Anonymous goes after Sony

[scobywhru]

It is wrong but it can also be viewed as a statement or stand against a company, like how I generally buy most games without DRM, I haven't bought EA games for years because they insist on putting draconian DRM in that ruins it for valid customers, same with Ubisoft now, I am not going to spend money on a game I would have to crack to actually play. People who pirate games, like those that download music, are more passionate about them and spend more of there money on them then the average citizen a pirated game does not correlate with 1 lost sale all real studies not funded by the game/music industry show this along with anecdotal evidence from independent or small publishers/game makers. Small game studios find if they just ignore pirates they can make a better game and get MORE money.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008 ... change.ars

If you ask me this is about 12yrs late, sony has been terrible to consumers for years and years, remember the colluding of the music industry to artificially inflate prices I really enjoyed the $20 cd, and the Rootkit that caused computers to crash from Sony in 2005 and opened a backdoor and reporting mechanism to sony from your PC.

[SixtyWattMan]

i understand the OS removal pissed off a lot of people, but I don't believe for a second that the dude did it without intending for the system to be pillaged. I could care less about online activation, but the fact is, the EULA clearly states that what Hotz is doing is illegal, and the fact that he's trying to play all innocent in this is just bullshit.

EULAs do not make things illegal rofl. :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

[Neelpos]

"I made a new game console, the EULA has just made gay marriage illegal"

[Sk1n]

Now anyone feel free to correct me if I am wrong here. I haven't read completely into the situation about what happened with this Sony stuff. As I understand it, this cat GeoHot reverse engineered the software on the PS3 and leaked the info so people could essentially jailbreak their systems and do all sorts of shit with it that wasn't intended?

[scobywhru]

yeah but Sony had woefully inadequate protection of the root keys for PS3 which once worked around gave full access to the system.

[Sk1n]

yeah but Sony had woefully inadequate protection of the root keys for PS3 which once worked around gave full access to the system.

Ok well in that case:

EULAs do not make things illegal rofl. :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

Isn't necessarily true. (cue a typical boring Sk1n post)

Reverse engineering does violate EULA as well as copyright and patent laws, depending on the situation. There have been many cases about software copyright law and the infringement of it through reverse engineering such as Baystate v. Bowers in which Bowers' CAD software was found to have been reverse engineered and was paid damages for the copyright and patent infringement. In Europe, the EU allows reverse engineering for the purposes of interoperability, but prohibits it for the purposes of creating a competing product, and also prohibits the public release of information obtained through reverse engineering of software. Which is exactly what GeoHot did.

Whether you agree with it or not, it doesn't matter. It's against the law and whoever got in trouble doesn't have any right to complain because they broke the law. No matter what kind of idealistic bullshit is used to try and justify it, plain and simple it was against the law.

[Pentagram.J2]

Sk1n++

[Josh43558]

Whether you agree with it or not, it doesn't matter. It's against the law and whoever got in trouble doesn't have any right to complain because they broke the law. No matter what kind of idealistic bullshit is used to try and justify it, plain and simple it was against the law.

Ever heard of protesting?

[isybub]

i dun have ps3 so it dont really bother me
my friend does though...
wait, protesting against the law!?
NO NO NO NO NO
Oh wait, i pirate, oops :]

[Sk1n]

Whether you agree with it or not, it doesn't matter. It's against the law and whoever got in trouble doesn't have any right to complain because they broke the law. No matter what kind of idealistic bullshit is used to try and justify it, plain and simple it was against the law.

Ever heard of protesting?

Yes I have. I fail to see how that relates to this.

[stickbeast]

Geohot is just a kid who figured out how to break Sony's new toy to use homebrew, and told other people how to do it. This has been done with phones for a while now. If it's legal to jailbreak a phone, why is it illegal to jailbreak a PS3?

Why hasn't Nintendo started suing people for installing homebrew on their system?

[Sk1n]

Geohot is just a kid who figured out how to break Sony's new toy to use homebrew, and told other people how to do it. This has been done with phones for a while now. If it's legal to jailbreak a phone, why is it illegal to jailbreak a PS3?

Why hasn't Nintendo started suing people for installing homebrew on their system?

To answer your first question, Apple tried to make it illegal to jailbreak their phones. They filed suits to define copyright law in regards to the unlocking of their phones. It was denied and found that jailbreaking is exempt under the DCMA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) rules. Apple is allowed to release iOS updates and put certain measures in place to prevent people from jailbreaking their phone, but is not allowed to sue anyone for doing it, or they would have done so by now.

Nintendo has never sued anyoneas far as I could find, but they have also implemented many patches to prevent it on both the Wii and DS.


Here's a lateral example of it all.

Jaywalking is a crime. It's on the books. It can be punished and sometimes caries a fine. Depending on where you are though and who catches you, there may or may not be any repercussions. In some cases it's considered a misdemeanor. It other cases cops don't give a shit as long as it doesn't cause any disruptions. The point is, we are all well aware that we run a risk of getting in trouble for it whether the risk is .0001% or 99%. Yeah getting a ticket for jaywalking may be a bullshit cheap way of a city generating revenue, but when it comes down to the basis of it, it's still a law even if it may be a bullshit law.

The same goes for hacking. Some companies might not fight it, others fight it by releasing software updates to prevent it, and some use legal action to fight it, like Sony. No matter what side of the argument someone is on, it's a fact that the releasing of hacking information by Geohot was illegal, as has been shown by the legal system allowing Sony to proceed with a lawsuit against Geohot. Calling the legislation against hacking the PS3 a bullshit law, doesn't change the fact that it is still a law.

And if all these hackers hate Sony and all these other console's limitations so much so that the feel the need to hack the consoles and customize them as they see fit, then maybe they should build their own fucking consoles the way they think it should be made and then freely share those with everyone.

[stickbeast]

Right. It's still not illegal to jailbreak your smart phone, so what changes about it being a console?

Jailbreaking isn't an automatically bad or illegal thing. It just eliminates some restrictions and enhances your device's capabilities. We can think of it as a plug-in, like what we use to run our TF2, GMod and CSS servers. Are we committing a crime by using them? Are Valve's updates that break Sourcemod a hint at us (and the thousands of people that rely on Sourcemod because we don't like Valve's provided admin abilities) to stop using them? No. They aren't that stupid.

Sony is just stubbornly clinging to the failed "old business model." As people get more and more familiar with computers and new consoles with amazing computer-like capabilities, we are starting to use products not JUST for their intended use. Thanks to the internet, this information and any additional software is made easily available. This is the direction things are going, and to fight against it, is like fighting against a current. George Hotz is just 21 year old, and he managed to crack the iPhone and PS3. What could he have done if given full resources and a full time job at Apple or Sony? We will never know, because Sony insists on making enemies when it could be making great friends.

[CaptainTripps]

Yea, I install custom ROMS on every phone I buy, I never really understood a company having a say in how I use a product once I purchase it. If you are attempting to gain access to OTHER people's hardware that's one thing, but the ability to modify something once you've paid for it seems pretty fucking obvious. I always wondered why companies don't pay more attention to the custom mod scene and try to implement the more popular ones, maybe grab the guys developing it and paying them, since you get a clearer idea of what people actually want by what they actually search for and use.

And if all these hackers hate Sony and all these other console's limitations so much so that the feel the need to hack the consoles and customize them as they see fit, then maybe they should build their own fucking consoles the way they think it should be made and then freely share those with everyone.

Ridiculous argument, people don't have the money and resources to do this from scratch. They can however, PAY SONY for the hardware then change/redesign/addon whatever they like. I mean, you wouldn't tell someone they couldn't modify their computers, would you? Overclock their CPU's and GPU's? I recall negative industry overreaction when people first started doing this, and nowadays the software to do so comes with a purchase.

[Little Weapon]

The industry doesn't realize that an illegal download is NOT a sale lost. People don't hack or illegally download things to make money. They do it because they love watching movies, love listening to music, and love playing games. If they were to devise a system accounting for the new age of media, where anything is released is available for free, maybe they could come up with something that actually makes the consumer to gladly pay for a product.

Starting this witch hunt for people who have hacked is just dumb, making people put in serial codes for a game is dumb, and not letting your game run without consistent connection to the official game servers is dumb. It puts the regular consumer through a lot more, for what is going to be hacked and available for free anyway.

Music sells a lot less these days mostly due to piracy