Bonne chance
The Register carries this rather excellent story. Sacked workers at a Sony VHS factory have taken hostage the Sony France chief executive. I’m not sure at what point you get to claim indignation when a VHS factory is shut down – the format’s all but redundant, after all – but I really rather like the course of action.
To say I have a strong distaste for Sony would be an understatement.
- They’ve included viruses on their CDs (See the Wikipedia article), to which their response was (and this is a genuine quote) “Most people, I think, don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?”
- Then, the uninstaller created “a far greater security risk than even the original Sony rootkit“.
- Their SonicStage and Connect MP3 player software is terrible, despite the premium costs of the players.
- They were the focus of a class action lawsuit when their PS2 lasers were shit.
- They were sued, and ultimately removed feedback rumbling from PS3 controllers, since the whole technology was ripped off from Immersion with niether payment nor even acknowledgement.
- Then there’s their suing Lik Sang into oblivion for daring to legally buy their products wholesale in Japan and sell them on to Western consumers, because it circumvented their region encoding & price hiking.
- They’ve consistently tried to introduce proprietary formats with no place in the market – Betamax, Minidisc, and UMD.
- Most spectacularly, they’ve manufactured laptop batteries for Dell, HP, Lenovo and Apple which have exploded with flames reaching six foot plumes.
- Most recently they’re bitching about the Change4Life campaign using a Playstation controller in their attempts to get kids off their sofas from time to time and get some fresh air.
So, if anybody would like to kidnap any more Sony execs under any thin veil of industrial action, or just recreationally, you have my blessings. That said, I won’t be purchasing any fresh VHS tapes, solidarity or none…
