Sony CEO: We Were Hacked By Freetards Who Just Want Everything Free

from the freedomtards,-perhaps dept

Ah, delusion in the CEO suite. Sony CEO Howard Stringer has been struggling to deal with the fact that pretty much everyone* in the tech world now hates his company. He famously called the month or so of downtime for the PlayStation Network, due to Sony's own failure to properly secure its servers, "a hiccup." He's also continued Sony's standard practice of going to war against makers, hackers and innovators, by trying to close off everything and then suing anyone who dares to try to do more with the products they thought they'd bought.

Stringer, at a recent Sony shareholder meeting, had to deal with critics concerning the PSN downtime, and his response was not to take any of the blame, or to admit that Sony might have been at fault, but rather to say that hackers pick on the company because it likes to "protect" its intellectual property:

"We believe that we first became the subject of attack because we tried to protect our IP (intellectual property), our content, in this case videogames," Stringer told shareholders at Tuesday's meeting in response to a question about the background to the incident.

Of course, that's an interesting version of revisionist history. There are all sorts of theories as to why Sony got hacked, with Occam and his trusty Razor suggesting the simplest answer: because Sony had crazy weak security that would allow malicious hackers to make off with useful information with which they could profit. But even if we grant Stringer's unsupported assertion was true, what set many people off (though, not necessarily these hackers) was the fact that Sony sued George Hotz for doing nothing more than helping to re-enable a feature that Sony had marketed as part of the PS3... and then had retroactively disabled. That's not "protecting Sony's IP." That's breaking a product and false advertising... and then suing people for trying to help make your products more valuable.

But Stringer apparently wasn't done there. You see, the real problem is just those damn freetards:

“These are our corporate assets,” Stringer told the meeting, “..and there are those that don’t want us to protect them, they want everything to be free.”

Seriously, Howard? This has absolutely nothing to do with people wanting stuff for free. People are pissed because you're suing people who are trying to improve your products -- the ones they actually paid for (yes, with real money). If anything, they want "free" as in speech, not free as in beer. They're looking for the freedom to tinker and to expand and to build.

And you're giving them the opposite.

And let's can the crap in which you pretend that Sony has to "protect" its intellectual property in this manner. It doesn't. You can treat customers right, even without being overprotective. Why, just look at Samsung, one of your biggest competitors. When it came out with a new device, rather than freaking out about people jailbreaking it, it sent free devices to some of the top modders, and asked them to mod and hack them faster...

That's called treating your community right, not treating them as criminals. It's not because people want everything to be free. People are quite often happy to pay for something of scarce value to them. Where they get upset is when you make that product less valuable by locking it down in anti-consumer ways.

So, no, you weren't hacked by freetards. You were hacked because you had dreadful security, and everyone's pissed not because they want stuff for free, but because you treat them like crap.

* Yes, slight exaggeration. But no more than calling over a month downtime on a popular gaming platform a "hiccup."

Filed Under: free, hack, hiccup, howard stringer, intellectual property, psn
Companies: sony

An Open Letter To Sony CEO Howard Stringer

from the i'm-surprised-he-didn't-just-tell-us-to-go-play-outside dept

Howard -

While we all can appreciate the difficulties you've been through in the last month, what with your online cash cow being tipped by thousands of overbright fratboys, the simple fact is your responses have been, well, completely terrible.

First off, nothing heals fresh wounds like dismissive handwaving. When you have millions of customers and hundreds of developers locked out of their online connection for over a month, the use of the word "hiccup" isn't exactly going to smooth things over. A term like that is usually deployed to indicate minor speedbumps, like 12 hours of downtime for "unscheduled maintenance" or informing the end users that their Diner's Club cards are no longer being honored.

Following it up with defensive comments about your response time (faster that others!) and claiming the attack was unprecedented (no one has ever been hacked like this before!) isn't really endearing you to the Home crowd. (Yes, that pun was intentional. And terrible.) This sort of irritated tone lacks the contriteness that those of us who have supported Sony for far too long would like to see. I suppose we're supposed to feel grateful for your swift turnaround time, but if you're just going to measure your company versus the lower end of the spectrum, then you're wasting everyone's time. 

I see Sony is offering users/hackees some consolation prizes to help smooth over the month-long lockout + wholesale compromise of their personal information. I'm sure I speak for others when I view these items and wholeheartedly applaud them as being "better than nothing." While a few new games would be nice, I'm not sure I've got the time or the hard drive space to fill with games I never intended to purchase.

(Let me explain: I bought my PS3 back in the good old days when 40GB was considered to be "plenty." After all, it was just a "game machine" and still relied on disc-based delivery for content. I agreed with these unspoken sentiments right up until I purchased Dragon Age: Awakening: All of Everything Ever Bonus Game of the Year Edition. I'd heard nothing but good things about the game and shoved it in the disc-hole anticipating some excellent awakened dragon killing. I spent the next 2+ hours watching all of everything ever download and install, not including some sort of "update" that needed to be applied before I could even get to the exciting downloading/installing screens.)

Long story short, I have nowhere to put these new games that I don't really want nor the desire to uninstall anything currently on the drive. Especially Dragon Age: Awakening: AoEEBGotYE, not only would I hate to have to reinstall it, but I have my doubts as to whether I would even be able to re-download my bonus online content, leaving me with a $30 game that I paid $50 for. So there's that.

And as to the free month of Playstation Plus service... is that going to be 30 days continuous or will it just count down incrementally every time you manage to keep your network running for more than a few hours in a row? Clarification is needed because these are two very different things. All that other whatever-it-is, you can keep.

100+ items for my Home? This would be shit-hot news if I was still some sort of materially obsessed tween, but I could scarcely be bothered to dick around with my avatar for more than 15 minutes (shortly after signup?) and I haven't been back since. (In my mind's eye, I see him pacing the space between the immaculately empty living room to the outer edge of the balcony several hundred times, trying to talk himself into jumping.)

The long and short of all this is this (and trust me, it gets longer from this point): These shiny objects and temporary gifts aren't going to do much to win back the trust, and more importantly, the $$$ of your swiftly dwindling fanbase. Much like many of your pissed off customers, I go back a long way with the Playstation.

I started out with the PSone way back in the day when Driver was the killer app that made the sale. (Way, way back, actually. There was no "one" on the console at that point.) You had other exclusives as well, like the Final Fantasy series, of which VIII was used by my wife (at that point, just my girlfriend) to reach out and awaken my inner dork (along with Legend of Dragoon), and many, many other games followed. (Jade Cocoon, Monster Rancher, various Legends of various Things, Driver 2: The Walker... [but not Final Fantasy VII, much to Dark Helmet's dismay, and although he has encouraged me to give it a try, every nostalgic screenshot cuts me right across the eyes with its dangerously jagged polygons.])

I stayed with Sony for the PS2 (and its attendant killer app, GTA III), ignoring the mockery of X-Box fanboys, who derided our low-fi "memory cards" and made rude gestures with their enormous hands. I made the most of our ("our" -- remember how close we used to be?) exclusive titles and repurchased the console no less than five times. (Mainly thanks to the first few generations' alignment issues, which meant that shortly after the warranty expired the console would develop disc reading problems, grinding and blundering away like Grandpa with a malt liquour buzz and his glasses missing. Also, small children may have been involved.)

I even stayed true to the lineage and purchased a PS3 once the arrival of GTA IV made resistance impossible. (I was able to resist the PSP, however. Something about those newly-fashioned UMDs reminded me of the blink-and-you'll-miss-it heyday of the Minidisc.) I sucked it up and took the hit at the cash register despite the fact that Sony's competitors had much friendlier price points. I swallowed hard as other consoles signed exclusive title after exclusive title. I defended its honor using the only weapon I had: the Blu-Ray player. And I laughed vindictively as the HD DVD fell by the wayside. I sat at home and admired my ungainly Blu-Ray player while waiting for worthwhile titles to come out and slowly got used to the fact that if something was PS3-only, it meant that no one else really wanted it.

I'm just one of millions, Howard. You had us all for so long, but between the wholesale harvesting of our data and the forced removal of functionality, I'd be bracing myself for some very low sales numbers when the next generation of consoles roll out. The shiny stuff and free digital trinkets are ok, but a little bit of humility would go a long way.

Sincerely,

Tim Cushing

Filed Under: howard stringer, playstation
Companies: sony

Sony CEO Howard Stringer: Month-long Hackathon Merely A 'Hiccup'

from the sony-shouldn't-be-left-in-charge-of-your-metaphors-much-less-your-personal-i dept

As we've all seen over the last thirty days or so, Sony has handled their month-long data breach/pwnage with all the grace and humility that one expects from an out-of-touch megacorporation. Between dismissing the breach as "harmless" and fingering the ever-popular "Anonymous" for all the trouble, Sony has managed to stay at least one step behind their attackers the whole way. To add insult to injurious class action lawsuit, it emerged from the 30-day hackout bruised, bleeding and completely unable to go back online in its own country.

CEO Howard Stringer apparently has come to the conclusion that there's still plenty of room for more foot in Sony's mouth, dismissing the longest outage by any console maker as merely a "hiccup in the road to a network future."

Now, I don't want to presume to speak for everybody, but generally when I have the hiccups (inside or outside of the road), it tends to leave the nearest 77 million people unaffected. Sure, I may get some random advice (drink a glass of water/hold your breath/salt your passwords), but otherwise life goes on and I'm the only one bothered by it. Plus, these hiccup attacks never run more than 10-12 days at the most and only rarely do I lay the blame at the feet of unrelated hacking entities.

Thank you, Howard, for clearing that up. I'll be sure to dismiss any unknown charges to my credit cards as mere "hiccups in the road to financial instability" and when my linked email account becomes a spam-spewing zombie, I'll just hold my breath until it all goes away.

Filed Under: hack, hiccup, howard stringer, psn
Companies: sony

Sony Says It Should Have Been More Open... But It Said That In 2005 Too

from the actions,-not-words... dept

There's a bunch of buzz around a recent interview with Sony's CEO Howard Stringer, where he admits that Sony should have gone with an "open" music solution from early on, and if it had done so, how it could have "beaten Apple." Sure, those sorts of quotes sound great... but it's action that matters.

Because... it was nearly four and a half years ago when we wrote about top Sony exec Ken Kutaragi saying almost the exact same thing. He talked about how Sony made a huge mistake focusing on proprietary formats and DRM and how the company was going to change and focus on more open and free solutions rather than limited DRM-encumbered solutions.

And what happened?

Not much. Sony kept DRM with things like ATRAC for three more years and continued to use DRM in a variety of different settings, including the very famous case of Sony subsidiary Sony BMG putting rootkit DRM on music CDs (which occurred months after Kutaragi's original point that Sony needed to move away from DRM).

So... consider us skeptical that Stringer's comments are meaningful. We've heard it before. If the company really is embracing a more open solution, it's time to show people, not just speak about it.

Filed Under: drm, howard stringer, ken kutaragi
Companies: sony