Sony Became Hacker Target for Protecting its IPs, Says CEO

[Mangod]

All these debates/discussions/discourses/disputes/d-whatevers about the PS3 just make me all the happier that I never moved past my PS2. Long live lack of internet connection!

 

[mjc0961]

Protecting its IPs? If that's what you call trampling consumer rights these days. You got attacked because you removed Install Other OS in a move that said "fuck you, you don't own this device you paid $300-$600 for" and then started suing the hell out of people for jailbreaking it to get that functionality back.

But there was no violence, no threat of violence, no possibility of violence.

No on got killed, there was no threat that anyone could get killed, there wasn't even a possibility anyone could have been killed.

You need at least one of those to POSSIBLY call this terrorism!

If we can't even call REAL piracy a form of terrorism - you know those Somali pirates with guns ACTUALLY killing people - then how the hell can we call software piracy terrorism?

Get some perspective here, this is trivialising of real terrorist atrocities to put these punk kids fucking around on a network in the same category as a suicide bomber blowing up a train full of commuters.

Is Lulzsec anything more than a bunch of pranksters who've taken things too far?

First off, you just sitting here calling these little shits who stole personal data and put everyone who is a member of PSN at greater risk for identity theft and who cause the network to go down for nearly a month which cost multiple companies who knows how much money "pranksters" is the real trivializing of events here. And quite frankly, I find it to be condescending and offensive. The lives of millions of customers and the jobs of millions of people who worked at these companies are not play things for "pranksters" to "fuck around" with.

Second, terrorism is just using fear to try and get people to do what you want. And it worked to some degree. [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/111282-Hacktivists-Force-Pause-in-Australian-Net-Censorship] At least one company is now afraid to do the business it wanted to do because of the thread of getting hacked. Not only is it terrorism, it is successful terrorism.

Many people keep saying that sony was saying "We allow you to use our tech. What you do with it is up to us."

Because they were. That's exactly what they were saying with update 3.21.

 

[GonzoGamer]

Sony doesnt care about other organizations being hacked. No, what they care about is eroding ownership rights, and the only governmental action they are concerned with is those that give them freedom to screw with consumers in order to maximize profits and it infuriates me to see people defending sony like they were for one second not behaving like a multinational conglomerate trying to use litigation and legislation to ensure shareholders profitability.

And that's why fanboys annoy me so much. They treat these corporations like some hot celebrity they want to bone rather than a business that wants to farm as much money as possible off them.

As a ps3 owner I feel like I have the right to be extra critical of sony. I'm the one who's spent (at this point) over $1000 on the machine and its games/peripherals.
If they are going to spend all their resources (that should be used in supporting the machine for us legitimate consumers) on a losing war against hackers, I may as well hack my ps3 and get the free games & movies because (if it continues to follow the same pattern as the psp) it's probably not going to do anything more than play games & movies anyway.
I don't really intend to hack my ps3 (nor do I condone it) but at this point, I can totally understand it.

 

[Jumplion]

Hackers may well be wrong for their actions in this, But for all they actually did its like comparing a first offense possession charge to a serial rapist. All these "hackers" did was inconvenience people for a few days and jarred them from their entertainment. Sony if left unchecked is trying to undo established rights and freedoms.

And, you know, stealing much of their personal information that could potentially, and for some unlucky bystanders has, lead to identity theft and other nasty "inconveniences", in addition to causing dozens of developers (indie ones, specifically) to lose potential revenue, as well as costing many companies thousands in expenses due to the whole ordeal. And that's just specifically PSN, not everything else that's going on.

Everything else you said I won't comment on, as I really don't want to get into the business of GeoHotz and the whole ordeal with him and everyone else (the whole thing is really muddled up, I tell ya), but I would like people to stop going "Jeez, can't you guys handle a few weeks without online? Sheesh!" because it is clearly not the case in this situation. These hackers can be considered cyber terrorists (already a discussion on "terrorism" above me, so won't get into that either) and it's a real problem that the internet as a whole is going to have to address as technology keeps on advancing.

I like to think of these hacks as a "Revolution in Internet Security". It's just I don't think we should be needing this revolution in the first place.

 

[Jimi Bove]

then it's a negative situation that governments may have to resolve."

See, this is my problem with this whole ordeal. Sony pulled bait and switch, then tries to ruin a guys life via litigation because he restored what was wrongly taken away. At that point, and they admit it, they invoked ire and brought hell down on themselves. But... citing irrelevant CIA, FBI front pages being brought down, and saying, its time for the government to step in Is wrong, its misguided, its an illegitimate notion and worst of all its a lie.

Sony doesnt care about other organizations being hacked. No, what they care about is eroding ownership rights, and the only governmental action they are concerned with is those that give them freedom to screw with consumers in order to maximize profits and it infuriates me to see people defending sony like they were for one second not behaving like a multinational conglomerate trying to use litigation and legislation to ensure shareholders profitability.

Hackers may well be wrong for their actions in this, But for all they actually did its like comparing a first offense possession charge to a serial rapist. All these "hackers" did was inconvenience people for a few days and jarred them from their entertainment. Sony if left unchecked is trying to undo established rights and freedoms.

This guy knows what's up. I also want to add that though Sony brought this upon themselves, it's not like those hackers are any decent either. I mean, who sells the entire identities of millions of innocent people just to get at one corporation? These assholes wanted to get some money on the side at the expense of all of those people, I suppose. I think massive-scale identity sale is a LOT worse than a first offense possession charge. Some people (and "some" out of millions could be a few, a hundred, or even thousands) didn't know their stuff was stolen until they were cost thousands of dollars. At least a few people were financially raped, so it could technically be as bad as a serial rapist.

Also, Sony is an asshole right now. They're doing whatever it takes to be the weak victim who needs his enemies punished, even if it means forwarding the idea of a government-controlled internet. They must understand by now that keeping hackers out is impossible--it's not like the physical world where you can build a giant wall. This is the internet, and there is ALWAYS a hole. If the government steps in, the innocent American citizens will be punished while the hackers create a cyber warzone.

 

[insanelich]

Ah, so HERE's the typical Sony bullshit.

So yeah, now they're blaming their colossal failure on... pretty much everyone they wanna make look worse. Oh *yay*. I'm so tempted to be a Sony customer again.

 

[Delusibeta]

Ah, so HERE's the typical Sony bullshit.

So yeah, now they're blaming their colossal failure on... pretty much everyone they wanna make look worse. Oh *yay*. I'm so tempted to be a Sony customer again.

Yep. It's precisely the sort of language that made them a target for hackers in the first place.

 

[Popido]

Sounds like somebody is addicted to analproping.

 

[Awexsome]

I really can't believe how many people still call Sony the bad guy on this. People seriously call turning off a feature of their hardware that was used by very few and those that did use it were mostly being used as a mass exploit thereby hurting the company more evil than a group of outlaws who showed no remorse committing mass identity theft on millions of people?

Sony at worst pulled a dick move to protect their assests. Mass identity theft and cyber intrusion is on a much worse scale. Period.

 

[Baresark]

It's not terrorism. Terrorism has to be an act in and of itself. But identity theft is crime, data theft is a crime, denile of service to people who want said service from anyone besides the people who sells/gives said service is a crime. They broke the law. But to call it terrorism is to raise it to a whole new level. And anyone who calls it terrorism is hurting society simply because they are working so fervently to expand the definition, as if it's not wide enough as it is.

Let me put in perspective this way: If you believe that these people who are guilty of the aforementioned crimes should be robbed of a trial, thrown in prison for an indeterminate amount of time, possibly tortured, then by all means call it terrorism.

And if you still think they are terrorist, then there is medication to handle your little rage problem.

It's an annoyance, and it's a pain in the ass, and it is illegal, this should be enough for any society. If it's not, then you should jump in a time machine and had back to Russia circa 1980, or Germany circa 1939, or Cuba circa 1960, or Vietnam circa 1950... you get my point.

OT: Sony is playing the victim again. They think they got attacked because they don't want their games pirated, and while that is partially the truth, it's not by any means the whole truth. It's the outright admission that they believe they own any part of the console after a person pays money for it. If you don't update the console with their software, they make it so you cannot play new games, even though you have bought the console and bought the game. This concept is so foreign from right of ownership, it's literally on another continent.

I don't approve of theft, one way, or the other. So I cannot condone the attacks or methodology of the hackers, but I also can't help but feel that Sony got exactly what they deserve. The best bit is as a sorry they gave us a bunch of demos to market new stuff they are selling. I said it before and I'll say it again, I'm pretty much done buying Sony anything.

PS. It's annoying that anyone thinks that government intervention on what is essentially a private affair is a good idea. The last thing anyone needs is more laws, since the current laws in place are simply not upheld and new ones will make honest peoples lives harder, and still not matter one bit to any hacker. Punishment for a crime never has been and never will be a deterrent for a crime, it will only hurt us honest law abiding citizens.

 

[Baresark]

I really can't believe how many people still call Sony the bad guy on this. People seriously call turning off a feature of their hardware that was used by very few and those that did use it were mostly being used as a mass exploit thereby hurting the company more evil than a group of outlaws who showed no remorse committing mass identity theft on millions of people?

Sony at worst pulled a dick move to protect their assests. Mass identity theft and cyber intrusion is on a much worse scale. Period.

It's not that Sony deserved this or that denying service to customers is forgivable in any way, but also to sit there and say they don't deserve a special place in hell for what they do is ignorant and missing the point completely. They do not reserve the right to dictate how people use a piece of hardware they have purchased in any way at all. You can make the argument with reasonable success that cloud movies or cloud gaming is a good idea, but cloud hardware sales is not. When a society stops protecting basic rights of ownership, it's all downhill from there.

 

[Awexsome]

I really can't believe how many people still call Sony the bad guy on this. People seriously call turning off a feature of their hardware that was used by very few and those that did use it were mostly being used as a mass exploit thereby hurting the company more evil than a group of outlaws who showed no remorse committing mass identity theft on millions of people?

Sony at worst pulled a dick move to protect their assests. Mass identity theft and cyber intrusion is on a much worse scale. Period.

It's not that Sony deserved this or that denying service to customers is forgivable in any way, but also to sit there and say they don't deserve a special place in hell for what they do is ignorant and missing the point completely. They do not reserve the right to dictate how people use a piece of hardware they have purchased in any way at all. You can make the argument with reasonable success that cloud movies or cloud gaming is a good idea, but cloud hardware sales is not. When a society stops protecting basic rights of ownership, it's all downhill from there.

There's been a massive trend recently I've noticed of people always worrying about "The precident it sets"

The Sony case, DRM cases, the Australian internet thing. I always see people that seem to think that Sony will decide tomorrow that you can only play a PS3 on their specified TV or Australia will abolish free-speech next week.

One move to prevent people from being assholes or doing something illegal doesn't mean the end for consumer rights or whatever. I don't buy that at all. There's an overwhelming lack of any type of trust at all towards any type of authority. Like every move a company or government makes that isn't handing the people exactly what they want on a silver platter is somehow the beginning of the end.

If you ask me a lot of people here need to stop thinking that every authority is out to ruin their fun and trample all over their rights and just take everything on a case to case basis.

Here the case is an unfortunate situation where a feature was being most widely used for exploiting and was forced to be disabled. Not because Sony wants to be Big Brother with everything they make.

 

[Treblaine]

So, a bank robbery where nobody gets killed is just shenanigans? And identity theft is just messin' about? Well, now that all that is in perspective.

The distinction of robbery from theft is violent confrontation, so a bank robbery would mean guns or some threat of death or harm

I'm sorry if the dictionary definition doesn't completely fit your idea of what terrorism is, or what certain governments have been hyping it up to be in the last decade or so.

For crimes where people get killed, we also have useful words like "homicide", "genocide", etc.

Yeah who need dictionary definitions, this way we can eat our cake and still have a cake afterwards. We can call these hackers terrorists yet not trivialise the term itself (/sarc)

Seriously, terrorism IS a form of homicide and can be a form of genocide. But obviously not all homicides are terrorist acts.

But there was no violence, no threat of violence, no possibility of violence.

No one got killed, there was no threat that anyone could get killed, there wasn't even a possibility anyone could have been killed.

You need at least one of those to POSSIBLY call this terrorism!

Who said that. There does not need to be violence or death to make it terrorism.

Definition of TERRORISM
: the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion (Uses the subject word in the definition)
? ter·ror·ist \-ər-ist\ adjective or noun
? ter·ror·is·tic \ˌter-ər-ˈis-tik\ adjective

ter·ror·ism   /ˈtɛrəˌrɪzəm/ Show Spelled
[ter-uh-riz-uhm] Show IPA

?noun
1. the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes.
2. the state of fear and submission produced by terrorism or terrorization. (Uses the subject word in the definition)
3. a terroristic method of governing or of resisting a government. (Uses the subject word in the definition)

If we can't even call REAL piracy a form of terrorism - you know those Somali pirates with guns ACTUALLY killing people - then how the hell can we call software piracy terrorism?

Get some perspective here, this is trivialising of real terrorist atrocities to put these punk kids fucking around on a network in the same category as a suicide bomber blowing up a train full of commuters.

Is Lulzsec anything more than a bunch of pranksters who've taken things too far?

See above for an actual definition of terrorism.

Using the only definition that does not use the subject word in the definition:

"Terrorism: the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce"

You contradict yourself with your own source

 

[night_chrono]

For fucks sake they weren't attacked for "defending their assets" they were attacked for claiming that they owned your PS3 after you bought it, ignored previous court rulings that should have shut their argument down, and suing a broke college kid who did nothing illegal.

 

[Treblaine]

"Cyber terrorism is now a global force," Stringer said."If hackers can hack Citibank, the FBI and the CIA ... then it's a negative situation that governments may have to resolve."

Terrorism? Who got killed in this "attack"?

More like Cyber vandalism, or Cyber shenanigans. Yes, that is the proper term for this: Cyber shenanigans.

Terrorism, as its name should suggest, is not about killing or injuring people. It's about making the public lose faith in those whose job it is to protect them, by attacking them publicly and spectacularly in ways that completely destroy their sense of safety. This is done in order to get the public to pressure their government or in this case corporations to stop doing whatever it is that pisses the attackers off. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Killing or injuring people, long known to be an effective method of hurting them, is thus a common method in terrorism, but it is not the focus. Posting personal info is a good way to inflict fear on the public as well, and therefore doing so with the goal of influencing corporate policy is cyberterrorism.

It doesn't matter what the name suggests, Terrorism MEANS violence in a calculated way for political/social intimidation.

This all started with just the PS3 getting hacked because Linux install was removed. There was absolutely no intimidation or coercion at all, Geohotz simply said "I paid for my PS3, I'll hack my own damn property if I want to and I'll show how others to do it too to get Linux back".

Remember the PS3 was unhacked for YEARS after introduction, because anyone with any interest in PS3's hardware just installed linux to satisfy their hacking curiosity of fiddlign with the hardware. Remove that and they took what by English Common Law was rightfully theirs: dominion over their own property. Sure they could merely not have installed the update, but then they couldn't play any new games.

Sony's problem was they depended on every single PS3 in the world remaining 100% locked down for good network security. Which is ridiculous. They fail to recognise that the PS3 was hacked only after Linux was removed that then opened up the possibility of piracy.

First off, you just sitting here calling these little shits who stole personal data and put everyone who is a member of PSN at greater risk for identity theft and who cause the network to go down for nearly a month which cost multiple companies who knows how much money "pranksters" is the real trivializing of events here. And quite frankly, I find it to be condescending and offensive. The lives of millions of customers and the jobs of millions of people who worked at these companies are not play things for "pranksters" to "fuck around" with.

Second, terrorism is just using fear to try and get people to do what you want. And it worked to some degree. [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/111282-Hacktivists-Force-Pause-in-Australian-Net-Censorship] At least one company is now afraid to do the business it wanted to do because of the thread of getting hacked. Not only is it terrorism, it is successful terrorism.

Yep. I'm calling these little shits 'pranksters'.

Maybe you hold pranksters in higher regard than I do. It's mainly targeted at Lulzsec who are blatantly in the pranking game, they're just doing this for fun and to get people riled up. We still have no idea who broke into PSN in this initial big intrusion that meant Sony felt the need to shut down the network for a month, but they seem like old fashioned opportunistic credit-card thieves.

But that doesn't mean anyone involved is a terrorist!

Hacker-activists or "Hacktivist" is a far better description of Anonymous, like those Greenpeace guys who trespass on to oil rigs and shame companies with an embarrassing sign. Technically they are criminals using conspiracy and deception to trespass onto private property and disrupt business operations but they aren't terrorist!

They COULD be terrorists, The Weathermen movement in the 1970's was close to that fortunately for the public the stoners were too incompetent to build a bomb without killing themselves but until they actually take that step towards violence then they are not terrorists.

 

[5mj7R7yf4Dwr3gdZyyu9PeGNwYjlNrjzuh3iTXQG]

One has to wonder if the people who are defending Sony's position in this are doing so because they've already dropped a chunk into a pertinent Sony product, in other words, they have a monetary investment in goodwill towards Sony.

When it comes to the month-long shutdown, and the stealing of private user info, while not a terrorist act, it was certainly not civil disobedience either. Note that we still don't have anyone claiming responsibility for that one, neither Anonymous nor LulzSec.

That said, Sony deserves to suffer for its unethical actions based on unethical policy, and it deserves to be hit hard enough that its shareholders suffer. And this means, sadly, that Sony's consumers need to be discouraged from continuing to be Sony's consumers.[footnote]If you are a PS3 owner, you might want to get yourself informed about your state's lemon laws, and if and how they apply to electronics. Some states only protect consumers of motor vehicles and maybe phones, but others offer legal options regarding any large-ticket consumer item.[/footnote] PS3 owners and PSN users will suffer due to this conflict as well. It cannot be helped.

Whether or not Sony's end users deserve the bother of direct action against Sony is not the point.[footnote]The well-being of Sony's consumers is also irrelevant according to Sony (beyond their ability to be placated and encouraged to continue to buy Sony products). As soon as Sony finds it no longer profitable to sustain and maintain PSN, it will shut the network down.[/footnote] The point is that Sony has some really douchebaggy policies that hurt their own consumers and hurt the industry by letting Sony continue to fill a gap that could be occupied by a more ethical company. You owners of PS3's may end up collateral damage, just as we Betamax owners were, when Sony was engaging in dickwaddery about that, too.

Between Beta, the PSP and now the PS3, maybe we'll learn to stop patronizing them. Sell your PS3. Get out while you can.

Oh, and PS: Sony is the nice company who brought us SecuROM [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securom].

Sony is not your friend.

238U.

 

[insanelich]

Meh, everyones a **** in this sorry saga; Sony are cunts for removing things from the PS3 without peoples consent, GeoHot is a **** for causing this whole sorry argument with his brainless giving away of the master key (and to a lesser extent selling out) and the hackers are cunts for hacking, and giving the dinosaurs of the right-wing media ammunition for the 'Cyber Police' to be set up.

Honestly, GeoHot could have fought and lost. This way he's giving $10000 to charity. Also, giving away the master key reversed Sony's decision to stop OtherOS.

Overall, GeoHot isn't to blame for much. And there's no evidence the massive leak had anything to do with the releasing of the master key or the lawsuit.

And the hackers hacking wasn't bad either, but the thieves stealing ID data was. Stop misusing "hack" dagnabbit.