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Sony Marketing Man Tweets PS3 Master Key

An anonymous reader writes "Sony Marketing Man, Kevin Butler's official Twitter feed retweets a post by @exiva that posts the PS3 Master key. Kevin Butler who has over 69,000 followers tweet read (The tweet now deleted): '@TheKevinButler Lemme guess... you sank my Battleship? RT @exiva: 46 DC EA D3 17 FE 45 D8 09 23 EB 97 E4 95 64 10 D4 CD B2 C2 Come at me, @TheKevinButler'" Here is a screenshot of the tweet.

23 of 351 comments (clear)

  1. So... by Aeternitas827 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Does this mean that Sony have now published the key? Its not as though the person running the Twitter account had to retweet. Reply or dm would have been sufficient to get the quip in. A simple Google search would have told what this was, after all.

    --
    I don't post AC. I like my -1, Flamebaits. Trump/Sheen 2012 on the Batshit Insane ticket!
    1. Re:So... by miknix · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I think the guy behind TheKevinButler twitter account thought the twittered PS3 master key was some kind of coordinates, that's why he replied "you sank my Battleship?". After someone from Sony realized it was in fact the master key, the marketing team must have removed the related post. Makes sense.. no?

    2. Re:So... by PitaBred · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Doubtful. Not many people could tell what a private key is when looking at it, especially not a marketing type who doesn't deal with that shit. I'm betting it was just an ignorance mistake on the part of whoever was manning the Kevin Jack twitter account at that time. Just because you see an encryption key doesn't mean 99% of the rest of the world will know what it is.

      Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.

  2. Re:I think by SighKoPath · · Score: 3, Informative

    Raising awareness of a boycott and getting more people in on it makes it a much more effective boycott.

  3. Re:I think by Zelgadiss · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Can't be helped.

    If console makers give up on securing their consoles with these fairly non-intrusive DRM and leave their consoles wide open like the PC, it's only common sense to expect PC like DRM from games.

    Even if Sony, Big-N and MS does nothing to enforce copy protection, the game publishers will add their own.

    IMO it's kind of a pick your poison situation.
    Have the console maker do it via locking down their console or have the game publishers make a crazy mess of it.

  4. Re:Well, this just goes to show ... by Nadaka · · Score: 3, Insightful

    69000 new IPs to subpoena?

  5. I don't understand. why did this happen? by goombah99 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why did this happen? A few theories:

    1) an unintentional auto-complete disaster
    2) disgruntled employee
    3) Hacked twitter account used to launder code in to public domain
    4) A diversion: A secondary easily revoked key, not the master, being used to take the piss out of efforts to to find the real master ....???
    what is your guess?

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
    1. Re:I don't understand. why did this happen? by zill · · Score: 5, Funny

      1) an unintentional auto-complete disaster

      Yeah, don't you just hate it when you type 46 and 46 DC EA D3 17 FE 45 D8 09 23 EB 97 E4 95 64 10 D4 CD B2 C2 get suggested.

    2. Re:I don't understand. why did this happen? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      This is the real key. It's been known for a few weeks now. Sony has been trying to suppress anyone who reposts the key. Obviously a futile effort.
      The marketing guy was tricked into tweeting the key as he responded to another tweet.

    3. Re:I don't understand. why did this happen? by amicusNYCL · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think you missed a major possibility:

      5) As a marketing guy, he has no clue what he was looking at.

      Look at his reply: "Lemme guess... you sank my Battleship?" He's guessing, he doesn't know what the string of characters is. He's in marketing, not engineering. That's why the message got removed, because someone who did know what they're seeing contacted him about it (and he's now probably hoping that he doesn't get fired for it).

      --
      "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
    4. Re:I don't understand. why did this happen? by M8e · · Score: 5, Funny

      Or when you want to write 46 DC EA D3 17 FE 45 D8 09 23 EB 97 E4 95 64 10 D4 CD B2 C2 and 46 DC EA D3 17 FE 45 D8 09 23 EB 97 E4 95 64 10 D4 CD B2 C2 don't get suggested until you typed 46 DC EA D3 17 FE 45 D8 09 23 EB 97 E4 95 64 10 D4 CD B2 C.

  6. Re:How about by Daetrin · · Score: 4, Informative

    You are entirely correct, that is the not the real Kevin Butler's real twitter account.

    (It is however the "real" Kevin Butler's "real" twitter account.)

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    This Space Intentionally Left Blank
  7. Re:I think by redemtionboy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Microsoft has handled the situation appropriately, by putting in fixes and banning consoles and user accounts that break the EULA by hacking the system. Such behavior doesn't end piracy (something that is impossible to do, See: The Fallacy of Perfect Security), it only makes it less convenient, but it doesn't get in the way of honest individuals who purchase content fairly. I fully support Microsoft's behavior as it is a much more reasonable response that keeps both gamers and studios as happy as possible. It may not be as ideal to me as a consumer who wants to do what I want with the console and run homebrew and custom hacks on it, but it never gets in the way of me using the console as Microsoft presented it when I purchased it.

  8. A clever dupe! by LordStormes · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Look at the reply - "Lemme guess, you sank my battleship!" - The marketing guy had NO IDEA what he was reposting, he was simply trying to figure out why some guy dumped a random string of characters on his Twitter. With the spaces in there, it looks like a log of a Battleship game. The original tweeter simply confused a non-IT guy who had no idea that was even a hexidecimal value, let alone the significance of that particular one, into replying to a tweet. In short, absolutely brilliant.

    1. Re:A clever dupe! by Nemyst · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The irony of the situation is how appropriate that response is, even in the new context.

  9. Re:Confused... by Bill+Dimm · · Score: 4, Informative

    My (perhaps incorrect) understanding is that exiva tweeted the key to Kevin Butler (the marketing guy) followed by the words "Come at me." Kevin Butler then retweeted it with "Lemme guess... you sank my Battleship?" because he didn't know what it was. So, Sony didn't give the key to a marketing guy, someone outside of Sony (exiva) did.

  10. In the context of trade secrets and the law ... by perpenso · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I am guessing, but I think the poster was asking if Sony published in the context of protecting a trade secret. My understanding is that if a company fails to protect and/or publishes a trade secret, either intentionally or accidentally, the information loses its trade secret status in the eyes of the law. So in this context it is an interest question, does publicly repeating what an outside has said count as disclosure of a trade secret with respect to the law?

  11. Re:I think by Zelgadiss · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don't keep up on 360 hacks but to my knowledge MS didn't have their signing key compromised though.

    The only hacks I know of are messing with the DVD drive to play pirated games. Has anyone really gotten homebrew to run on that thing?

    by putting in fixes and banning consoles and user accounts that break the EULA by hacking the system

    I believe Sony would have fix it if they could - they did it with the PSP and the various hacks (etc the first PSP hack that exploited a bug in the TIFF viewer lib).
    With the signing key in the wild, custom firmware that can evade detection won't be hard. Banning will be of limited effectiveness.

  12. Re:Or... by franciscohs · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I never understood this "account hacked" thing. You mean that twitter service has a security vulnerability and someone was able to tweet with his account without the right credentials, OR someone used his account logging in with his weak password?, because that's not hacking on my book.

  13. Kevin Butler by a_nonamiss · · Score: 3, Informative

    Do you people realize that Kevin Butler isn't even a real person? (At least, not at Sony.) He's a fictional character played by an actor. This twitter account is probably manned by dozens of employees in the marketing department paid to do just that. Any one of them could have been tricked or compromised. citation

    --
    -Arthur
    Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
  14. Yuo sunk mah battleship by otis+wildflower · · Score: 4, Funny
  15. XNA by tepples · · Score: 5, Informative

    As I understand it, there hasn't been much of an effort to jailbreak the Xbox 360 console for homebrew because Microsoft offers a limited "XNA" sandbox in which to make, run, and even sell homebrew games, and it appears far more committed to XNA than Sony ever was to Other OS.

  16. Re:I think by Nursie · · Score: 3, Informative

    Meh, vaio are good, but not the only decent laptop.

    The tvs are expensive compared to the likes of Samsung

    There's honestly not much to pick between Xbox and PS3 IMHO.

    DS and derivatives have WAAAAY more market than PSP...

    In the current market, you can easily get away from Sony products without much compromise.