Sony/Anonymous Nonsense & the PSN Outage ... also GeoHotz

[ForceStealer]

Depending on who you are, Anonymous is a righteous freedom fighter or an online terrorist group. Either way, Sony is in the organization's sights for its civil suits against PS3 hackers, and it would appear that the gathering of personal info and takedown of PSN is only a taster.

"So far, all Sony has seen from us is poking and prodding," claimed the group. "A simple salute to let them know we’re coming. Make no mistake, what you saw today and thought to be frustration is merely preparation for what’s to come. We said, expect us. Counting us out would be a mistake."

Anonymous' attacks on the PlayStation Network have earned backlash from gamers, something that the group acknowledges: "The consumers in this are as one might call, collateral damage. We are very cognisant of the fact that we are not making friends nor allies among the average consumer with our attack. This is unfortunate as a concern should always be, will the very people we seek to support not see what it is we are trying to achieve."

"In this case, many don’t. There has been a lot of hate spread throughout the internet and over forums that we are being reckless and simply punishing consumers more than Sony. To the consumers I would say: before you judge us, take the time to understand us."

Source

I think they're annoying. Yes, it wasn't cool for Sony to remove Linux capability and then try to go after the guys that hacked it to restore it. But it doesn't change the fact that they are obviously a bunch of self-important punks pretending video games are some holy crusade by paraphrasing V for Vendetta.
Not to mention whatever crap they do is just gonna make things worse for everyone else. Knocking down PSN at the best, and at worst, stealing personal information


What do you think? Again, I'm not defending what Sony did, but these guys might have actually had a case by arguing that they merely restored functionality they paid for. Now they've ruined that possibility and are just gonna make it worse for everyone.
Also, "Anonymous" is a lame ass name.

 

[Alessa Gillespie]

Sometimes Anonymous does stuff that's cool but most of the time it's a bunch of whiny newfags using the Anonymous name to do retarded shit that they think is helping the populace.

and that's all i have to say on the matter.

 

[Alex]

Petty damn sure that Anonymous has practically nothing to do with video games and more about attacking major companies stance on copyright law. Given that it isn't really an organization makes trying to work out any coherent ideology for them kind of a pointless exercise

Have to disagree with you about the name too. Anonymous is a fitting title because it accurately represents the fact that nearly every single person on the internet is Anon. Unless you forum handle happens to be your real name of course, then you are in fact Anonymous. Only a fraction of people online are the actual internet activists that people associate with the group.

As for whether they will actually make things better or worse in the long term? Eh, who can say? I'm reserving judgement on that one.

 

[Max Payne]

Yes, it wasn't cool for Sony to remove Linux capability and then try to go after the guys that hacked it to restore it.

Geohothacking the console had fuck all to do with restoring other OS, and the only thing his actions have caused is rampant cheating and piracy.

 

[X-SOLDIER]

This is a quote from a comment on Joystiq's original article, that essentially summarizes my feelings towards the origin of the whole mess.

Geohotz problem was he publicized an encryption key, and then bragged out it. That's basically all it took to enable piracy, and he knew that walking into it.

It's like publicizing a banks RSA key and then saying you didn't intend for people to use it to commit fraud.

He's fully at fault here. I see no reason to spare him from the legal ramifications of what he did. If all he wanted was custom firmware, he shoudl have done that, instead, he handed the pirates the keys to the kingdom then tried to act surprised when they used it for piracy.

But the biggest thing that they're doing is pissing off people. Son'y not really suffering from this, but their customer base is. The customers aren't even angry at Sony either. All it's doing is making Anon look just a bunch of fucking idiots, and burying ANY chance that Geohotz once had of not getting absolutely legally destroyed for what he did. To exacerbate this, the bit from Ars Technica reported that people are being encouraged to go protest at Retail locations. To quote Joystiq's article, Nothing quite says "stick it to the man" like complaining to retail employees.

Plus:

Maybe if you don't want YOUTUBE to hand over your personal information, you should bring it up with THEM, rather than getting pissed that Sony's just looking for anything that'll let them lock down the issue that's hurting them. It's not like Sony FORCED them to do it, they ASKED.



For anyone with issues, apparently the problems are resulting in the following connection errors: 80710092, 80710D36 and 8071053D. I got the first one last night when attempting to sign in to PSN, but managed to get online again directly afterwards.



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[Alessa Gillespie]

Petty damn sure that Anonymous has practically nothing to do with video games and more about attacking major companies stance on copyright law. Given that it isn't really an organization makes trying to work out any coherent ideology for them kind of a pointless exercise

Have to disagree with you about the name too. Anonymous is a fitting title because it accurately represents the fact that nearly every single person on the internet is Anon. Unless you forum handle happens to be your real name of course, then you are in fact Anonymous. Only a fraction of people online are the actual internet activists that people associate with the group.

As for whether they will actually make things better or worse in the long term? Eh, who can say? I'm reserving judgement on that one.

first off, no, anonymous has been credited with attacking scientology which is a religion for crazy people with money, same with westboro baptist church

so they just attack whatever the fuck they feel like on the interbutt.

moreover, it's not disrupting sony's business in the least, its just bothering people who have used psn and shit

so either way, anon is going about this like a derpbeast

 

[X-SOLDIER]

Upon re-reading the image, I notied the following phrase,

"Should you be sued for an agreement you didn't even made?"





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[Alex]

first off, no, anonymous has been credited with attacking scientology which is a religion for crazy people with money, same with westboro baptist church
t

First off, dude, chill out, I forgot.

 

[Alessa Gillespie]

First off, dude, chill out, I forgot.

NO I CANNOT CHILL

I AM IN FACT, THE OPPOSITE OF CHILL

I AM LLIHC

THIS IS HOW UNCHILL I AM WIT DIS

 

[Alex]

ur a chilli peppa

 

[Alessa Gillespie]

ur a chilli peppa

 

[Hisako]

BREAKING NEWS: Anonymous are a bunch of warmongering twats

 

[X-SOLDIER]

http://www.joystiq.com/2011/04/07/anonymous-suspends-psn-attack/


Looks like it's stopped for now.


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[ForceStealer]

"Anonymous is not attacking the PSN at this time until a method is found that will not severely impact Sony customers."

Did they not anticipate Sony customers being impacted by attacking PSN? What morons.

 

[Cthulhu]

"So far, all Sony has seen from us is poking and prodding," claimed the group. "A simple salute to let them know we’re coming. Make no mistake, what you saw today and thought to be frustration is merely preparation for what’s to come. We said, expect us. Counting us out would be a mistake."

Am I weird for picturing a guy hiding himself behind a scrarf or balaclava saying that in Arab holding an AK and backed with his buddies holding this monologue?

 

[Tetsujin]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...fter-sony-makes-it-personal-very-personal.ars

 

[X-SOLDIER]

*sigh*

Yeah, personally harassing corporate figureheads, because their company's HR Department is doing its job is a GREAT idea. The biggest thing is that I don't think that this is the dumbest / most juvenile thing that will come out of this.


I saw someone on my Facebook posting positively about Anon's actions for taking down Sony's website for a little bit, and totally tore them apart for it, and let them know what they were supporting. I really dislike people blindly approving of online hacker-type actions, just because they've got a hardon for Linux, and don't actually investigate the issues they're supporting, which I'd assume would be the majority of people who see this action in a positive light.


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[ForceStealer]

Yeah that's really upgrading them from nuisance to cunts (and criminal).

 

[X-SOLDIER]

It should be over now.


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[Alex]

It should be over now.


X

Yeah because Anon has a great track record of just letting things go

This definitely isn't the last we'll see of this.

 

[Max Payne]

Also, that's a very piss poor ruling.

No more sony products for the badly named basement nerd.

 

[Ⓐaron]

Anonymous's actions are ridiculous and pretty much indefensible, but if I'm understanding what's happened correctly, then so are Sony's. If I'm not misinterpreting this they've basically made it impossible for homebrew game developers who don't have distribution deals with major retailers to distribute their products to customers, and it appears that they're doing away with region-free content as well. Am I misunderstanding what's happened here? This is just what I've gathered from various summaries on the tubes, and it's possible things have changed since those summaries were written up.

 

[Max Payne]

Anonymous's actions are ridiculous and pretty much indefensible, but if I'm understanding what's happened correctly, then so are Sony's. If I'm not misinterpreting this they've basically made it impossible for homebrew game developers who don't have distribution deals with major retailers to distribute their products to customers, and it appears that they're doing away with region-free content as well. Am I misunderstanding what's happened here? This is just what I've gathered from various summaries on the tubes, and it's possible things have changed since those summaries were written up.

I don't recall any of this.

 

[Ⓐaron]

From what I had been led to understand, when they shut down PSN they made it apparent that they were going to be requiring content to be approved by specific distributor-marketers before they would allow it to be distributed. Which would basically mean that people who didn't have deals with these marketers wouldn't be able to distribute their games via PSN. Perhaps they decided not to go through with this, or perhaps I was just grossly misinformed. I wasn't sure whether my understanding of the situation was correct, hence why I asked. I wouldn't be surprised if it were true, honestly, since Sony got caught putting tracking malware on CDs as an attempted anti-piracy measure a few years ago. Which just makes me glad I don't buy CDs from major labels anymore.

 

[Max Payne]

The last time PSN went down was because of their failed attempts at combatting cheating caused by all of this, wasn't it?