HyenaThePirate said:
This. Jump, you hit it right on the head.
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.
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.
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.
