapware-free by following a few basic rules like keeping my Norton, Spybot S&D, and AdAware updated, mainly. And running preventive scans regularly. So imagine my surprise when, while doing a routine scan this morning, Spybot tells me I've got something called Torpig. Damage control mode kicks in and I google the name, thinking in the background that it may be somehow related to TOR and, thus, a false alarm. For those not in the know TOR stands for The Onion Router, a free IP masking service that my Azureus frequently connects to.

Surprise surprise. Torpig happens not to be a false alarm. It's a passworrd stealer trojan. Bad. According to Panda's website, "It needs an attacking user's intervention in order to reach the affected computer." Badder. Only scenario I can think of here is a bugged webpage. The kind that are displayed when you open a SPAM email. My bad. I've been getting cocky and actually opening some SPAM emails lately. That's gotta stop.

So Spybot offers to clean it up after restart. No, thanks. Spybot is a great tool but its clean-on-restart feature can take forever. I dig in my toolchest (no, not THAT toolchest, Sammi) and find what I was looking for: KillBox. This little piece of software by an unassuming fellow Canuckian does a great job of removing anything -including executables attached to running processes- on reboot. I set the parameters, reboot the box, and Torpig is history. Woot!!

The moral? Do not open SPAM, even if your pooter is safe. The lesson learned? I kick booty. Those dunces at EE (and the other dunce at ERT) don't know what they're missing.