Interesting that Sony would accuse Amergence of failure to meet its specifications now. After all, you’d think that’s an issue it would have taken up with the company two years ago, after its own engineers presumably reviewed the software and, if not then, perhaps on Oct. 4, 2005–the day Finnish security outfit F-Secure warned it that the software posed a serious security risk. “If [Sony] had woken up and smelled the coffee when we told them there was a problem, they could have avoided this trouble,” Mikko Hypponen, F-Secure’s director of antivirus research, told BusinessWeek at the time.

“We told them it was a major security risk,” added Santeri Kangas, F-Secure’s director of research. “They thought we were silly. They wanted to keep the problem quiet.”

That’s certainly what it looked like at the time. What with Thomas Hesse, president of Sony BMG’s global digital business division, telling NPR that “most people don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?” ‘Course you tend to forget about those things when you’re busy redistributing blame, right?