Sony Declines to Appear Before U.S. Congress

[JDKJ]

By merchantable quality I'm assuming you mean the fact that it was hacked once? By your reasoning we should go after Microsoft a couple million times over since the XBOX has been hacked a great many times and computers are hacked often.

I could be talking about their console being advertised as having online capabilities and it not having so for the previous two weeks, I could be talking about the utter failure of the service to protect private information (as is implied by the nature of the closed network). Or, as is far more likely I'm referring to the more significant subscription services that are obviously no longer delivering the promised content. Sony will, of course attempt to make it up to the customers, but it is still a breach of contract.

You're quoting common law and civil in order to try and attack Sony in a criminal court?

I was quoting laws that sony has broken. The post I was responding too had a tone that sony had not failed at all or broken any laws. They have utterly failed their consumers and breach several contractual agreements in doing so. Breach of contract may not be a literal "crime" with police and burglars, but it is still breaking the law and as such sony are quite clearly a target for lawsuits.

Let me teach you. There are two kinds of court in the world: Civil and Criminal

Civil court is "You wronged me/Broke our contract/lied to me/cheated on me! I'm going to sue you and try to make money off of you" It has nothing to do with the laws that govern the jail system. It looks into the civil law and finds out if the person is actually at fault for what is being claimed.

Criminal law is "You killed someone/stole/embezzled/etc" and now you're going to jail.

...Thanks, how kind of you to teach me..... I suppose it would be far, far to obvious of me to claim that someone inside sony was involved in the hacking, and that therefore there is a real possibility that individuals or groups within sony are criminally involved and that it would be beyond negligent of government agencies to not fully investigate sony...

If you feel SONY broke civil law and you can sue them, go right on ahead, but SONY will chew you up. However, don't quote common and civil law stating that SONY broke the law. They may have fucked up, but they are working very hard to fix it. And again, you don't know if they have breached privacy policy. You have no idea if they had a giant cybernetic safe in place and the hackeers were just. that. good

Sony have publicly said that the personal information was not encrypted, the privacy policy implied that all information would be encrypted (they will likely argue that that only applied to credit card information, but that probably won't float). There are currently several class action suits floating around in different countries. If you think sony are going to chew up big (rich?) groups of angry people who have feel they have been wronged (and can contractually prove that they have been) you're quite possibly overestimating the powers of sonys legal department (or you may not, I have no way of knowing at this point in time). Why do you not think that a breach of a legally binding contract is not breaking the law? A breach of contract is, quite simply, a breach of common law...That's breaking the law, the fact that you aren't going to get a big policeman to haul your ass down to the jailhouse doesn't mean otherwise.

Where are you seeing that Sony's PSN Privacy Policy impliedly states that "all information will be encrypted?"

The Policy, in relevant part, states as follows:

"We will take appropriate technical and organisational steps to prevent unauthorised access to or disclosure of your information. However, we do not guarantee that we will eliminate all risk of misuse of your personal information. You are responsible for keeping your password secret to prevent unauthorised access to and use of your Sony Online Network account and any payment details which you have saved for your account. We ask you not to share your password with anyone. Remember to turn "Save Password" off before letting anyone else use your Sony Online Network account or giving your PSP? (PlayStation®Portable), PlayStation®3 computer entertainment system, personal computer, BRAVIA® television or Blu-ray? Disc player to anyone else, including for return to a shop or for repair."

In order for you to correctly claim that the language above impliedly states that "all information will be encrypted," you'll have to make an argument that "appropriate technical . . . steps to prevent unauthorised access to or disclosure of your information" neccesarily requires encryption of all information. Can you make that argument?

And even if you can make the argument that encryption was required, how do you plan on getting around the fact that they expressly state that they make no guarantee that they will eliminate all risk of misuse of your personal information? Given that Sony clearly states that they make no guarantee that your information will not be misused, if it unfortunately is misused by another, how can that be a breach for which you can hold Sony responsible?

Fuck those class actions. They ain't gonna go far.

 

[neolithic]

I'm all for Sony getting slapped on national TV over this. However, I'm worried that Congress, or at least some parts of it that would be involved in this, would only put their spin on this to promote their "net neutrality", and "we need to be regulating this place if this kind of damage can occur" ideas and policy.

 

[midpipps]

If you want to read the response from sony



http://www.flickr.com/photos/playstationblog/5686965323/in/set-72157626521862165/#/photos/playstationblog/5686965323/in/set-72157626521862165/lightbox/

and the blog post

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2011/05/04/sonys-response-to-the-u-s-house-of-representatives/

Sony's steps seem reasonable to me. Forensics on computer systems is not an easy go in read a couple of files and say this is what happened.

 

[Canid117]

You know, as much as this security breach in Sony annoys the hell out of me - I had to change some passwords and cut up a credit card - I kind of find this obnoxious of the government to do.

Seriously, I'm still pissed about the banking fiasco here. How long did it take for them to pay back America for what they did? Oh, they still haven't yet... I see. And where are all the sub committees demanding to see these bankers? Oh, they already did that. And what happened? Oh yeah, we gave their dumb asses more money.

Sorry, but in the grand scheme of things, this Sony shit is insignificant. The government needs to get their priorities straight.

So just because they do one thing you disagree with they have to stop enforcing all laws? Thats awesome! Whos up for a looting party and murder spree next week!

Yes. That's exactly what I said. I can see right there between the words "priorities" and "straight," tiny little words that say "Anarchy rules! Fuck the law!"

Maybe I should state my original point in less sarcastic terms. Just because the government screws up once does not mean that they should not enforce the laws that are in place anymore. Sony may have broken laws and the United States government is trying to investigate this. The bailouts are completely irrelevant to this article.

 

[punipunipyo]

I think an online DLC pass from SONY (limited funding of cores, enough for DLC, but not for limited edition of full game) would be nice.
It's been 2 weeks... there is still no fix? no capture of the hackers? FBI? it's kinda sad how this network is built on an "honor system", but users didn't treat it with respect, and now, we are all going to end up with high security system, that are going to make our gaming tougher... well... I hope this isn't some weird scam SONY cook up for excuse to up in some crazy firewall/anti-3rdparty/secret disc check/monitoring system that they are going to inject in to our PS3s... kinda like 3Ds with the auto(with out users' consensus) update/check-up thing...
Being a PS3 owner, I felt kinda "Orz" right now... even when I don't play online modes...

 

[Nieroshai]

Why does Congress do this? PUBLICITY! All congressional hearings are for is making a person or organization grovel on live TV, and Sony has every right to refuse.

I think you more or less just answered your own question there. They do it because they get to make people grovel on live TV and all that jazz.

You can, however, do what many do when hauled before Congress and are asked to answer their questions: repeat the phrase "on the advice of my attorney, I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that to do so could tend to incriminate me" (aka "taking the Fifth") over and over and over again until they get tired of you and send you back home.

Unless you're Tony Stark, in which case you have some fun with it and make the committee look bad at their own hearing.

Why yes, yes I did answer my own question. Because I was using a rhetorical device, not asking anyone anything. How was that not clear?

 

[Scrythe]

So we finally have info on who's responsible:

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2011/05/04/sonys-response-to-the-u-s-house-of-representatives/

We discovered that the intruders had planted a file on one of our Sony Online Entertainment servers named "Anonymous" with the words "We are Legion".

Why am I not surprised?

 

[Nieroshai]

Why does Congress do this? PUBLICITY! All congressional hearings are for is making a person or organization grovel on live TV, and Sony has every right to refuse. They have done nothing wrong except maybe be slow to mention the breakin, but they were exceptional in handling the fechnical aspects.

That's pretty much it. A few politicians want to be seen asking Sony hard questions.

And Sony has played it damn smart. They're answering the questions put to them as quickly as possible (making it tough for a glory-seeking politician to claim their hiding something) and claiming the situation requires their full attention.

Over-all, Sony is playing a bad situation pretty well. There's no way a company comes out ahead on this, but after a slow start (perhaps due to them honestly not knowing the full extent of the hacking) they've pretty much thrown themselves on their own sword. The key to situations like this is not to be seen protecting your own interests over the interests of those affected and they've not really been caught out on that since they admitted the security breach.

I'm gonna springboard off of this one instead of the other SIX replies I've received for the sake of convenience and brevity, so this isn't to you necessarily.

First off: I'm on a roll, every comment I've made in the past month has received at least two comments in return!
Second: to answer my comment that Sony was doing the right things technologically if not in the PR department at first. I say this because first, the biggest reason hash-tagging is enough to protect our passwords is because we're SUPPOSED to have passwords to our sensitive information that are NOT WORDS. The password needs to look like 10tC@bR104# (if symbols are allowed) to genuinely protect yourself, in ANY application where passwords are used, we should have all learned this in computer class in elementary school. Can't memorize it? Tape it to your desk, it's not hard, I have to deal with 10 different passwords to things. Second, credit card numbers WERE encrypted. Thirdly, they got professional security personnel on the job the moment they found out about the break-in. So yes, Sony DID take every security measure necessary.
Third, I didn't know Congress COULD actually send out subpoenas, because they're not a court. I'll look it up, but this sounds like someone has it backwards.

Overall, Sony IS playing this pretty well, especially considering the bad press and conjecture being thrown all over the internet.

 

[Nieroshai]

So we finally have info on who's responsible:

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2011/05/04/sonys-response-to-the-u-s-house-of-representatives/

We discovered that the intruders had planted a file on one of our Sony Online Entertainment servers named "Anonymous" with the words "We are Legion".

Why am I not surprised?

True or not, you know pretty much everyone here on the Escapist are going to take Anon's word over Sony's.

 

[Clonekiller]

Good idea congress. Let's regulate networks like the Playstation network and Steam so that "the people are protected". Yeah, that'll keep hackers away.

 

[JDKJ]

So we finally have info on who's responsible:

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2011/05/04/sonys-response-to-the-u-s-house-of-representatives/

We discovered that the intruders had planted a file on one of our Sony Online Entertainment servers named "Anonymous" with the words "We are Legion".

Why am I not surprised?

Which would tend to explain why there's been no attempt to actually make money with the stolen information. It wasn't stolen by professional cyber-thieves. It was stolen by professional idiots.

 

[Baresark]

snip

Gross negligence, breach of their privacy policy, removal of a product products ability to to be used for it's specific purpose (on several counts) and distribution of a product that is below merchantable quality.

snip

snip

snip

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So like most governments the American government cant multitask or shouldn't in your opinion?
Its these same statements that make no sense on the level when people complain about the police showing up to do their jobs last month when a bunch of people were given a years ample time to remove their basketball hoops of which they never use from the curbs of roads because of a city ordinance they didn't vote against and pretty much ignored..The government is capable of doing quite a few different things this happens to be one of them...but maybe the government should stop as a whole to concentrate on wars in the world and then american can descend into hell...because the stuff usually regulated by the government and metered by the government no longer is...

Will you go out and stop the roving bands of rioters whom can't get their welfare, social security...etc because you decided the government should stop working on many things and work on just one thing you think is supposedly important?

Those roving bands of rioters exist because the government created them. I didn't say the government should stop working, I did say that they should keep their heads out of things that do not concern them. On that note, I live in New Jersey, and what happened a few years ago is that the state shut down because no one could reach an agreement on a budget. It shut down for three days, and you may find this hard to believe, no one felt a thing. Only government workers were freaking out, but the days continued on like nothing had changed for all of us honest working guys. It was honestly a little like heaven, because for three days there was no one just consuming money and resources for the sake of consumption.

Also, America has already descended into hell because so many folks such as yourself are ok with the rampant imperialism of the US, the inflation of our money supply, and the unending expansion of credit because your neighbors didn't obey an ordinance and take down their basketball hoops. You are just seeing the worst of government in that right at your front door. The police came in and threatened fines, jail and violence on normal citizens for something that doesn't even matter, and you are ok with this because you're a drone who can't think for himself.

In the words of Garet Garrett:

"There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom."

 

[Sovereignty]

sorry but this really buggged me. Just because people disagree with your point of view doesnt mean they dont understand the situation.

Personally I don't have enough information to decide whether sony didnt try hard enough or the hackers just had swag through the roof. You can always protect yourself more, there was always something you could of done, but if it turns out sony had done many things to prevent this then i dont think its there fault whatsoever

and if it is their fault i dont think they're doing such a bad job dealing with it. Heck we dont even know if the CC details actually were taken. I think some people really need to back up for a second and review the situation. Wait until you actually know whats going on.

As I said before. If you don't know what identity theft can do to your life. Sure this sounds like, "Not that big of a deal."

What bugs me most is people like you who have this need to protect a company. Sometimes, organizations (such as Sony) are in the wrong. You can argue that, "They tried." Or that there was, "Nothing they could do."

But ultimately they told us to give them our private information. It was at that point their responsibility to inform us of any breach as well as protect our information.

If you can't protect the information. Don't save it after the purchase goes through. Force people to re-enter their CC details each time they want to purchase another game.

For you to claim they've handled it well is just ridiculous to me. So far they've done nothing. Not even a formal apology for the breach. They've simply taken many gamers access to social online gaming away, and told us, "It's being looked into."



You might have no fear of your credentials being used fraudulently, but to act as if the people who are worried have no right to be upset or angry with Sony is ignorant.

Instead of asking the concerned consumers of backing up to wait for the details and information to become available. Why don't you take a step closer and ask why more isn't being shared with us.