No Buy List
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Publicise and act on your beliefs
We are continually told that as consumers we have choices and that capitalism works by the action of the great mass of buyers choosing which products and services to buy and from whom.
It is time to take the capitalists at their word and exercise that choice in our own interests instead of theirs.
My small, very small, contribution is to try to avoid buying products that do things of which I disapprove, to not buy them from persons or organizations of whom or of which I disapprove.
This is a pragmatic affair, I am not asking anyone to suffer for their beliefs nor do I intend to suffer for mine. I simply intend to give my custom to those who offer similar services and products but who in some way do it more in accordance with my beliefs.
So I have a short list of organizations who will no longer get my custom or who I will watch carefully to see if they deserve it in the future.
My No Buy List
- Sony
- for trying to infect my PC with a rootkit.
- Bertine Zettlitz
- for allowing Sony's rootkit to be distributed on her discs. If anyone can find a list of other artists who have done the same I would love to copy it here or link to it.
- Capital Boulevard Fleamarket, Raleigh, NC, USA
- for throwing me out because I wasn't wearing shoes.
My Watch List
- Nokia and Symbian
- for not ensuring that owners of Symbian mobiles can grant necessary capabilities to programs created by the owners themselves.
Sony
I used to be a great fan of Sony. They made great products, robust and high quality. They still do, although I'm not so sure they are as good as they were.
I have several Sony products bought over an almost thirty five year period with which I am very pleased:
- Reel to reel tape recorder, bought secondhand in 1975. Still working almost as good as ever which is pretty impressive bearing in mind that it was involved in a car crash in 1978
- Discman portable CD player bought around 2000. Not so good for portable use as Sony claimed because the anti-jog feature is totally useless but sound quality is good, it sits next to my favourite chair right now.
- GSM mobile bought about five years ago. Robust, no frills, simple to use, dirt cheap. Very satisfied.
- Minidisk player. Neat device,much more useful when walking, jogging or skating than the Discman. But now we come to a disturbing feature which seems to be part of a trend: even though MP3 and OGG are either de facto standards or free the Minidisc player cannot play them so all sound files must be ripped to the format Sony prefers (or worse transcoded with consequent loss of quality).
So far so good but now we come to Rollerskating by Bertine Zettlitz. This was issued as a protected disc by Sony Records. The label has a mark on it that shows, if you know what it means, that this is a copy protected disc; but it is so small that in the inadequate lighting of many record stores it is all but invisible. I didn't see it, didn't even realize that there was anything to see.
When I inserted this disc in one PC it immediately installed the rootkit. This meant that I could not rip it to MP3 to play in my car. Well actually it didn't because I simply went to another PC turned off Autorun and ripped it with CDEx so not only did it try to prevent me doing what I am legally entitled to do (I live in Norway where, so far, we have a moderately sane legal system) but it failed in its aim.
Nonetheless it did succeed in compomising one machine and leaving open a back door that gives root privileges to anyone who can connect to it. That is reason enough for me to cut Sony out of my life forever, or at least until I can be sure that all those involved have left the company which is likely to be the rest of my life.
Nokia and Symbian
Symbian makes it very difficult for private individuals to run programs that they have written on their own mobiles. This amounts, in my opinion, to an anti-competitive practice.
If it doesn't get easier both will be moved to my No Buy List.
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