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Comment by alias_neo | Hacker News Reader

I came here to mention exactly this and am glad to see it at the top.

I, as a teenager bought a Sony BMG album with this rootkit.

At the time I didn't own a standalone music player, just my PC. I had a nice Creative sound card and some decent speakers, and an appreciation for audio quality.

To my surprise I found that the Sony album prevented you from playing back anything but some low-quality 128Kb MP3s stored in that data portion of the Disc if using a PC and there was zero chance I was allowing their crapware onto my machine.

I contacted them and they sent me out a replacement disc without the root-kit data rubbish but only upon me first posting back my own disc, without its case no less.

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wasn't it a thing, that you could bypass this by holding shift (to disable autoplay) when inserting the disc?

or use linux :)

I know this statement of yours is somewhat of a meme, and you may even be saying it tongue-in-cheek, but, this is one of many tiny cuts over the years that caused me to switch entirely to Linux. I don't run Windows at home or at work for the best part of a decade now. I run bleeding edge hardware, I have a high-end gaming PC, my laptop is a 2019 model that only works if I use Linux 5.0 and my wife complains that Open/Libre Office sucks on her laptop.

Don't get me wrong, I have my issues, sometimes I have to fix things, but I would rather this any day than having to go back to using Windows.

> I have a high-end gaming PC

Is gaming a thing on Linux now? I was given to thinking that if you're into PC gaming you're really stuck with Windows ...

With Valve (steam) involved and wine much improved, it is a thing now, but you are still very limited compared to windows.

Agreed. The only major problems right now are alternative clients and anti-cheat engines (many of which inject themselves into the Windows Kernel, yeah...) not working. Seems Valve may be leaning on publishers to fix that though.[0]

[0] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/apparently-valve-are-...

A slight hitch: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/10/08/epic-games-buyin... and https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/964284402741149698...

Not condoning piracy, but it is a great equaliser. Hackers and modders will find their way around anti cheats anyway, I believe there's nothing unethical about exploiting that to play through Linux.

But yeah Epic Games is terrible.

GOG/Humble have done wonders for Linux as alternative stores.

Hopefully, for people like myself, who really aren't into multiplayer, that'll be less of an issue. I'm not sure which games do and don't contain EAC but I've generally had good results with my catalogue on Stream Play the biggest limitation being those which use Windows-specific codecs for their cut scenes or sounds.

It obviously depends on what you're playing exactly, but many titles (from indie to AAA) run great on Linux, either natively or through Proton (Steam's integrated Wine distribution with DX11/12 support).

Never used the Epic Store or Origin though, so cannot speak to that.

Origin, Uplay and Battle.net are working fine. I play Battlefield 1 and Overwatch with friends on Linux. EGL works too, but I know nobody who is using it (except for the free giveaways and the engine).

It's not perfect, but thanks to Steam Play/Proton it's becoming viable, I've played several high end "Windows" titles on Linux through Proton (modified Wine), and then others like Tomb Raider have native ports. DOOM 2016 runs better on my Linux box with Vulkan than it does on Windows, where it averages 100FPS/4K/Ultra vs ~60FPS in Windows. I'll be honest, _what_ I play is more driven by what's available now than it used to be, but I'm not much of an online/multiplayer, I prefer single-player so there's no huge rush and I have a back-catalogue that'll keep me busy for years to come, with more being added faster than I can play them.

Linux gaming has come a long way. Steam even has a fork of wine they are working on which is built into their client.

Ubuntu today is easier than windows 10 for me. Granted I use Linux heavily.

I think holding shift just works for autostart when booting up. Autorun/autoplay of CD's can be disabled in the system settings.

No, shift would disable autoplay. The question is whether this could defeat the malware ... I seem to remember that it did but few were wise to this.

That didn't work for getting you access to the better quality audio. The PC's drive would just skip the audio section, even if you prevented it from installing the malware/rootkit.

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