Still, it is Sony's continued poor handling that gets my ire up at the moment. Sony probably sees this as merely a minor spot of bad publicity and doesn't really "get it" about how wrong it was to install secretive software in the first place.

I think what my friend Chris Quirke said in an e-mail forum sums up the problem nicely: "Sony releases all manner of things under their brand, including IT products. If they are happy to leverage the brand association, then they can't disassociate themselves from the fallout. Would you buy or resell Sony DVD writers and other optical drives? Would you trust software bundled with Sony digital cameras, media playing devices, etc.?"

Trusted computing can fail at any one of several layers, and it's no good worrying about the deepest of these -- program code, hardware, and the like -- if the topmost layer is blown away. Trusted computing is going to be designed and built by entities that have proved they cannot be trusted, out of materials that are notoriously prone to bad behavior.

When audio CDs drop rootkits on PCs, "documents" auto-run macros, and JPEG image files run as raw code through some deep code bug, you don't have to look far to understand why we are scratching at the door to escape whenever we hear the term "trusted computing."

One thing is for sure: Trying to ensure that only good comes out of the trustworthy computing and DRM initiatives will be no picnic.