I'm wondering if the people at F4I used to work at Creative Labs, writing the extremely buggy SB Live drivers that would kill SMP machines left and right due to not understanding proper locking mechanisms in their low level drivers. Race conditions and all other sorts of goodies pop up when you start going multithreaded. Thankfully a side effect of so many machines have HyperThreading these days exposes those errors quicker than the good ole days of Tyan motherboards with dual processors, etc.
I also like how their aries.sys driver doesn't do any data validation on the information passed to it. Way to go! All the more reason not to buy any of those CDs.
The unfortunate side effect I can see happening is people "locking down" workstations even more when people could previously listen to a CD at work but now with all this rootkit business going on, it is a security risk. You shouldn't have to have admin rights on a computer to play an audio CD but that's what it looks like now.
Anyway, here is the link:
http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/11/sonys-rootkit-first-4-internet.html
