[jakepunk]

Despite the hysteria of impending Armageddon, I knowingly and willingly purchased The Bad Plus Suspicious Activity?.  I did this despite the fact that it installs a DRM rootkit on your PC if you aren't careful.

I absolutely love this album.  The songs had me tapping my feet and laughing out loud.  The Empire Strikes Backwards is brilliant.  I like the fact that they emphasize their own compositions on this album and only have one cover.  The acoustics on this album sound good, too.  There is only one clunker in my opinion... Knows the Difference on track 5 seems to lack structure.

Reading the reviews on Amazon.com (for what they're worth), they seem to fall into the "love it or hate it" categories.  If you liked the previous two releases, you will like this one.

The DRM stuff is a joke.  Note the two extra tracks containing DRM goop:



You can disable Autoplay in Windows, or you can tell Exact Audio Copy to disable Autoplay for you.  The EAC helper text is in Engrish, but you get the idea:



P.S.  I find it ironic that a band with songs like Cheney Piñata (and whose album title mocks Homeland Security) has a prominent FBI anti-copying emblem on the CD.  I doubt they had much say in that.  

[ooheadsoo]

Those track names are only available now that the DRM is well known.  When I bought the cd, there was none of that.  You guys are fortunate :p

[nathanm]

So disabling Autoplay is all you have to to to thwart the scary malware software?  Pffft!  Call that copy protection!?  That's like the first thing the anti-virus people tell you to do, turn off autoplay for CDs.  Duh!  Apple tells you to disable it in Quicktime's prefs.  This scheme sounds about as effective as Photoshop CS's alleged refusal to open or print scans of banknotes, which took me 3 seconds to bypass.  Is that the best they can come up with? This is about as effective as the Jedi mind trick!

A LITTLE bit of knowledge goes a LONG way with this virus crap.  If you do just a little research you can avoid 95% of the stuff that's out there.  Being a computer genious not necessary.  Most of it seems to rely on the user being completely ignorant and careless.  I expect more from the hackers.  They need to make truly draconian shit that totally alienates and angers every single one of their honest, paying customers.  That's the only way we'll ever see the demise of the big bad record biz.  Like how about between every song an announcer comes on and recites the software license agreement or every minute there's a brief burst of guys banging on pots and pans and yelling, "Copyright law is good for you!"  They're just not doing enough to piss off the listener.

[sabes]

After allowing myself to get pig-biting mad at sony for downloading spyware to my pc and preventing me from ripping "suspicious activity" to my readynas here at the office, i dejectedly brought the disc home where my lowly mac mini resides and inserted the cd. VOILA! the cd ripped beautifully and i am now enjoying it being streamed from the mini to my sb2. take that, sony!  

[Geoff-AU]

actually, the DRM uses a $SYS$ prefix on filenames to sort out what is DRM stuff and what's not, so renaming your favourite ripping program to have a $SYS$ in front of it totally defeats the DRM.

roflcopter.  sony are an absolute fuggin joke.

(i could be wrong about the above, the info is all over the net and i'm working my way through my beer cache!!)