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EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers
On its Deeplinks blog, the EFF has a strongly worded look at the actions taken by Sony against George Hotz for finding and publicizing security holes in its PlayStation 3 console. "Not content with the DMCA hammer, Sony is also bringing a slew of outrageous Computer Fraud and Abuse Act claims. The basic gist of Sony's argument is that the researchers accessed their own PlayStation 3 consoles in a way that violated the agreement that Sony imposes on users of its network (and supposedly enabled others to do the same). But the researchers don't seem to have used Sony's network in their research — they just used the consoles they bought with their own money. Simply put, Sony claims that it's illegal for users to access their own computers in a way that Sony doesn't like. Moreover, because the CFAA has criminal as well as civil penalties, Sony is actually saying that it's a crime for users to access their own computers in a way that Sony doesn't like."
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EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 20, 2011 19:16 UTC (Thu) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link]
If Sony want to easily lose their customers, then appear to successfully do well with that outrageous. Once again, an example of company forgetting client made then and will soon undo them.
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 20, 2011 19:19 UTC (Thu) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link]
Can anyone remind Sony their rootkit fiasco that affected PC running Windows systems? That action was criminal. I am surprised that company was not prosecuted. Just let them taste their own medicine.
Agreed Posted Jan 20, 2011 19:33 UTC (Thu) by dbruce (subscriber, #57948) [Link]
The DRM rootkit absolutely was a criminal act. They seem to be relying on a heavy bias that a well-known corporation will be considered the law-abiding "good guy", and that individuals who disagree with them will be thought of as "outlaw hackers" by the legal system and the public at large.
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 21, 2011 13:58 UTC (Fri) by macson_g (subscriber, #12717) [Link]
Average Sony customer doesn't give a damn. All he/she is interested is product spec, price-to-quality ratio and software availability.
Even if - by accident - someone gets to news like these, one can view it only as a legitimate fight with 'evil hackers'.
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 20, 2011 19:16 UTC (Thu) by cyperpunks (subscriber, #39406) [Link]
Sony is evil. Not exactly news:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_roo...
Just stay away from Sony products. It's that simple.
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 20, 2011 21:43 UTC (Thu) by xxiao (subscriber, #9631) [Link]
right, just stay away from Sony.
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 20, 2011 22:59 UTC (Thu) by PaulWay (✭ supporter ✭, #45600) [Link]
I've been staying away from Sony since before I read one of their catalogues in 2003, where the only bluetooth-enabled device was the top model video camera - and are you really expecting to send high-def videos via bluetooth? When the Minidisc came out and you couldn't buy a drive to write disks in digital format directly, that was the sign. Sony is a company out of touch with their consumers.
The only reason the PlayStation 3 exists is because Sony can make money out of games companies - they sure aren't making the money out of the consoles. And now that you don't have to go to Sony to have your game blessed by their private key, it won't be long before publishers just decide to bypass them completely. It won't be EA or the other big publishers that bypass Sony (because Sony will have nice big contracts with them and lawyers watching), it'll be all the little publishers that feel they can slip under the radar - and Sony knows those publishers add up. That's the real issue; that's why Sony's getting all righteous about how this should be a (US) federal crime. The piracy issue is beside the point, and Sony (obviously) couldn't care less about people running Linux.
Once again DRM fails. Once again no-one should be surprised. Once again an intellectual property monopoly collapses and the monopolist tries to protect their failure with badly-written laws. How is it possible that the people making these laws still don't see that they're never going to work? You can't hold back the tide, and certainly not by just building a brighter stop sign.
Have fun,
Paul
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 21, 2011 9:15 UTC (Fri) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link]
Just like many others you're perpetuating the myth that the PS3 isn't selfsustaining. Initially the PS3 was indeed sold at a loss, but nowadays it's not (since late 2008 or early 2009, depending on what sources you trust). This is fairly common practise when trying to open up a new market. The Wii was an exception, not the norm, and the fact that it could sell at a profit right away was purely because it's largely a GameCube in a new case with a new controller.
And I think your analysis is incorrect. Big publishers or small, developers definitely won't bypass Sony, for a multitude of reasons. First of all most smaller companies sell their games via the PlayStation store, rather than on blu-ray. Obviously Sony knows who its licensees are, and will refuse to sell any self-signed software.
Second of all, small studios cannot risk the legal threat. It could be that Sony doesn't have a legally strong position in this case, but it doesn't matter. Just like many other big companies in this situation (think Apple and the clone makers), they can just sue and win the game purely because of having a bigger legal budget. That's sadly how the legal game goes, especially in the US:
1. Sue
Trust me, this is all about "piracy" (I hate that term -- no swashbuckling seafarers involved here!). Sony needs to show resolve to its licensees to make them confident that Sony is doing everything they can to prevent games from being pirated.
Do I condone Sony actions in this whole affair? No. But painting them out as any worse than its competitors (Microsoft and Nintendo) is hugely misleading. Both Microsoft and Nintendo have a long history of suing people left and right (for kicks try googling for "Microsoft sues" or "Nintendo sues").
Take a step back: if you were a console maker who realised that their master key has been cracked, what would you do? Silently accept people that copy games and release unofficial firmware? Not likely. While it would probably lead to a short-term boost of hardware sales, it would almost certainly scare away any third-party developers.
Sony has only got two options (wholesale replacement of all hardware and patching all games isn't an option):
* Legal scare tactics to lessen short term risks, before the problem becomes too large to handle
* Work on a firmware upgrade that somehow tries to mitigate the problem (can it be done? maybe, maybe not -- they claim that they have a solution to the problem, but they would be stupid if they didn't claim this)
All this said, I don't think DRM is the answer. I think that DRM is the problem. But just like with software patents, the good guys lose. Everyone else is using DRM, hence you have to use DRM, or your competitors will attract the game studios. Everyone else are patenting things left and right, so you have to do the same to avoid getting smacked with patent lawsuits if you threaten them by having a superior product (or just riding the wave).
DRM eventually died out (more or less) for music. Hopefully it'll eventually do so for films and console games too, but don't hold your breath.
As for software signatures, I'm all for them, if used correctly. To again take the PS3 as an example: the right way to do things would be to allow unsigned (or developer-signed -- having all software signed by its maker would be a nice twist) software, but disable things like the trophies, playstation network and playstation store. That way Sony could prevent cheaters from polluting online games, while at the same time allowing homebrew to flourish. Best would be to allow dual-booting.
So, pretty much the Linux-mode of past, but without the artificial limitations. Is Sony likely to let us have our Linux-mode back? Nope. But Sony isn't in the business of selling homebrew platforms, they're in the business of selling media-capable gaming consoles, so I don't blame them.
Would I very much like to run homebrew and be able to play flac on it? Yes, definitely. But is that why I bought my PS3? No. I bought my PS3 to play games and watch blu-ray with. I can still do that. I know that some people bought their PS3's to run Linux on, and I really, really feel sorry that Sony felt that it was necessary to remove that capability.
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 21, 2011 23:30 UTC (Fri) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
Couple of parochial observations here ...
In the UK, if a Judge thought that Sony were pulling the "sue and bankrupt a smaller company" stunt, the smaller company would be invited to tot up EVERY SINGLE PENNY they'd spent on the law suit, and the Judge would present the bill in its entirety to Sony. And Sony would be wise not to refuse ... (even if the Judge accidentally, or more likely deliberately, didn't bother to audit it properly :-)
The other thing is, just because YOU bought your playstation to run games, doesn't mean everyone else did. I'm typing this on an Athlon X III, a nice powerful *general* purpose computer. The PS3 is a nice, powerful, *super* computer - a term of art meaning it has highly optimised parallel processing capability. Yep, running a general, run of the mill, general computer program my Athlon will knock the spots off the PS3's Power core. But give the PS3 a vector-based problem, and my Athlon wouldn't stand a hope. There's plenty of people (the USAF, for example) who bought a whole bunch of PS3s for precisely that reason.
Cheers,
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 22, 2011 11:38 UTC (Sat) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link]
Yes, and the USAF (and anyone else) could happily *continue* to run their super-computer stuff on their PS3:s (assuming they were willing to renege on the ability to use PSN).
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 22, 2011 17:17 UTC (Sat) by jthill (guest, #56558) [Link] So, Sony's going to take a major feature from you, but they're going to let you choose which feature they steal.
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 22, 2011 18:27 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
and as long as they never need to have a unit repaired. If you send a unit to Sony for service, they don't give you any choice and upgrade the firmware to the version that won't allow you to use 'other OS'
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 22, 2011 0:09 UTC (Sat) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link]
Small publishers are just as much hurt by illegal software copying as large. They are just as upset that you can copy PS3 games.
As much as I support peoples right to modify their own hardware I think these PS3 hacks are only out to destroy Sony's and PS3 game publishers' buisiness models. We had complete access to PS3 for 3.5 years and no interesting software was ever released. Some people made some patches for mplayer and an X scaling engine, but that was it. So why should things change now?
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 22, 2011 0:12 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
but what is there about this that has anything to do with copying existing software?
this is about being able to sign whatever software you have and the PS3 considering it 'blessed by Sony' and therefor running it.
if you are copying software, you copy the existing signature as well, this wouldn't make any difference to you.
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 22, 2011 0:16 UTC (Sat) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link]
The previous poster claimed the cracking of the signing keys somehow will lead to more small (game) publishers on the PS3. I disagree and think they will be just as hurt by illegal software copying as the larger publishers.
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 22, 2011 0:18 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
I'm not saying that there will be more small game publishers, but what does the ability to publish a game to the PS3 without Sony blessing it have to do with illegal software copying?
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 22, 2011 10:24 UTC (Sat) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link]
If you publish a game you most probably want to sell it. From all my experience in the world, if people can play the game for free by copying it illegally, we are much less inclined to buy it for the price the publisher wants.
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 22, 2011 18:25 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
without conceding your point about people playing for free, what does that have to do with this case?
what Hotz did has nothing to do with copying games. what he found is a way to sign software so that the PS3 will play it.
if you are copying an existing game, it's already signed and you copy the signature along with the game. what Hotz made possible has nothing to do with copying the game.
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 22, 2011 21:04 UTC (Sat) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link]
As far as I know, it certainly was not possible to copy games on the PS3 before these hacks. Since you claim that it was possible, could you give an example? I have not heard anything about it.
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 23, 2011 20:35 UTC (Sun) by Aissen (subscriber, #59976) [Link]
It was possible with this little thingy called PSJailbreak, and its open source implementations called PSGroove and PSFreedom.
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 23, 2011 20:48 UTC (Sun) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link]
You could run whatever software you wanted with those hacks as well.
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 22, 2011 0:30 UTC (Sat) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]
We never had complete access to the PS3: OtherOS was not allowed to use the GPU which is much of the power of the console, and it could not use one of the SPU either.
Furthermore, a number of interesting number-crushing software were released for the PS/3, for example to find collision in MD5.
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 22, 2011 3:34 UTC (Sat) by jthill (guest, #56558) [Link] no interesting software was ever released Perhaps the software that the Linux access enabled is uninteresting only because you don't know about it. Hunt up "BOINC". Gamers would leave their PS3's crunching on protein folding and whatnot. The PS3's horsepower for scientific problems is staggering: the horsepower contributed by PS3's simply dwarfed that from any other source, with far fewer numbers. It's all gone now. Just one of those projects, "folding@home" a few years ago, had this to say: Just six months after we launched the program, nearly 600,000 PS3 users have registered. Second, we made several improvements to the application (v 1.2) that helped make the computations more accurate and enabled us to squeeze even more work out of each and every PS3 console -- we went from 450 teraflops to 800 teraflops. These factors, combined with the contribution from all the other platforms, helped us cross the barrier, which happened sometime over the weekend.It's important to understand that they were talking about having just passed the petaflop mark. That's 1,000 teraflops. 800 of those were from gamers donating their PS3 cycles. It's all gone, now, the PS3 doesn't even show on the BOINC platform stats. What Sony did hurt a lot of people. Protein folding research saves lives. Got a kid?
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 22, 2011 4:04 UTC (Sat) by jthill (guest, #56558) [Link] Sorry to follow my own, but it occurred to me you might not have anything to indicate the real magnitude of their contribution. In 2007, the time of that quote, 800 teraflops would have ranked the combined PS3's as far and away the fastest supercomputer on the planet. Even today, 800 TF would rank that effort at #12.
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 22, 2011 10:26 UTC (Sat) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link]
folding@home is a sony licensed app that can be run from the XMB/GameOS. Today it is called "Life with playstation" (I think) and is still happily folding proteins for those who choose to run it.
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 22, 2011 11:37 UTC (Sat) by jthill (guest, #56558) [Link] Then I apologize for my tone, which certainly wasn't appropriate for the true state of affairs. I had always assumed from the @home suffix that folding@home used the same framework as seti@home and several others. folding@home not being one of them certainly explains the absence of PS3 contributions on their stats; and the rather acerbic comments about sony's action on the boinc boards apply only to their own projects.
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 22, 2011 5:04 UTC (Sat) by AndreE (subscriber, #60148) [Link]
We never had "complete access".
For example, access to the graphics core was extremely limited under "OtherOS" making it pretty much useless for say, media centre applications.
And your contention that no one did anything "interesting" is hard to reconcile. Plenty of people were doing things interesting and useful for themselves using the OtherOS. Just because YOU didn't find anything interesting doesn't mean others didn't find value
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 22, 2011 10:30 UTC (Sat) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link]
People never ported code to the spus wich made the PS3 running Linux useless for media center apps. There were patches for mplayer and Xorg (scalers and such) that made it possible to run fullscreen 1080p video, but they were never merged into the main tree (what I know of).
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 22, 2011 14:42 UTC (Sat) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]
Again, Linux was not allowed to use the GPU. Instead people had to reimplement basic GPU functionality as SPU tasks (what the 'accelerated' PS3 X driver do), but SPU are not as powerful as the GPU for graphic tasks, so that ruins the platform for media center applications.
Beside, a lot of code has been ported to the SPU, by IBM in particular.
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 22, 2011 21:08 UTC (Sat) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link]
The SPUs in the PS3 are certainly powerful enough to power any type of media center application and I have give examples of that in previous post. What was lacking was interest into writing media center code for the spus.
And how would you decode 1080p video on the PS3 without using the SPUS? Would you write RSX shader code?
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 20, 2011 23:59 UTC (Thu) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]
Sounds a bit like an EULA, we do the same with software.
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 21, 2011 9:15 UTC (Fri) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
Disclaimer: IANAL, yada, yada, yada...
In the US at least, it seems that when someone buys a piece of stuff, that makes you absolute owner of that stuff, to the point that you can make whatever you want with it. The seller or original manufacturer has no right what so ever of imposing you any additional restrictions.
Software, on the other hand, is not sold but licensed. The terms of the license have to be agreed by both parties, and can (in principle) be whatever provided that they stay within the law.
With all that in mind, Sony can only argue that the researchers broke the law somehow (and the fact that they used a Playstation 3 is only incidental) and/or that they broke the terms of use of some software or services license. That may have happened indeed, because the console is not only hardware, but also firmware (in ROM/flash) and software (in discs), that may come with an EULA.
EFF: Sony v. Hotz: Sony Sends A Dangerous Message to Researchers -- and Its Customers Posted Jan 22, 2011 12:23 UTC (Sat) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]
On other "news", Sony is not the only one that does not like it when people tinker with the products, here is an Apple example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentalobular_screw
Big companies are usually 'evil', I think publicly trading is the problem, they only think of the short term.
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