There’s an excellent entry up over at Scatterbox detailing Sony’s perfidious scum-suckery (ed – penultimate ‘s’ chipperly added because The Consumerist is, at heart, a family publication). First: the spyware and malware they surreptitiously installed on the computers of thousands of people who had actually bothered to buy their CDs; then, vandalizing other people’s property so they could tattoo their rainbow corporate swastika in public places on somebody else’s dime. These guys are sleazy enough that a mere push would send them in a frictionless glide right across the pit full of jagged glass bottles and honey consumers would like to roll them in.

Steven Silvers has got an excellent message to send to Sony and other businesses engaging in “stealth marketing”:

As the hide-your-marketing hype reaches its inevitable peak, Sony
s very public image problems are bound to be followed in 2006 by other companies that ignore this reality of the information age:

Your stealth marketing will be only as successful as the reaction consumers have when they realize who
s behind it and what you
ve been up to.

And, yes, they will find out.

Read the whole thing. For a refreshing change of pace, there’s a great Orwell quote in there that isn’t being used by both political hemispheres to either defend or offend President Bush, depending on the quoter.

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