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Sony Sends DMCA Takedown Notice To GitHub
Plombo writes "Sony's war against PS3 hacking continues. On January 27, Sony Computer Entertainment America sent a DMCA takedown notice to GitHub demanding the removal of 6 repositories under the 'circumvention device' clause of the DMCA. All of the repositories in question were related to jailbreaking or homebrew development for the PS3."
I wonder if all exploits could fall under the DCMA.
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
They should file a counter-notice, citing the interoperability clauses :)
Perhaps the real news should be how quickly github caved and removed all of the projects in question.
repositories in the US may work, but It'll just get some dudes to host them from a country with more loose ip laws
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
Screw their "online assets." The link to the contact list of offices for the law firm responsible is right here. Sony's corporate contact numbers are here. I suggest that each of their offices should receive a good few calls Monday, letting them know what we think about free speech and about restraining it.
It takes a lot fewer calls to pull off a denial of service than it takes packets.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
All that kind of radical reaction will do is put Sony in a better light. One hacker apparently already tried a blatant 'stop or else' blackmail threat. All that does it give Sony ammo saying 'hey this lot is a bunch of anarchists and criminals'.
arent they. the real hacker underground is intertwined with open source. targeting the places where these crowds regular, is not something wise.
but morons which are dubbed as lawyers in some countries naturally would have no idea about that. they got too much used to bullying defenseless citizens through law.
i wonder what will they do to sony's online assets.
Nothing. Stop dramatizing.
Agreed, more fundamental issues (things like freedom and human rights) were the trigger for what happened in Tunisia and Egypt.
Now that i think of it, while freedom and human rights and all that jazz were central to the unrest in the arab world, the thing that got the Middle-class Muhammeds off his behind and into the streets was the economic situation. Runaway inflation and the price rise probably acted as the one issue hot enough to move the usually reluctant masses to action.
Goes to show that you can get away with pretty much anything, as long as you can keep people busy working hard just to make ends met. You let the situation get out of hand enough so that now matter how hard he/she works, the ends just aint(sic) going to be met, that's when people give up on the rat race, and suddenly have time to think about protests, placards and maybe even the guillotine.
Reminds me of a humorous headline i read last week :- For the first time in history, the prices of necessity, comfort, and luxury are all the same.(Onions - Rs 65/Kg, Petrol - Rs 65/Liter, Beer Rs. 65/Glass).
RkR
If you google "sony geohot $1" http://www.google.ca/search?q=sony+geohot+%241 you will get some info along the lines that Sony tried to paypal George Hotz $1 dollar ("Attached hereto as Exhibit DD is true and correct copy of a redacted PayPal receipt from George Hotz, using an account registered to..." from http://psx-scene.com/forums/attachments/f6/23998d1294899764-scea-vs-geohot-day-2-more-files-day-3-now-over-more-files-added-04-pdf ). You can imagine why Sony did this ...
It's already been done for the original repositories; they've been uploaded to Gitorious, which is hosted outside of the US. A remaining problem, though, is that all forks of the repositories were also taken down. Those weren't uploaded to Gitorious, and there were too many of them to count.
Hay Sony. I think I'm gonna circumvent you now. Seriously regretting buying that PS3.
Back in the day, Sony was a pretty cool company. They made affordable audio equipment with decent performance for the price; through high school and college, my turntable (vinyl LPs... remember them?) was a Sony. I also remember my first Sony Walkman cassette portable (early 1980s) and CD DiscMan with great fondness; Sony pretty much single-handedly invented the portable audio industry. My first camcorder was a Sony too, and I enjoyed the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 immensely.
Somewhere along the line, they lost their way. Maybe it had something to do with their transformation into a combination of consumer electronics giant and content provider; I'm not sure. But the CD rootkit fiasco was an indication of where they were heading. My opinion of them also took a nosedive when my second Sony camcorder (purchased around 6 years ago) turned out to be a piece of crap.
These days, they are solidly on my "avoid" list. I used to consider a Sony nameplate to be a badge of quality; now it is more of a warning label.
It's not. Sony or their attorneys perjured themselves. Either that or their wilfully ignorant. I'm a bit fuzzy where the line is. In order to file the take down notice they have to certify that there is no legal use for the software. It's pretty clear that there are legal uses for the software so they're likely guilty of perjury and if the developers opt to round up funds and sue they'd likely win.
Sony like a lot of corporations files these sorts of notices without any real consideration for the legality and unfortunately because the corporation would be held responsible there's little to no accountability.
I'm not giving out any Sooper Seekrit information, just stuff that's on a public website. If it's illegal to "incite" people to protest things by speaking to the parties responsible, then it's even worse than I thought.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Sony entertainment had no problems a few years ago fubaring up my XP system by installing a rootkit after I inserted one of their music CD's. Seems they can care less about us, but don't reveal their precious encryption keys.
Between all that and their proprietary memory in digital cameras, I avoid ALL thinks Sony. They aren't worth the time. So sad a former leader of technology has descended so low.
all but GaiaManager can be found here:
http://gitorious.org/ps3free
there's also a story:
http://www.ps3-hacks.com/2011/01/29/dmcaed-ps3-git-repositories-cloned/
but the site is a bit... busy right now.
For the first time in 2011, let me offer you a hearty "Fuck You."
Gotta get that in every year, it seems--this year it either came early, or will come often.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
> But these are the numbers which matter to Sony.
No, I think the numbers which really mattered to Sony (not that they are going to figure this out) are:
OTOH, I rather doubt Sony will initially sell their next generation consoles with "OtherOS", while at the same time the high-performance computing community is more and more focused on GPGPU acceleration. So maybe they don't care that they're just giving themselves bad PR with the geek crowd while not really preventing anyone from obtaining tools to develop / run homebrew / run pirated games.
After all, the rootkit incident didn't cause a general focus on cracking the PS3. So perhaps this won't cause their next console to become a target from the very start --- or maybe yes, because it won't have OtherOS. Only time will tell.
Because they don't care about customers who don't buy games? And why should they? Why should you care about unprofitable customers?
Do you really think Github can afford a lengthy trial with mammoth Sony? Not in a million years. The legal team of Sony will bury Github's with so many documents they either have to give up or will lose.
Big corporations have big law departments. The only purpose of these law departments, which cost a lot of money each year, is to make life as easy as possible for the employer, Sony in this case. This means: they'll do everything they can to make the life of the opponent as miserable as possible: lawsuits, burying with massive amounts of documents etc. Github doesn't have a chance.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
When faced with the threat of continuing legal bills for asserting your rights, the pragmatic thing to do is comply. The Net is not the anonymous place we all thought it was. It seems America is not the land of the free unless you can afford to pay for it! Note to self: Make sure to have multiple legislatures for any controversial site I put up. E.G. service registered in country A, selling into country B and located in country C :-D.
Following Sony's rise and fall is rather interesting, I think.
:-) the Americans introduced the quality movement in Japan and in 1968, Kaoru Ishikawa outlined the tenets of TQC (Total Quality Control) management:
They started off by making tape recorders and became famous by producing small, transistorised radio receivers that were affordable but rather poor quality. I remember my first one that after a few months developed the most scratchy volume control (metal wiper on a carbon path -- I took it apart in the end).
After WWII (not, I'm not that old
* quality comes first, not short-term profits
* the customer comes first, not the producer
* customers are the next process with no organizational barriers
* decisions are based on facts and data
* management is participatory and respectful of all employees
* management is driven by cross-functional committees covering product planning, product design, production planning, purchasing, manufacturing, sales, and distribution
Akio Morita, the founder of Sony, was a proponent of this quality movement and worked hard to make Sony products fairly affordable and good quality, which was the hallmark of their products for many years.
After Morita's brain hemorrhage in 1993, he was unable to lead the company and stepped down as chairman in 1994, at the height of the company's glory. After that time, Sony seemed to slide slowly downwards in its respect of customers with a marked disregard for the second tenet of the TQC "laws".
Sony has been -- and still is -- very innovative, but they have gone down the slope quite a bit since Akio Morita's time with regards to affordability and respect for customers.
That's what Sony gets for wanting to eat their cake and have it. IIRC they added Other OS as a way to avoid higher import tariffs (computers vs. game consoles). At the same time the didn't want people to actually use it because they were selling the PS3 at a loss and it would only generate money through game sales. Then someone turned Other OS into something useful, they took it away and now they're up in arms because people went to great lengths to re-enable it, undermining the entire platform in the process.
I think the lesson here is "don't sell your product as something it isn't supposed to be". That just makes you look evil when you try to keep people from using it for what they thought you allowed them.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Here's an interesting factoid for you: design and manufacture of most of the Sony video hardware is outsourced...
Sony VCRs: usually made by Samsung. There's a lovely design cockup in the FX-series -- a capacitor was installed the wrong way round, which screwed with the controller and ended up wiping the EEPROM. Only way out of this is a VHS alignment tape (custom to Sony/Samsung and only available to their service centres) and a full reset. Oh, and a new capacitor.
Sony DVD players: Samsung or Philips. Usually bottom-of-the-barrel crap.
Sony DVD recorders: Almost always Philips. Utterly crap, slowest processors and worst laser pickups imaginable. Hit STOP then PLAY and you'll be waiting a good minute for the thing to get its act together.
I like my Bravia and my MZ-RH1 Minidisc recorder (great for recording lectures) but the rest of my Sony kit (not much)? Crap.
I love how they use proprietary connectors for the camera USB ports, and change them with every new model series. They do the same with the batteries too... absolute evil. Point of comparison -- the Canon NB2LH battery from the 400D? Used in almost all their SD-card camcorders. Costs about £30, runs the thing for 90 minutes or so. Sony equivalent? £69, and there are four variants depending on which camera you have. Upgrade your camera, and you get to replace all your spare batteries. The chargers are (usually) cross-compatible, but that's about it. Lose a Sony charger, expect to pay a good £50-£60 for a replacement. Lose a Canon one and you can probably replace it for £20-£30, or less on Ebay.
As far as I'm concerned, Sony can FOaGDIAF. Canon are getting first-dibs if I need any new imaging gear -- my Pixma iP4600 is the first inkjet I've had which didn't suffer a fatal head clog just by leaving it idle for a few months, and my 7D has taken the worst the British weather can dish out and kept on going. I've seen customers bring Canon 10Ds back into the shop, wanting to try out a new lens. The cameras usually look like hell, but work perfectly. That kind of reliability gets you lots of brownie points.
Sony DVD recorders: Almost always Philips. Utterly crap, slowest processors and worst laser pickups imaginable. Hit STOP then PLAY and you'll be waiting a good minute for the thing to get its act together.
This surprises me. Sony manufacture pickups and having personally used them I can say they are amongst the nicest that I've seen. Fantastically easy to interface and produce a very nice clean datastream.
They do make nice laser pickups (and I think the Philips players use them almost universally), but the CPU, MPEG decoder and error-corrector circuitry (all designed by Philips) is astonishingly bad. If the disc isn't perfectly clean, scratch free and absolutely perfectly mastered, the ECC engine falls over and the picture starts to break up. The CPUs are generally WAY underpowered for what they're doing. I used to hit Record on my Aiwa VCR and it'd start recording within a second or two. The Sony DVD recorder hooked up to the TV downstairs takes almost a minute to start recording. The MythTV box is almost instant. Guess which one gets used more often... the DVD recorder is used more-or-less like an expensive DVD player (the Myth box falls over on some DVDs).
I concur with the camera gear. I know someone who's been through two Alpha 200 cameras without doing anything extreme with them. My D200 has worked (briefly) at -55degC and made a fully recovery once warmed up, gets used in dusty and corrosive environments and has fallen out of the car more times than I'd like to admit. Sony really don't make them like they used to. My MD player took similar abuse.
Oh, my MD players have been through a ton of punishment. The RH1 has been absolutely babied, but my MZ-N710 (bought as a refurbished unit several years ago ago) was dropped, banged, and got dragged to Terra Firma by its USB cable once or twice. Still works fine. The RH1 lives in a Lowepro camera pouch, and only comes out occasionally. I've been meaning to try time-syncing it with my brother's camcorder -- if only as a "can this be done?" experiment.
As I understand it, most of the BBC Regional Radio off-site interview / RNG teams still use Sony MD recorders for field recording. If they're good enough for Auntie Beeb... well...
If only git was a de-centralized VCS, these repositories would already have been cloned in the dozens around the world, and this take-down would be completely futile!
Oh, wait.