Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

  >It is in Sony's interest's to keep pirated content off of their devices.

This isn't about piracy. This is about control and ego.

Look at the DS. Hell, look at the GBA.

Flashcards for every single Nintendo portable system ever released are being commercially sold, piracy is as easy as downloading a rom and sticking it on an SD card.. yet they outsell Sony like crazy on hardware and software. Could it be that, like the MPAA, instead of concentrating on their content, they prefer to childishly blame their flagging sales on a third party?

SCE continues to validate my decision to boycott them made back after the Geohot fiasco. If I ever end up with a Vita, it will be used, and running unofficial software. I refuse to give a single penny to this cavalcade of assholes.

And I cheer the hackers every single time. For two reasons, because it opens up closed hardware (which is always a Good Thing), and because some SCE exec somewhere just got a little bit more annoyed.

The thing that bothers me the most is that Sonys decisions often reflect what's good for them and not what's good for their customers. All piracy aside, custom firmware made the original PSP a much better device for the user in general. You probably haven't followed this so here are some examples. The biggest advantage was you could put all your games on the memorystick instead of using the little CD-ROM drive, which meant a) loading times where much faster, because you're reading of flash b) battery life was better, since no spinning optical drive is running and c) you didn't have to carry anything besides the device!

Another funny thing, the PSP shipped with a Sony-made Playstation 1 emulator on it, which meant you theoretically could play the whole PS1 library on this thing. Now instead of letting people use it, it just sat there inaccesible. People where actually quite surprised to find it there after the PSP was hacked, and finally allowed everyone to use it.

Then there where cool little tweaks & tools - there was a really cool savegame system, which allowed you to save at any time during a game by taking memory snapshots, which is very useful on a portable system. And another cool tool let you transfer files from your PC wirelessly over your WiFi.

Well the point is, it really unleashed the device and made it much more capable then in its locked down state, in effect providing greater value for the customer. You'd think that after a while Sony would get some insight and reconsider their decisions, instead they lock down even more and start suing people!! What the hell, I think a lot of companies, who blame their problems on piracy and whatnot are slowly scaring of their customers away without even noticing, which then of course gets blamed on piracy again...

If this were really about piracy (and assuming that they're vaguely clueful, which I realize is a hypothesis Sony is doing their very best to falsify), they'd just bring back OtherOS and call it a day.

It's no coincidence that the PS3 lost its long-held distinction as the only platform without a piracy problem mere moments after they made cracking the DRM system a prerequisite for doing homebrew tinkering.

The PS3 didn't have a piracy problem for a long time because of Blu-Rays. For a couple of years after the initial hardware release, BR burners were prohibitively expensive, and the bandwidth required to download a single disc in a reasonable amount of time was also expensive.

There were several high profile hacks on the PS3 that allowed pirated games for a while, even before they removed the OtherOS feature(IIRC, one was a rather ingenious hack that involved tricking the USB handler in order to do a code injection).

The real reason that the PS3 has such a big problem now is because, as we found out with the GeoHotz stuff, Sony didn't actually use any real security for the PS3.

MS and Nintendo took hardware security very seriously. MS has basically made the 360 unhackable without a mod chip at this point through a lot of creative Hypervisor tricks. Nintendo had a similar level of security as Sony(lots of OS holes that have been patched up over the years), but they also use a non-standard disc encoding format, which makes traditional "download the ISO and burn it on a DVD" piracy a lot more difficult because very few DVD drives can actually read the discs to rip them.

So you don't agree with this decision by Sony? Basically you would be happy if Sony were complicit in allowing vulnerabilities to exist and be exploited on their platform.

>> because it opens up closed hardware (which is always a Good Thing)

If you want open hardware buy something that supports it. Don't punish a commercial company that just wants to do their own thing.

> If you want open hardware buy something that supports it. Don't punish a commercial company that just wants to do their own thing.

All hardware is open, given enough work. The original creators' intentions have nothing to do with this; it's for the owner to decide.

  >So you don't agree with this decision by Sony?

The decision less so as much as the handling of it. Sony is a company that apparently has no concept of the word "tact". Any entertainment company out there would patch holes as they're found. Sony does it, Nintendo does it, Microsoft does it.

Sony acting like complete screeching dicks every time, is the difference. The Geohot thing was the final straw for me.

  >Basically you would be happy if Sony were complicit in allowing vulnerabilities to exist and be exploited on their platform.

A "vulnerability" on a game platform is a sight different than a vulnerability on anything else. So in this instance, yes. I'd wish they'd let it alone. What are the implications? People who are going to pirate and break the DRM anyways continue to break the DRM, Sony focuses their efforts on improving their content and software, and nobody else (i.e. the average consumer) is the wiser? Seems fine to me.

  >If you want open hardware buy something that supports it.

No. I will do what I wish with any hardware I purchase. Until such time as Sony grows up a little bit, they remain on my "do not buy from, ever, no way" list.

Homebrewing on the Wii is widely known and Nintendo has taken few measures (none as aggressive as Sony) against it.

Sony's vicious policies towards consumers and hackers are what causes people to attack them, and nobody is suggesting that they be complicit towards vulnerabilities.

Piracy of Nintendo handheld games has not been without consequences. It led them to implement draconian anti-piracy methods, such as stating they will remotely brick your system if they want to. [1]

[1] http://www.defectivebydesign.org/nintendo

Nintendo has never done any such thing. I'll write off such shenanigans as scare tactics until such time as an actual action takes place.

In fact, they go out of their way to tell you, when updating, if you have modified your console that the update may break it, and provide a way to skip the update.

I haven't heard a case of them using the facility, but the very fact it exists and that they specifically highlight it shows how piracy has become such an issue for them. Maybe the media attention and 'brick campaign' made them think twice about it.

> Flashcards for every single Nintendo portable system ever released are being commercially sold,

Not for Nintendo 3DS.

You mean Not Yet ^_^

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