The dawn of a new year should be a time of reflection, of weighing what happened in the last year and planning to make the next 12 months better. I have reflected on the happenings of last year and I would sum up 2006 as The Year of Not Enough Outrage. Sure, we were all suitably outraged by HP’s boardroom foolishness; the government stepped in and took action, so score one for the forces of good. But that was one of a very few points of light in an otherwise dark, gloomy cavern of misbehaviour.
We started 2006 with the Sony BMG Music Entertainment digital rights management (DRM) fiasco still going strong. In late 2005 it was discovered that Sony had intentionally installed rootkit software on PCs when users tried to play certain Sony-produced CDs under Windows.
By the start of 2006 we knew that more than 500,000 networks had been infected. We also knew hackers had created malware that could exploit the na