The five most pointless Sony products ever

Perhaps the most annoying of all Sony's proprietary concoctions. SanDisk's miniSD was announced in 2003 and was designed "to meet the needs of the mobile phone market". Then in March 2005, SanDisk announced the slightly smaller microSD format -- a card designed "specifically for the wireless communications market".

Fine. But six months later, it was announced that Sony had worked with SanDisk to produce the Memory Stick Micro -- a card "designed to meet the growing storage needs of highly compact, multifunctional mobile phones". The world groaned. Only a few months earlier, Richard Whiteley had died. And now this. Humanity had reached new and excruciating lows.

microSD and Memory Stick Micro cards are extremely similar in size, and both were designed for use in phones. The most significant difference is that Memory Stick Micro cards support Sony's MagicGate DRM system -- something the average user enjoys as much as being circumcised.

To consumers this was just another irritation, another explanation to sit through at the electronics store, another worry when switching from brand to brand.

Sony introduced the Blu-spec CD format earlier this year. It promised better sound by using the technology used to author Blu-ray discs to master standard CDs. These blue, rather than red, lasers are far more accurate at burning pits in the readable surface of CDs. The result is fewer read errors, therefore better sound.

"That sounds good though," you say. "I don't get what's pointless," you continue. The thing is, Blu-spec CDs use the same 16-bit, 44KHz audio encoding as traditional CDs, so you're not gaining additional sonic data. It's not Blu-ray audio -- just standard CDs made in a different way, released as a new format. 

Really, Blu-spec is just glorified error-correction technology -- something the CD format already incorporates in the form of Cross-Interleaved Reed-Solomon Coding, and something many software-based CD ripping tools use to great effect.

Blu-spec, then, is Sony's proprietary answer to an industry-wide problem that causes few people any issues. So what's the point? Really?

Pretend, for a second, that you bought a horse. Doesn't matter what kind -- just a standard horse. Then, imagine finding out the breeder had purposely given it a disease that prevented it from having baby horses. And as a bonus, it left the horse open to malicious software attacks from remote computers.

Yeah, you'd be confused. As if an analogy had broken down along the way. But that's pretty much what happened in 2005, when Sony BMG put Extended Copy Protection (XCP) and MediaMax CD-3 software -- the Black Death incarnation of DRM -- on a total of 102 CD titles.

Users who played these CDs on their computers unknowingly had malware known as a 'rootkit' installed on their machines. Rootkits can avoid detection by anti-virus and security programs by hiding deep within a computer's operating system. This rootkit left PCs on which it was installed at the mercy of hackers.

Although the copy-protection was not strictly a Sony product (XCP was developed by a British company called First 4 Internet, now known as Fortium Technologies), the CDs that included it were. And for that reason we just can't help but consider this one of the most pointless -- and infuriating -- Sony products.

Incidentally, Sony claimed "there were no security risks associated with the anti-piracy technology", but offered to exchange CDs containing the software for versions without. Thanks a bunch.