From Sony’s DRM Rootkit to CarrierIQ: Why Commercial Rootkits Make Us So Mad
The half life of the CarrierIQ “rootkit” scandal proved to be a little more than a week. That’s about how long it took for Trevor Eckhart, a young, Connecticut-based Android developer to begin raising questions about some stealth software he discovered running on Android phones by HTC and speculation in the media and online to run rampant about what kinds of spying said software might be engaged in. It was time enough for CarrierIQ to issue a lawyer letter threatening to sue the Eckhart and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to come to his defense and even for Congress to get involved – each of which ensured even more news cycles would be taken up with the mini-controversy. And it was time, at long last, for more information to become available about what was really going on with CarrierIQs software, and for cooler heads to prevail on both sides. The question, now, is why incidents like this provoke our anger so – and what we can do to stop them from happening again.