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Comment by eridius | Hacker News Reader

> like the iTunes and Kindle ‘‘updates’’ that have removed features the products were sold with

Anyone know what iTunes update he's talking about? I don't remember anything that fits this description.

Don't know about iTunes, but much along these lines Sonos removed support for Windows DRM and ticked off customers who had their music stored in that format. Amusingly, the link I found about it is also a post by Cory Doctorow.

https://boingboing.net/2011/12/22/sonos-removes-windows-drm-...

I suspect the Kindle feature he's talking about is the text-to-speech feature, which the publishers hated because it threatened audiobook sales. Or maybe he's talking about Amazon deleting books from customers' Kindles?

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/07/amazon-sold-pirated-...

Text-to-speech in kindle was really nice feature in my opinion.

I don't know about Apple, but Sony is an excellent example.

They removed the ability to use Linux on the PS3. This is probably one reason they have been consistently targeted by hackers.

The reason hackers get Sony is because they installed rootkits in everyone of their window's consumers. Then they apologized, released a "fix" that only hid the rootkit.

Besides, it must be fun to keep hacking the same company and seeing that they haven't changed anything in their IT.

And by "apologized", you mean "having a top Sony executive insult their customers' intelligence":

> "Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"

Source: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/11/sonys_drm_roo...

I'm pretty happy to have not bought a single Sony product since 2005. I think that people should boycott brands that spit in their soup, but Doctorow makes a better point: these companies should be killed.

I remember that one, although IIRC they did it because Linux-on-PS3 was being used as a way to get around the copyright restrictions on the PS3 and pirate games. Basically, the pirates ruined it for everyone.

I feel comfortable in blaming Sony for this. At one point I would have paid for an open ps3, say without the gpu, but these are lost sales now.

Sony didn't really have a choice. They have to protect the integrity of their system as best they can, which means closing any holes that are used to circumvent the copyright restrictions. Besides just being important to protect sales on their platform, it wouldn't surprise me if there aren't contractual obligations here as well.

The integrity of the Win-tel platform is not preserved at all, yet games are still being sold there.

That doesn't really have any bearing on Sony's contractual obligations as a console vendor. And you'll note PC games are often DRM-laden, and the DRM vendors surely have their own contractual obligations to do as much as they can to prevent their DRM platform from being compromised. Similarly, I know for sure that back when Apple sold DRM-laden music, they had contractual obligations to the music labels to fix any FairPlay holes they could.

...which are again on Sony for signing in the first place.

I mean it's their right to be a purely gaming console, but they should also accept blame for tanking their reputation with the open source community.

They should be given kudos for even trying, not blame for failing at what appears to be an impossible task. Sony thought they could offer Linux-on-PS3 and still keep the PS3 secure. For a while it seemed to work, but eventually it was demonstrated that Linux-on-PS3 broke the security model of the PS3. Sony really had no choice, because it's a gaming console first and foremost and they had to protect that. Yeah it sucks for everyone who was interested in using it as a Linux machine, but if you can't recognize that Sony had an obligation to protect the gaming console over the Linux support, I don't really know what to say to you.

However you view it, the damage is done.

May have been the one that "helpfully" deleted your music, and replaced it by compressed version, even if you didn't bought it via iTunes. Or deleted your files period, if it detected a not so "equivalent" version you could download.

Supposedly to save local disk space.

I recall an accounting of a composer losing his work file that way —they got compressed behind his back. Thank goodness he had a backup.

That was never an iTunes feature. That was a bug, that affected a relatively low number of people, and was fixed IIRC within a week.

I stand corrected, sorry.

Certainly some iTunes features have been removed over the years, but I don't know if it's anything that anyone would care about. The "Ping" music social network is gone, for example.

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