poiuppx said:
Therumancer said:
Well, I still insist that Sony pretty much provoked this attack, and I still want to see them admit they were wrong about the other OS thing and apologize.
As far as their comments about their speed of respone, I personally don't consider "oh well, other companies report things much slower, if at all" to be an excuse, other than to say that perhaps various goverments who were concerned here should spend more time looking into the reporting processes of other companies. Start giving CEOs jail time if they don't immediatly inform customers of attacks, their nature, and the possible risks involved. The big reason for not wanting to do so, largely seems to be so that the companies in question won't look weak, and I think "face" is a big part of this whole thing. It's also why I think we might see more attacks on Sony in the near future, because Sony refuses to concede they were wrong about the "other OS" pull back, restore that functionality, etc... largely because that will show a group of hackers took them down, and also establish precedents away from the whole "it's our property, we're just nice enough to let you use it in exchange for money" definition that they (and other companies) are pushing it. I very much do not see Sony as being victims here. What the hackers/Anonymous have done is not right, but at the same time Sony isn't right either, in fact I might say that I haven't let their current woes detract from how angry I was over the "other OS" thing, despite not using it myself, and actually consider them to be MORE wrong here than the hackers. It's hard to take them seriously as victims when they were victimizing their customer base and brought this upon themselves.
In fact it's this kind of arrogrant justification in saying "we weren't wrong here, because other companies do worse" that is at the root of their problems to begin with.
Or in short, this is all about corperate attitude adjustment, I appreciate the gestures Sony has made to users over the down time, but overall I'm getting tired of them flapping their lips and trying to justify their part in the overall situation. The only thing I want to see their CEOS say is "I'm sorry, we were wrong, we brought this upon ourselves and it trickled down to our users, we'll change our policies and do better in the future". Free games are nice, but since I don't believe it's happened yet, I'd also like them to restore the "Other OS" option to users that use it, but of course for that to be meaninful it has to come with an apology.
...you DO realize that a hack like this more or less makes it 100% certain we will never, EVER, see a legal Other OS on a Sony console ever again, right? Between GeoHot and this, the sentiment is likely to be 'screw this, we're never going to even come CLOSE to this can of worms again', with some side comments in the board room about what they'd like to do to these hackers with five minutes in a locked room and a nice sturdy baseball bat. The only corporate attitude adjustment this caused is that they're likely to be fifty times more locked-down with any future creations.
Oh your right, and that's why there is probably going to be another attack. As I said, they need an attitude adjustment. What your describing is a pretty typical corperate response to being challenged for reasons of "face" and also because they don't want to admit that customer response in motivating things like hackers is that powerful. They want to maintain a "the customers do what we want, not the other way around" attitude especially when it comes to things like property rights.
So basically, the point of the hacking is to demonstrate that Sony is at the mercy of the customers as enough outrage or ridiculous behavior is going to get the attention of hacktivists, and they are going to stand up to major corperations and put them in their place. Your quite correct that they would love to take a baseball bat in a back room to a hacker, and heck, a company like Sony probably has it's own hit men and private security personel for exactly those kinds of situations (okay , well, no "probably" about it), of course the very point of something like "Anonymous" is that none of that matters, they could torture some guy to death, and it won't matter because there isn't any kind of organiation to go after, you nail that one guy, legally, or with thuggery, and it means nothing to the overall body and what it's doing.
So pretty much your explaining why I won't be surprised if there is another attack, it might not happen, but if it does, it's going to be because of that reaction and attitude, which is what they are trying to break.
In the end only time will tell. This situation is notable because companies like Sony are generally viewed as being untouchable, and yet we're seeing a group of hackers rather publically drag them around through the mud, rather than being swept under the carpet. The fact that Sony's usual attitudes aren't working is why this is news. Right now it remains to be seen if it turns into a battle of wills. It's not viable for Sony to back away from The Internet entirely, the big question is going to be whether it's going to be able to play by it's rules (or if this is going to be let go for the moment if we don't see another attack) or if it' going to have to concede that The Internet is the territory of the users (pretty much) who when enraged too much lead to actions by groups like Anonymous, and Sony acts as
a guest in their back yard... much like how a corperation that builds a branch in a foreign country abides by their rules.
I'm not saying your wrong, just that I suspect that is exactly why this isn't over. It might be, it might not be. A lot also depends on whether this whole "Anon civil war" is for real and involves the people responsible to begin with. I've also suspected that this civil war might very well have been set off by Sony. See instead of taking a baseball bat to a hacker they catch, I've suspected this might have started with them getting someone fairly influential and turning them. No way to tell that, but understand while companies do a lot of underhanded things, they are liable to hand someone a briefcase of money to do what they want, than to say take the risks involved in pounding the crap out of someone, or sending a hitman to their house... such events are very rare unlike on TV. Sony however admittedly has a bit more of a reputation for that going back to the "Japanacorp invasion" of the 1980s, being the inspiration for a lot of the evil corperations in fiction, that have things like entire wetworks divisions and private security forces equal to the militaries of many first world countries... all exagerrations (massive ones) of the reality based on hypothetical ideas of what the real deal was actually doing at the time.
Incidently, don't get that I hate Sony overall. I just happen to think they are wrong in a lot of what they do, especially in cases like this. That "other OS" thing makes it fairly difficult for me to defend them on any grounds. Their mentality aside, it's still bloody wrong, they sell a service to someone, and then find a backdoor way of taking it away from the people who use it, there is no way to present that as being right. Pointing to things like TOS and EULA agreements which incidently only appear AFTER you paid for a product which you probably can't return at full value (and even then have to jump through hoops), only makes it clear that such agreements are themselves wrong due to what they are enabling and have gone too far.
Sony also didn't pull the "other OS" option for security reasons. They pulled it to hurt piracy so they could potentially pocket a few extra bucks by cutting down on a portion of their losses. Their issue was the option enabling piracy... piracy being a whole differant topic of discussion. The big problem of course being that while piracy is wrong, what they were doing is a bigger wrong. On top of that, they were lying about their reasons for doing it by claiming it was some kind of major security risk. The point of the hacker attacks isn't just the damage they are doing by taking down the networks, but to show that their network was complete tissue paper, Sony had no real security, and any halfway decent hacker could tear thrugh their system "Other OS" or not... and all of this became outed because of the attacks. It's important to understand WHY the hackers attacked in the way they did, and also that the real damage/point was in showing that Sony lied and what a state their security was in to begin with, taking down the network is kind of tertiary, it just demonstrates how weak the security was and how much work Sony had to do to bring it back up and up to code.
If there is another hacker attack on Sony, even if it's motivated by the same thing, I'm not sure if it's going to be an attack on PSN. After all that's what Sony expects, and is ready for. Generally speaking hackers operate through misdirection and by not going after the obvious target. Of course in this case if they want to prove "Sony can't stop us" they might very well go after PSN again, letting Sony set up all it's pieces, open up their store, and say that they are confident, so bringing the whole thing down proves who the big dawg on the Internet is. It's really hard to say what they are going to try, or even if they will do anything at all. Hacking, and Anonymous in general, tend to be pretty chaotic.
