Sony Officially Blames Anonymous For PSN Hack 575
H_Fisher writes "In a letter to Congress, Kazuo Hirai, chairman of Sony's board of directors, blames hacker group Anonymous for making possible the theft of gamers' personal information. 'What is becoming more and more evident is that Sony has been the victim of a very carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated criminal cyber attack designed to steal personal and credit card information for illegal purposes,' Hirai wrote. He also indicated that Sony waited two days before notifying the FBI of the theft."
shame game (Score:5, Insightful)
Anonymous? (Score:5, Funny)
hey!
I didn't do crap!
Re:Anonymous? (Score:5, Funny)
hey! I didn't do crap!
Coward
Re:Anonymous? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sony, go fuck yourselves.
We are not "Anonymous."
We are the customers whose data you exposed by being a bunch of idiot fucktards who wouldn't bother with the most basic of data encryption.
And WE ARE STILL LEGION.
Ohh, this is going to sting.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Fuckwitted, indeed. By making this (dubious sounding) claim, they have just poked anon with a stick after it has just been demonstrated that they have a major security problem. There is a fair chance that anon has a sizable population of already irritated PSN users. In light of the whole HBGary fiasco, does this REALLY seem like a wise thing to do?
GG Sony, you are proving to be more entertaining by the day...
Re:Anonymous? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:shame game (Score:5, Insightful)
Anonymous my ASS
Convenient scape goat
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Actually it was Anonymous Coward. My bad. I just wanted to play "global thermonuclear war" and suddenly I got all these credit card numbers.
Agreed - Scapegoat for organized crime (Score:4, Insightful)
Looking for credit card info? Anonymous tends to do things for idealogical reasons, AFAIK. There may be some overlap, but this sounds like organized crime. And yes, known vulnerabilities are things you should not be vulnerable to if you have credit card info for even two million people.
Re:Agreed - Scapegoat for organized crime (Score:5, Insightful)
Then again there might just be one really bad ass anon who decided to get down with his bad self.
Re:Agreed - Scapegoat for organized crime (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:shame game (Score:5, Interesting)
Who scapegoated them?
A professional cyber cracker may well opt to take advantage of anonymous's wrath by leaving a frame job behind.
Re: (Score:3)
Anonymous?
bah!
Not a chance!
To me this looks like the work of the famous lone wolf known as "Somebody"!
Re:shame game (Score:4, Insightful)
Wha? Why would it have to go that far?
This is a single file that sony "magically" came up with after the fact. This is more than a week later, and there's nothing they're showing to substantiate their claim. If there was an actual anonymous attack plan stating "let's steal sony's credit card info" prior to this event, then we might have a finger to point at anonymous.
Instead, I'd bet my life savings that Sony planed this "anonymous framing document" themselves.
I really hope this puts sony out of business.
Re: (Score:3)
Why am I an internet tough guy? That is quite a non sequitur. They have had abhorrent policies and generally treat the public like shit for years. I don't do business with sony in any way. I do not buy sony products.
In reality, companies who have total access cut off for more than 3 days are extremely likely to go out of business (>90%). This is a well studied economic issue, and in this case while it is not all business with the company, it is substantial. A week's worth of PSN revenue is not small by a
Re:shame game (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm guessing that Sony is scapegoating them because it's easier than figuring out who did do it. And even when/if they do figure out who it was, it's basically impossible to prove that that individual isn't in some convoluted way anonymous.
Re:shame game (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason it took so long is because they were planning on using 'terrorists', but after the recent news they decided against it.
Add "Anonymous" to the list of things that frighten the lay person and get stupid laws passed.
Right after 'terrorists' and 'for the children'.
Re: (Score:3)
Anonymous my ASS
Convenient scape goat
Indeed. I think that the following quote shows they don't really understand the nature of Anonymous.
'What is becoming more and more evident is that Sony has been the victim of a very carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated criminal cyber attack designed to steal personal and credit card information for illegal purposes,'
ich bin Anonymous ! (Score:2)
I'm a jelly doughnut.
Re: (Score:3)
Now, I'm not saying that this was sophisticated attack. I don't know. But the fact remains that any network/server can fall to this kind of stuff.
Most security admins acknowledge it too which is why logging is enabled, roles are separated out, teams perform penetration testing an so forth.
I have no idea how sophisticated the attack against Sony was but the way they're talking of moving their data centers and that they had defence at the perimeter suggests to me that someone broke in through their intranet or wifi (e.g. sitting in their carpark) to gain access rather than through a public facing interface to the service.
Re:shame game (Score:5, Insightful)
They probably deserve the blame, too - they were apparently hacked via a "known vulnerability" [theregister.co.uk] although I don't think they've ever stated which one.
Re:shame game (Score:5, Insightful)
From what I've heard, the vulnerability was in a library which was used by a piece of middleware which Sony relied on.
Sony should have tracked vulnerabilities in indirect dependencies more carefully, but I'll bet that dozens of other companies which invest millions of dollars in security have similar issues. It takes a ridiculous amount of money and sacrificed features to harden a non-trivial setup against truly determined attackers. Sony had both a lot of valuable credit-card data and a lot of wrath from the tech world, and that's a dangerous combination.
Re:shame game (Score:5, Insightful)
Same here.
I fail to see any kind of plausible explanation why "We were busy defending ourselves from Anonymous" affected the poor design of their security structure.
Re:shame game (Score:5, Funny)
Kinda like the guy who broke into my car and stole my radio/mp3 player was anonymous.
Re:shame game (Score:5, Insightful)
The real mind bender is.. Is there a difference? I mean, Anonymous isn't exactly organized is it? It's just a convenient name people adopt sometimes.
Re:shame game (Score:4, Informative)
Just because party A and party B are both anonymous doesn't mean they're the same party. It just means you can't pick either of them out of a crowd.
The Anonymous group which has been anti-Sony recently is huge, amorphous organization with goals that change from day to day depending on what they feel like doing that day. Think of Anonymous as an online flash mob.
The anonymous group that hacked Sony? Who knows. They could be highly organized under a feudal system where failure is rewarded with the opportunity to commit seppuku. Although this group is anonymous, they may have none of the attributes that make Anonymous what it is.
I guess the problem you're having is that you're equating anonymous with Anonymous. One is a description and the other is the name of an organization which happens to be descriptive.
If (as we suspect) Anonymous had nothing to do with the hack, then all Sony is doing is trying to vilify an organization that opposes it. In other words they're putting the blame on someone they don't like in the hopes of lowering public opinion of them.
Re:shame game (Score:5, Insightful)
I blame Sony for not having security sufficient to prevent such an attack in the first place. What, did we have a Win '08 server facing the 'net without a firewall??
Re:shame game (Score:5, Funny)
I blame Sony for not having security sufficient to prevent such an attack in the first place. What, did we have a Win '08 server facing the 'net without a firewall??
No, it was a PS3 that used to serve as a Linux firewall. Unfortunately they 'patched' it and now it doesn't run Linux anymore.
Re: (Score:3)
I blame Sony for not having security sufficient to prevent such an attack in the first place.
You are aware that Mr. Hindsight has perfect vision, right?
My point here is one can ALWAYS make your statement after the fact. Reality shows us that we have such things as 0-day vulns. In my opinion, Sony's failure was not so much getting hacked in the first place(which they do have their faults here, don't get me wrong), but more for failing to properly plan for this scenario.
If we've said it once, we've said it 1,000 times...it's not a matter of "if", it's only a matter of "when". Proper planning for t
Re: (Score:3)
Some random security researcher [wired.com] posited that because they had outdated apache server versions (with no known exploits) that it might have been an apache vulnerability. News sources elsewhere repeated that nonsense.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
You can blame a home owner for not putting a good lock on their door but the person that breaks in should still go to jail.
Blaming the victim is just lame.
Re:shame game (Score:5, Insightful)
Sony is not the victim, the users are the victims.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, but a home owner with huge amounts of other people's sensitive data should have better security, or contract it out to someone competent.
oh Shit! (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah right (Score:5, Insightful)
"carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated"
These are not words I think of when discussing Anonymous. Give me a break.
Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Funny)
"carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated"
These are not words I think of when discussing Anonymous. Give me a break.
"carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated"
These are not words I think of when discussing Sony.
Re: (Score:3)
"carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated"
These are not words I think of when discussing Anonymous. Give me a break.
"carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated"
These are not words I think of when discussing Sony.
No kidding. PSN only got marginally worse once they shut it off.
Maybe they are taking this opportunity to actually build a network that works and isn't embarrassingly slow.
Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Insightful)
Sony is doing what all people in power do:
- find a scapegoat.
Reminds me of what my boss said, "I will not take the blame for the failure of this board. YOU will." Normally I would agree, but I told you that we should do additional testing to verify it works, but you said 'we don't have time'. LIKEWISE I suspect Sony's employees told them to add additional safety measures, but Sony's managers refused to spend the labor time/cost.
So instead the managers are deflecting blame from themselves to the users.
Bastards.
Re:Yeah right (Score:4, Insightful)
Yet they go around collecting information they know they are not good at protecting.
Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Insightful)
- find a scapegoat.
A good scapegoat isn't just someone who can take the blame, it's somebody who you're trying to attack or remove for reasons you can't actually state publicly. For instance, if The Boss has to pick between scapegoating Alice or Bob, they might pick on whoever's standing in the way of a plum promotion for their good friend Fred, regardless of whether Alice or Bob had more to do with the problem in the first place. Or if someone from country A attacked country B, if the leaders of country B wanted to attack country C but couldn't come up with a legitimate reason they might try to blame the whole thing on country C rather than country A.
So I'm guessing Sony has it in for Anonymous for reasons totally unrelated to this breach.
Not an ideal strategy (Score:4, Funny)
Getting anonymous mad at them might not be the best strategy for beefing up the image of their security, though.
Re: (Score:2)
Would it be sophisticated and professional to *frame* anonymous?
Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Informative)
It's possible the two were linked. Perhaps Sony deliberately reduced security to improve uptime with a DDOS. Perhaps the targeted attack was planned and ready for a while and they waited until Sony was busy with other security matters or wanted to deflect the blame. "Linked" doesn't mean "caused by" or even "influenced by" in that the attacks would likely have happened even if Anonymous didn't exist. But that the timing may have been adjusted, however slightly, by Anonymous's actions. But it's not like someone DDOSing Sony from Anonymous said "Wow, I just hacked the Gibson, let's see what's in this garbage file..."
Re: (Score:3)
And the complaints against Fox are unrelated to any political ideology they are linked with. Thei
Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Informative)
Anyone who has read TFA will not find this the least bit insightful, though the Slashdot headline is extremely misleading as usual. Sony said they had been the "victim of a very carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated criminal cyber attack designed to steal personal and credit card information for illegal purposes," but did not blame Anonymous for that. They said they were under a DDOS attack from Anonymous at the same time as the security breach and the two events may or may not have been related.
Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Informative)
ROFLMFAO (Score:2)
They called Anonymous "very professional, highly sophisticated"
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They called Anonymous "very professional, highly sophisticated"
The old adage applies "It takes one to know one." Sony isn't professional or highly sophisticated, and they wouldn't know what that looked like if it hacked their network and stole all their data...
Re: (Score:2)
> They called Anonymous "very professional, highly sophisticated"
Obviously they have never been to 4chan.
Anony == Scrapegoats (Score:5, Insightful)
Dont have the competency or skill to run your network correctly?
Dont know who else to blame when your on the hook for a class action and liability in the billions?
Blame Anonymous.
Re: (Score:2)
The identity of the people behind this attack are unknown. In other words, they are anonymous. That's the downside of being anonymous.
Re: (Score:3)
It sure would be.
Not Quite (Score:2)
While a particular group may have been responsible for the data theft, Sony is still responsible for the irresponsible storage that they used to enable the theft. Good (industry standard) practices around credit card retention, such as gateway tokenization, would have drastically reduced the financial implications. There would still have been privacy implications, but by not storing card numbers they'd actually have made the information much less appealing to hackers as well.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Ok,
So how accountable should Sony ( a victim ) be for/to their end users also victims? I mean this seriously. In a world of tangibles its not even clear. Lets say you lent me your laptop and left it in my unlocked car at a the mall. When return to my car its gone. Now I was negligent about protecting your laptop. Clearly its the thief's fault its missing but I really should replace your computer if it can't be found after a day or two.
Now we are in the world of intangibles, Sony did a poor job of prot
"...steal..." (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, most Anonymous attacks involve masses of non-technical users joining a LOIC DDOS. It's essentially a human "botnet", just as cheap and effective too!
Re: (Score:3)
Yes but the information they "stole" was used more to embarrass them then anything else. I never heard anything about them accessing HBG's bank accounts or using their corp. credit cards; judging by the amount and sensitivity of data they copied it seems likely they could have used it to drain a few accounts.
As others have stated this just seems like a convenient scapegoat. If it was Anonymous then copying credit card data was most likely just part and parcel to further embarrassing Sony by pointing out how
BitTorrent (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
FTFA:
"The attack that stole the personal data of millions of Sony customers was launched separately, while the company was distracted protecting itself against the denial of service campaign, Sony said.
Sony said it was not sure whether the organizers of the two attacks were working together."
I.e., it's anonymous's fault. We were busy dealing with their crap and didn't notice someone coming in and stealing stuff.
Re:"...steal..." (Score:4, Interesting)
So very this. I'd mod you up if I could.
The common and fashionable sentiment is "Anonymous is a scapegoat for the Sony Conspiracy" or "Sony just needs a scapegoat for their failure..." when the defense of Anonymous should be exactly as you stated: It's not their MO.
Anonymous, to date, has shown itself to be mischievous (sometimes malicious) and extremely precise in their targeting. They have never represented themselves to be a for-profit hacking crew and they're smart enough to know that such actions are hurting the innocent users more than the company. Thus, the copying of millions of accounts' financial information cannot rationally be tied to them on history alone.
I really don't think Anonymous did this and I think Sony just needs *a* target of blame ASAP. In my opinion, anonymous is a *scapegoat of convenience*, given their vocal opposition to the modding community.
Tinfoil Hat Time: Maybe a for-profit hacking crew executed this attack knowing Anonymous would be target #1, thus giving them sufficient smoke screen.
Hmmm...
!Anonymous (Score:2)
Anonymous already denied it and, AFAIK, they don't do sneaky attacks and do not steal personal info.
Re: (Score:2)
Except for when they do.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/anonymous-speaks-the-inside-story-of-the-hbgary-hack.ars [arstechnica.com]
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/02/07/1424213/HBGary-Federal-Hacked-By-Anonymous [slashdot.org]
Re:!Anonymous (Score:5, Informative)
There is no official "anonymous" and there is no leadership or command structure. It's a concept, an idea to describe an emergent system of hacktivism. Saying anonymous is responsible for this (or anything) is like saying democracy is responsible for causing the wars in the middle east. You're mixing up an idea, an ethos, with an organization.
Re: (Score:2)
lol
Re:!Anonymous (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no official "anonymous" and there is no leadership or command structure. It's a concept, an idea to describe an emergent system of hacktivism. Saying anonymous is responsible for this (or anything) is like saying democracy is responsible for causing the wars in the middle east. You're mixing up an idea, an ethos, with an organization.
Yes, but when an organization runs around saying they are attacking targets, and when that organization has no real leadership (collective/mob), they also can't cry foul if someone co-opts their name, claims to be part of them (since they have no real membership requirement or leadership, whose to say), and decides to either:
1) Partake in the attack even though it has been officially "called off" (hey, just because most of Anonymous might be clueless, doesn't mean some of it can't hack/crack with the best of them.
2) Use your name as a convenient scape goat to pin their crime on (okay, we take as much data as we can, and point the finger at THOSE guys over there).
Either which way, saying "Anonymous Denied all Responsibility, It MUST BE SONY'S FAULT!" is the biggest LOL of them all.
Its the fault of the malicious idiot who attacked and broke into the network. Yeah, Sony should have done a better job securing the data, but that does not absolve the THIEF of responsibility (in spite of what most slashdotters seem to think).
Re:!Anonymous (Score:5, Insightful)
Saying anonymous is responsible for this (or anything) is like saying democracy is responsible for causing the wars in the middle east. You're mixing up an idea, an ethos, with an organization.
Are you equating the loosely-affiliated group Anonymous with a concept like democracy, or are you redefining the common definition of Anonymous as a loosely-affiliated group to now mean anyone involved in hacking or online attacks for an ideological reason other than financial gain? I've never heard proponents of democracy, or any other ethos, say something as cheesy as "We are [ethos]. We are Legion. Expect Us." The words "we" and "us" clearly identify people as a group. That is, even Anonymous thinks they're a group and not just an ethos. They are not an ethos, they are a group of people with some common world views, regardless of whether or not they have an official roster.
It's perfectly reasonable that a not-for-profit attacker would in fact steal valuable information just to steal it, not necessarily to release or sell it. It makes Sony look much worse, and costs them more, to have their customers' financial and personal data stolen, even if that information never actually gets used or released. In addition, it's not Sony's customers that Anonymous wants to attack, it is Sony itself. It doesn't serve their goals to release customer information, all they need to do is steal it. In other words, it would fit in with the idea of revenge against Sony to simply do as much damage to them as possible even if you don't plan on benefiting directly from the attack.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Anonymous disagrees with you.
"The attackers went one better than this, however: they dumped the user database for rootkit.com, listing the e-mail addresses and password hashes for everyone who'd ever registered on the site."
There was also the little bit about posting personal info about spouses and children of HBGary employees.
I don't buy it (Score:2)
Doesn't sound likely to me. Anonymous have done many things, but stealing user information hasn't been one of them until now.
I wonder if Sony did it themselves with the intention of pinning it on Anonymous?
Re: (Score:3)
If people only knew that Anonymous is just a bunch of teenage script kiddies...
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
FTFA:
We also informed the subcommittee of the following: ...
- 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." ...
Well, it may be slander, but they claimed (Under Oath?), that they were informed that Anonymous was responsible for the break-ins on the SOE servers. I don't think they actually said "Anonymous is behind the attacks", they just listed the evidence they have found since then.
Sony itself freely admits that Anonymous may have not been involved in the attack itself, but states that the initial intrusion seems to have happened at the same point that the initial Anonymous DoS attack did, and that the initia
Carefuly Planned and Profesional? (Score:3)
Some how none of that seems to point to Anonymous in any way.
Wait, what... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sony said on Wednesday that Anonymous targeted it several weeks ago using a denial of service attack in protest of Sony defending itself against a hacker in federal court in San Francisco.
The attack that stole the personal data of millions of Sony customers was launched separately, while the company was distracted protecting itself against the denial of service campaign, Sony said.
Sony said it was not sure whether the organizers of the two attacks were working together.
So they know Anonymous DDOS'ed them, and Anonymous have admitted this too.
They also were attacked separately where the theft took place. They don't know if these groups were working together. They blame the latter on Anonymous too. How did they draw that final conclusion??
Re:Wait, what... (Score:5, Informative)
Sony said on Wednesday that Anonymous targeted it several weeks ago using a denial of service attack in protest of Sony defending itself against a hacker in federal court in San Francisco.
This quote is more disturbing as far as I am concerned. Sony was not defending itself against Geohot, since Geohot never attacked Sony nor did Geohot sue Sony. Geohot was defending himself in a lawsuit filed by Sony.
Talk about slanting things...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
They also were attacked separately where the theft took place. They don't know if these groups were working together. They blame the latter on Anonymous too. How did they draw that final conclusion??
If A=B, and B=C, then C="Anonymous fucking did it!" That's basic logic right there.
Re:Wait, what... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sony defending itself against a hacker in federal court in San Francisco.
Did they really claim to be defending themselves against a "hacker" in court? Don't they mean "suing"? And isn't it unfair to lump the hackers who stole the information with completely different hacker, Geohot? Who the fuck wrote this article?
Re: (Score:2)
They being Reuters, Sony - as you quoted - didn't draw that conclusion. They mentioned the ongoing attack and of course it would seem relevant, but they carefully denied knowing of any relation between the two.
Re:Wait, what... (Score:4, Informative)
If you read the letter (which is made needlessly annoying by the fact that it's scanned in and the raw text isn't made available, fuck you very much Sony), you'll see that on page 2 [flickr.com] they explain:
When Sony Online Entertainment discovered this past Sunday afternoon that data from its servers had been stolen, it also discovered that the intruders had placed a file on one of those servers named "Anonymous" with the words "We are Legion."
So that's how they come to that conclusion. Which I guess means we can blame Anonymous, in so much as anyone calling themselves Anonymous is Anonymous.
Not that I really believe that the attacker really is "Anonymous," but they do make a good scape goat. And who knows, maybe the attacker did decide that this attack might as well be carried out under the "anonymous" banner.
It's the girl's fault! (Score:3)
Right... (Score:2)
The attack that stole the personal data of millions of Sony customers was launched separately, while the company was distracted protecting itself against the denial of service campaign, Sony said.
Because we all know that keeping your network secure involves someone personally inspecting each packet as it comes in. With all of Sony's packet inspectors distracted by the DDOS the hackers were able to sneak their packets through undetected.
Old, but gets funnier after every hack (Score:3)
You have to admit.... (Score:2)
You have to admit...blaming Anonymous for the attack sounds a lot better and less embarrassing as stating "Yeah, some 17 year old kid in Toledo managed to hack us and pull all your private information because we don't have our s&*t together." I don't blame them for pointing at Anonymous. After all, Anonymous pointed their finger at Sony not but a month prior.
IT'S THE CUSTOMERS FAULT! (Score:2)
That's the translation of Sony's Japanese doublespeak. (Notice it resembles Toyko Power's doublespeak of why the nuclear meltdown is not a danger to nearby customers.)
Fundamental rhetoric error on Sony's part (Score:2)
Logical Fallacy on Sony's part. Post hoc ergo propter hoc [fallacyfiles.org] . Or as many on /. like to say "Correlation is not causation".
Re: (Score:2)
augh hit submit instead of continue editing ...
This isn't to say Anon's members are blameless, and legally off the hook. A case can be made they were unknowingly but maliciously contributing factors. Its the malice part that will push law enforcement and prosecutor's buttons - they knew what they were doing was wrong/criminal and did so anyway. Without malice, its simple negligence; with malice, you may have a contributory criminal violation. The law is kinda funny like that - along for a minor prank, someone does a felony act (prior unknown to you)
Sony didn't explicitly blame Anonymous. (Score:2)
Sony may have blamed Anonymous for the attack, but they're not accusing Anonymous of executing the attack itself. They said the following:
Granted, Sony can say anything to cover their butts, but Hell... The hackers could have just as easily left an "Osama wuz here" file. Would that mean Al Qaida definitely did
Got my letter...don't know why (Score:5, Interesting)
Who? (Score:2)
Why point blame at Anonymous. The Russians love this kind of hack and apparently China also wishes to have such an illegal industry as well. Before anyone spouts off about blame they need some serious proof.
To turn a phrase... (Score:4, Informative)
Sony said on Wednesday that Anonymous targeted it several weeks ago using a denial of service attack in protest of Sony defending itself against a hacker in federal court in San Francisco.
Meanwhile in reality:
Sony said on Wednesday that Anonymous targeted it several weeks ago using a denial of service attack in protest of Sony attacking a hacker in a hopeless attempt to control information that had already slipped far out of it's control in federal court in San Francisco.
Interesting timing... (Score:2)
They hired professional investigators, what, last night to track down who did this, and then this morning, ta-da, it's Anonymous!
Anon is becoming the al-Qaeda of the Internet - the generic name used for "anybody who does this sort of thing." Hackers ARE Anonymous, in the same way Curads ARE "Band-Aids" and Puffs Plus ARE "Kleenex" and Sharp copiers ARE "Xerox machines".
Canada will stand up to Sony (Score:3)
I hate linking to this POS paper but here's the story http://www.theprovince.com/life/Privacy+czar+scolds+Sony+calls+power+levy+heavy+fines/4725743/story.html [theprovince.com]
Apparently (Score:5, Funny)
Sony would have blamed Bin Laden had he not been killed by the US earlier this week. They had to find some other scapegoat so that's why it took so long for their official blaming.
Hahahahaa - incompetence ? blame anonymous. (Score:4, Funny)
I hope I'm not the only one who sees the problem. (Score:3)
very carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated
Is this supposed to be the same "Anonymous" that's supposed to have its home on 4chan's Random board? 'Cause none of these qualities bring those users to mind.
I suggest Sony look elsewhere. I'm pretty sure "very carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated" and "Anonymous" are mutually exclusive possibilities.
Re:I told you, I didn't do it! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Blame the victim? (Score:5, Interesting)
Because there are different ways to approach the problem and heavy-handed lawyer-inflicted abuse makes you look like a total jerk.
Marcon hacks Wii and adds the "Homebrew Channel", which has never enabled piracy (although some others have built upon it to do so). Nintendo releases a firmware update. Marcon re-opens Homebrew Channel. Ninetendo releases another firmware update, which bricks a few Wiis on accident. Marcon re-opens Homebrew Channel and finds a way to un-brick some of the bricked Wiis. Nintendo pretty much just leaves the issue alone, not wanting to harm their customer base even more.
Note, at no time did Nintendo sue Marcon, remove features that were advertised with the product, etc. And when they realized their strategy was doing more harm than good, they backed off a little. Nintendo is still making a fortune off of Wii, BTW.
Contrast Sony. They said you could install Linux on your Playstation, but not use about half the hardware. GeoHot figures out how to use ALL the hardware. Instead of realizing what's best for everyone involved, in a control-freak driven rage they remove OtherOS. GeoHot casually puts it back. Sony removes it again, makes it so future firmware updates are forward-only, and requires all their game and BluRay partners to do a firmware check on all new releases. And they drag GeoHot into court on what should be freedom of speech. Then, they subpoena all visitors to GeoHot's website, everyone who ever gave him money, etc., etc., really making enemies of millions of unrelated people. All this in addition to their track record of installing a rootkit on customers' PCs when listening to music (a 5-10-year felony if you or I did it) and taking back purchases from thousands of customers and refusing to lift a finger to give them back.
Sony is NOT the victim here. And they are being punished for legitimate crimes (hacking, theft) by vigilante justice because the courts and governments haven't done their job.