Sony Threatens to Ban PS3 Hackers Forever
- Thread starter Logan Westbrook
- Start date
this, a thousand times thisJumplion said:
also, your proposition has merit, the only problem is pirate could try abusing such a system (like they do everything else) but nevertheless it sounds workable
I am always kind of amazed by all the Sony bashing about how they deserve to get hacked for taking away the oh so precious Linux support. They gave us an awesome gaming console on which we can all play awesome games. I have never been dissatisfied with the PS3. If I want to use my Linux, I use my computer. Seriously. It runs better on the computer anyway. The PS3 runs my games and that's all I want from it. It's a gaming system after all. For which Sony has always provided me with excellent customer support, by the way. I, for one, hope that they are successful in taking out the hackers and all those other people that feel the need to modify a perfectly wonderful console.
I'm sorry, I had to do this. Apologies for the text being out of alignment, the constraints of the picture design demanded it:
<img src=http://i54.tinypic.com/16c7415.jpg>
<img src=http://i54.tinypic.com/16c7415.jpg>
Exactly.Reed Spacer said:
I actually think SONY made that.
This. Jump, you hit it right on the head.Jumplion said:
Don't get me wrong people, I have no love for people who pirate games. I pay hard earned money for games and I want to KEEP playing those games. I want those developers to be profitable so they keep making games to entertain me. Piracy hurts the industry as a whole, and I agree that something to some extent must be done to combat the problem.
However, THESE types of actions don't help. Banning people who already decided they weren't going to pay if they could help it for games is a futile effort. I mean, how many pirates actually play online anyway? And worse, these measures only punish people who legitimately just wanted to customize their system out of preferences. Like I said, it really, REALLY would be nice to be able to change the dashboard's font color. Such a simple thing, but Sony denies it to me. Being able to organize my files in a more efficient manner? Why can't I do this? Why is it such a pain to deal with playlists for music?
But instead of recognizing these issues and trying to improve the experience, Sony faffs around on a pointless crusade to combat an enemy they will never be able to eradicate. Bigger and better companies have tried. And they have all failed. These cat and mouse games with hackers and modders accomplish nothing while robbing legitimate consumers of the attention they deserve.
So did I Mornelithe my friend. We're old schoolers. Dude, how many battles did we fight defending the PS3 across these forums 2-3 years ago?Mornelithe said:
But there also comes a point where a person feels that they aren't appreciated, and quite frankly, I don't feel like Sony "appreciates" their customers.
For example, Microsoft for all their failings seem to understand enough of the consumer base to take feedback into consideration, and thus they are ALWAYS refining the xbox dashboard experience. They offer customization options, because one thing that has been proven to lock in a built-in user base in the technology world is CUSTOMIZATION. Look at cell phones for example: the Iphone is an amazing pinnacle of mobile technology. So why is everyone else faffing about with the various evos and blackberries? Because while those phones don't have all the aesthetic charm and efficiency of the iphone, they allow heavy amounts of user customizable options. Hence why people like Droid OS phones... open source means A LOT to a great deal of people.
For the money we spend on these products, they shouldn't be telling us anything about how we modify it unless it is clearly being used for illegal activities such as piracy. If Sony meant us to JUST play games on the PS3, then they shouldn't have spent so much time marketing it as so much MORE than just a "game console." THEY set the expectation that the PS3 was a multi-function device that played games, played blu-ray, calculated distances to foreign stars, sang you to sleep at night, completed your spreadsheets for your presentation tomorrow, and disapproved of the women you brought home based on if your mom would like them or not.
Now I'm not saying that Sony shouldn't protect itself from pirates and the like, but just as we saw with the PSP vs. the Homebrew community, allowing their focus to be settled almost entirely on anti-piracy efforts hurt them badly. They spent more time updating firmware than establishing a user base, and in the process made the product so unappealing that it never became what it could have been. This I feel is what is responsible for the PSP Go's abysmal failure: They approached its design with the idea of thwarting those crafty hackers and homebrewers out there instead of trying to compete with their competitor who seemed less concerned about such things. As a result, the DS is outselling practically every other console, while the PSP Go collects dust on retailer shelves.
So yeah, I guess you are right in saying you have a choice.. hack your PS3 and get banned from PSN or don't. But you forgot one other option I can exercise--
"Buy an Xbox instead."
I'm getting a distinct anti-Sony vibe here, but I wasn't trying to make Sony, or the hackers, look like the "good/bad guy" here. It doesn't matter who you support because, in the end, nobody, and I mean nobody, wins.HyenaThePirate said:
I see Sony's concern, you have no idea which hackers are the "legit" ones who just want to change the font color of the text and which ones are the pirate hackers who want to take the games. It's better to just to one fell swoop to anyone who hacks and leave no stone unturned. They're trying to protect their business and their security, and they're trying to keep their service protective to their legitimate users.
I see the hacker's (not pirates, there's a distinction) complaint as well, while I don't think the "Other OS" feature was "advertised" (seriously, nobody has yet to explain to me what constitutes as "advertising", I doubt mentioning it on an online manual counts. Were there any actual advertisements that said "Install other OSs!"?) or even that big of a deal, it was questionable as to why Sony removed it. Their reason for removing it is debatable, but that doesn't matter now as it's gone. To a certain extent, sure, people should be able to do what they want with their hardware/software (again, debatable as to what you're actually modifying and whether or not it's under a Terms of Service or whatever).
But it's not like either side is helping the other. Sony is still trying to be protective of it's service by spreading it's butter as far as they can, and some legitimate hackers are getting punished for it. Meanwhile, on the hackers side, it doesn't help that they released security information, and have the potential to cause extreme damage to Sony. That, and some of them are douches [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/107733-Sued-PS3-Hacker-GeoHot-Responds-With-Rap] (though I have absolutely no taste in rap, so that could be hip-hop gold for all I know).
Nobody wins in the end. In fact, ironically enough, and sadly, I don't think Sony has really done anything to the pirates. They tried to attack the pirates, but ended up going through the hacker coastline while trying to get to the Pirate Bay. So they've made quite a hefty number of enemies, and in the end I don't think they've accomplished what they had hoped.
I support Sony's decisions regarding anti-piracy measures. I support the hacker's rights to their hardware/software (to an extent). I don't support how these three fronts, the Developer/Publisher, the Hacker, and the Pirate, have screwed it up for the Consumer.
Ah, it's been ages since I've done a photomanipulation. Does it still count if it's only text?
I'd have done better, but like I said, I only had so much space.
I'm not trying to troll or anything; honestly, I find the situation funny. And it's all Sony's fault, too.
Edit: Oh damn, I should have used bold text; my edit is a bit thinner than the original text.
I'd have done better, but like I said, I only had so much space.
I'm not trying to troll or anything; honestly, I find the situation funny. And it's all Sony's fault, too.
Edit: Oh damn, I should have used bold text; my edit is a bit thinner than the original text.
QFT.
A war on piracy is like a war on terror, in that as long as people have free will, someone will disagree with your paradigm and will make it their job to beat your 'system'.
It is a well known that anti-piracy methods results in false positives and is a short term solution. Implementing things like perma-bans for 'hacking' or unlocking the potential of the hardware is narrow sighted and by doing so will be reducing the market of 'power users' that they can sell to, you know those geeks that like playing with hardware just to see what it can do?
Piracy is something companies need to accept, protect the product to a degree so that not every Jo Blogs can copy the disk, but they need to realise that at some point all their stringent protections are going to do is make it difficult for a average consumer to use their product. Consider all the DRM placed on newer CD's... they dont stop you from placing a tape recorder infront of your speakers, similarly with DVD's, whats to stop you doing a screen capture with a camera?
About time. Drop the hammer. Push the red button. Give the green light. You can mod your console if you want, but if you violate terms of service, you better expect to have stuff taken away from you.
Ban em all.
Some of the greatest games have fallen to 12 year old dipshits who think they are badass for following a forum tutorial.
Some of the greatest games have fallen to 12 year old dipshits who think they are badass for following a forum tutorial.
Take notes from Modern Warfare 2: Tens of thousands of people were banned but because one or two of them were false positives they reinstated all accounts and haven't banned anyone since. Today you can go play MW2 on the PC and it's hacked, modded, and otherwise gangraped by the hackers. The only way to put a decent hurt on hackers is to make it a federal offense, which isn't happening.
some time ago, a very "entitled" guy at work asked a couple of us why we don't just jailbreak our ps3's, and cried freedom of info and all that crap. my reply was, "well I'd prefer it not eff up my system and warranty." pretty simple reason.
For the people that have modded their system to make it better for them, good job you're probably pretty smart. Now use those brains to pull your head out of your ass and realize you aren't the only people on the planet, that Sony is doing this to target those that hack maliciously to play cracked games, and cheat on said games making the leader boards there by useless, and any such trophies related to those leader boards impossible. Blame the "bad" hackers for ruining a good thing, and making the big evil corporation step it up to protect its property and the agreement that we all agreed to when we bought the damn thing.
For the people that have modded their system to make it better for them, good job you're probably pretty smart. Now use those brains to pull your head out of your ass and realize you aren't the only people on the planet, that Sony is doing this to target those that hack maliciously to play cracked games, and cheat on said games making the leader boards there by useless, and any such trophies related to those leader boards impossible. Blame the "bad" hackers for ruining a good thing, and making the big evil corporation step it up to protect its property and the agreement that we all agreed to when we bought the damn thing.
who the hell pirates ps3 games anyway? all the good ps3 games either come out on pc or have a crack to that effect, it's much simpler to just go through that
Yes, because banning hackers is a 100% foolproof way to eliminate piracy on the system. I mean, it worked with the Xbox.
I can understand being vindictive and/or trying to punish people who hack the system, but seriously... this is news? This is a deterrent? Microsoft has, if memory serves, held this policy up since the 360 was released and piracy on the 360 still exists. It should be fairly obvious to Sony that this isn't actually going to fix anything.
I think the big issue here is that when Sony introduced features for the PS3, like the other OS, they added features that weren't truly necessary for the console itself, but at the same time, by removing them they've done more damage to their reputation than they would have done if they'd simply never introduced the features.
I can understand being vindictive and/or trying to punish people who hack the system, but seriously... this is news? This is a deterrent? Microsoft has, if memory serves, held this policy up since the 360 was released and piracy on the 360 still exists. It should be fairly obvious to Sony that this isn't actually going to fix anything.
I think the big issue here is that when Sony introduced features for the PS3, like the other OS, they added features that weren't truly necessary for the console itself, but at the same time, by removing them they've done more damage to their reputation than they would have done if they'd simply never introduced the features.
I suggest you read some companies reports on their experiences with piracy (some are posted on this site). In some cases pirate copies outnumber legit copies by a factor close to 9 to 1 [90% pirate to 10% legit].Baresark said:
Other companies report a 0% conversion from pirate to legit copy.
It appears clear that pirates simply do not pay for games.
If the game the pirate wants to play can not be 'cracked' then the pirate does not buy that game, the pirate finds a game that can be 'cracked' and plays that game instead.
Ever been to anywhere in Asia?Baresark said:
There are vendors on most streets selling movies, music and games (who disappear each time the 'copyright' police arrive in town). Most of these sales are to tourists.
I spend a few months in Thailand each year and the local 'Hello Kitty' shop has a massive pirate DVD shop behind the changing room, filled with thousands and thousands of pirated games, movies and music (at a few $ each).
Even in the massive electronics shopping mall in Bangkok, Pan Tip Plazza, you can't get away from hawkers trying to sell pirate software/movies.
Thanks to them removing the support from the slims, I'm pretty sure the Hotz issue was more or less just an excuse that they used. There was nothing in the fat PS3s that's lacking from the slims as far as running Linux goes other than the option in the XMB.Mornelithe said:
I agree entirely with the above.shadowform said:
And as far as advertising goes, my Swedish 60 gig PS3 does mention OtherOS in the manual. Does that count?
