Core War
This is hilarious. A report says that Sony Music's bundled rootkit inadvertently defeats Blizzard's bundled spyware. (More precisely, the rootkit gives people a tool to use to hide things from the spyware. See "Lowcost superb RING0 rootkit developed(payed) by Sony BMG".)
It's the latest incarnation of real-life Core War on the PC.
P.S. Lessig says that "code, law, norms, and architecture" regulate; if so, getting mad (and getting other people mad) about rootkits and spyware may serve a concrete purpose. As J.B. Nicholson-Owens suggests in a comment on Ed Felten's blog, we can imagine a world in which people don't put up with software that undermines its user and has to fight with other software.
P.P.S. There are more points of view about this than you might think, because there is a seemingly large and growing community of security people in the business world who neither want users to be able to modify software in ways that its publishers disapprove of nor want software to be able to conceal itself, spy on other software, or attack other software. Those people support the idea of Blizzard preventing people from modifying Blizzard games (or even from writing software like bnetd) but oppose the idea of Blizzard using (or having to use, or being allowed to use, or being able to use) spyware to accomplish this objective.
