Any SIRIUS Satellite Radio listeners here - Beware

[Destructionator XV]

As many of you know, I am a call centre tech support rep, currently working in SIRIUS Product Support.

If you follow this terrible company, you will know they recently released a new "portable" satellite radio, the SIRIUS S50.

This radio comes with computer software which can be used to transfer your mp3 files to the S50 so you may listen to them on the go, along with satellite content.

Sounds harmless, right? Wrong.

Being Product Support, the newest addition to my job is to help customers use this radio and the software. To this end, corporate sent us a tip list to help customer's most common problems.

One of the tip sheets said if the software isn't working correctly, advise the customer to disable all firewalls on his computer then try again.

At this, I said wtf. Why would a network firewall mess up a program that interacts with an USB device?

Well, I decided to dive into the depths of the place where all software hides their dark secrets, the EULA.

My SIRIUS Studio EULA, section 3. (There are no machine readable copies of this avaliable to me right now, so I will paraphrase and get an exact quote later)

a) The program can communicate data to SIRIUS corporate as part of its operation. This communication is enabled by default, but can be turned in the preferences menu.

Well, I went to the program and looked for this menu. There is no preferences menu at all. The only menus are file and help.

The help file nor the manual says anything about this communication.

EULA section 3, continued. This is what it sends back to corporate:

(i) It can send back your ESN.

(ii) It can send back the channels you listen to, how long you listened to them, all the songs you have stored on the receiver, and what channels you have set as presets.

(iii) Sirius can use the ESN to match up with your billing information to send you more content and generate statistics. You may opt out of this additional automatic content in the preferences menu.

But there is no preferences menu! Again, there is no mention whatsoever of this anywheres but the EULA and corporate never bothered to even tell us reps about this.


My conclusion: My SIRIUS Studio is spyware, plain and simple. The EULA gives the company much power, and lies to the customer in the same sentence.

Given what info I have, would you come to the same conclusion? Or am I overreacting? Also, what do you think of this situation?



Problem number two with this unit: the RIAA.

Those cucksuckers made SIRIUS put in lots of bullshit to 'protect their rights'. Once content is on the unit, it cannot be retreived. It is encrypted on the unit, and any attempt to decrypt it violates the DCMA (which is a fucking stupid law, but that is another story).

They nerfed its recording capabilities too. It can store less content than originaly planned; only because the RIAA said so.

This pisses me off to no end. People are paying $12.95 / month for this service. They have the right to make a personal copy - this is protected by US Copyright Law.

But this problem isn't with SIRIUS (for once) or the designers. Fuck the RIAA.

[Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman]

This sounds familiar; the Copyright laws seem to be written so thoroughly and enforced so meticulously so it is against the law for paying consumers to even make backup copies of their own MP3s, etc.

On the other hand, the law protecting our privacy is so weak (or weakly enforced) that the consumers are always fucked.

My question is why? Why the lawmakers and enforcers seem to be more interested in cocksucking the corporate vampires instead of protecting individuals?

Is our society heading to a corporate-dictated conformity of some sort?

[Ra]

Money.

That's all it's about. Sure, they can get tax dollars off of the common citizen, but that's GUARANTEED. Don't pay you're taxes, your ass is grass.

But the corporate vampires can get the pols not only more tax revenue (thus why Eminent Domain was so subverted by the SC), but more money in their own pockets as well. Why do ya think such awful programs as the V-22 Osprey, FCS, Stryker, and Sea Fighter persist? Because the representatives and senators for the areas the Defense Contrators operate at are in their pockets. It's all about money, money, money, when you get right down to it. Gah.
- Ra