Sony Should Pay For OtherOS Removal, Says Finnish Board

x*yy*x writes "According to Consumer Board in Finland, Sony should pay up 100 euros to a console owner for OtherOS removal. The board said that the removal of OtherOS crippled console features that were present at the time of purchase and agreed that consumers should be compensated. Sony tried to point out that the user agreed to the PS3 EULA, but the consumer board noted that such agreements can't go around consumer laws."

Comments

Why is it being removed in the first place?

[boaworm]

I've been looking around a bit, but I haven't been able to find a good explanation to why Sony is removing the feature in the first place.

Does it allow hacking the console? Does it cost too much to maintain? Anyone knows?

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

Makes hacking the console easier.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[biryokumaru]

Probably because the content creators were uncomfortable with it, as they might imagine that it could potentially provide a route to more easily bypass DRM.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[jimicus]

You must have been living under a rock for the last year.

It was used for hacking the console, making it possible to run your own software, hacked games and backups of games. Those in favour say "and? I bought the console, I can do what I like." (These people make up the bulk of /. commenters, but by and large are in a minority if you look at various PS3 forums).

Those against say "Games are expensive enough as it is, if there's more piracy they'll get even dearer. And hacked games? Where's the fun in networked play if someone can use an aimbot? The whole benefit of networked console gaming is that you're all on a level playing field."

Sony say "We don't care what you bought, our EULA allows us to add and remove features as we wish."

Legislators say "Consumers can't relinquish statutory rights, that's the whole point of consumer statutory rights. We don't care what your EULA says."

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[cheekyjohnson]

Because some people play copied games, and this apparently made the console easier to hack. Also, there might be a few hackers in servers (which totally can't be banned individually like they have to do everywhere else). Or something. Therefore, the feature should be removed from all customers' systems entirely!

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[whiteboy86]

How many users buy a game console and use it for anything else then gaming or entertainment?

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[kenshin33]

copied games???? wth are talking about ???? what copied games ???? the onlty thing that enabled copied games was a hardware trick long after linux was removed untill recently. an still very very long after linux was removed.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[kenshin33]

really ??? informative ??? wao ...

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[neokushan]

Basically, because the PS3 was "unhackable", George Hotz decided to take a look at it and came up with a really convoluted way to unlock a tiny bit more memory access within Linux. This "hack" involved soldering a chip to your PS3 and triggering it at the right time. It was really trigger happy and a bit of a faff to pull off, but it did work eventually. You had to do this EVERY time you restarted your PS3.

That's it. That's the entire reason why Sony removed Linux. This "hack" didn't enable piracy, it didn't grant access to any encrypted files or anything like that, it didn't even give you total control over the PS3 like recent hacks have, it basically allowed you to poke around the memory a bit more. So Sony panicked and removed it from all FAT PS3's.

I should point out - Sony had decided that the PS3 slim would never have OtherOS support long before this happened, but that's ok - that's a refresh of the console line and nowhere did Sony claim the Slim would have OtherOS support. The issue is the Original, "FAT" PS3's that had this feature advertised on the box.

It's quite ludicrous as well, as anyone interested in hacking the PS3 simply didn't update, poked around all they wanted and 6 months later, PSJAILBREAK was released, allowing people to do little more than play backups on (what was at the time) the latest PS3 firmware - which had linux stripped from it. This allowed other teams to REALLY explore the PS3 as it was effectively in Debug mode and the rest is history - all the CFW stuff that's going around now came as a result of this.So it was a pointless move, the cat was out of the bag and rather than just patch the flaw, Sony removed Linux and pissed off a lot of people, giving them a "valid, righteous" reason to push further into the PS3 and unlock as much as they could. The original Geohot exploit never really got that much attention and probably would have died down if Sony had just left well enough alone.

Of course, that's all the official reason. The real reason was probably just to save money. Less support costs, less development costs, less testing costs, etc.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[kenshin33]

how many handicaps are out there ... not much ... therefor we should remove the parking spots reserved for them ?
Does it really matter ... it was a fucking advertised feature (I bought mine b/c of this : the fact that you can run linux AND play games). There's a name for what happened : Bait and SWITCH.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[erroneus]

Yes, because in the process of teaching or explaining, sometimes you have to say the same things in different ways to get the point across to different people who think and understand things in different ways.

I understand your amazement, it is essentially the same thing as the article summary...

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Spewns]

Those in favour say "and? I bought the console, I can do what I like." (These people make up the bulk of /. commenters, but by and large are in a minority if you look at various PS3 forums).

Rational people generally are in the minority like that.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[cheekyjohnson]

Really? Well, that's apparently what some people are saying (that it allowed for certain hacks that allowed you to do that). I don't agree with the removal even if that is true.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[erroneus]

Sucks to be you. I agree what Sony did was wrong, but are you now convinced that you should never buy from Sony again? I was convinced long, long ago and so this story failed to enrage me. The Sony rootkit affected me only because it was a problem on my business network -- I don't buy anything with a Sony label. So I'm curious to know if you learned never to buy from Sony?

I hope that every EU user claims his 100euro prize until it makes Sony bleed. And I hope this case gets revisited in the US and makes Sony bleed.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you look at Groklaw, Sony did admit that it was costly to maintain.

And no, Other OS cannot be used to play copied PS3 games because a) one must emulate all 8 cores, 1 of which is purely dedicated to console security measures, and b) Other OS was designed so someone could turn their PS3 into a computer. It would not have access to the PS3 firmware and software that was installed. Each would be independent.

Sony was annoyed at the Air Force's use of their PS3's since they were losing money on the consoles anyway. 2000+ consoles that no games were purchased for = thousands upon thousands of lost dollars. They used "security" as a scare tatic for the courts to allow them to remove the function. This was a decision made by SCEA, not the actual Sony Hardware Division in Japan that allowed this to happen. Corporate greed trumps quality yet again.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[JohnRoss1968]

It does not matter how many people buy it for games or whatever. What does matter is when a customer bought a PS3, they were told that it has the ability to use the other OS. And then Sony took that ability (that the customers paid for because it was a part of the package they bought.) and removed it without the customers permission. If that is allowed than what else is allowed.
Dear Customers we are disabling the ability to use 3rd party controllers.
Dear Customer we are disabling the ability of your PS3 unit to save games.
Dear Customer we are disabling the ability of your PS3 to play videos
Dear Customer we are disabling the ability of your PS3 to play games.
Dear Customer we are proud to introduce a new update that will allow your PS3 to use 3rd party hardware, and its only $19.99*
Dear Customer we are proud to introduce a new update that will allow your PS3 to now save games, and its only $24.95*
Dear Customer we are proud to introduce a new update that will allow your PS3 to now play movies and videos for only $10.99*
Dear Customer we are proud to introduce a new update that will allow your PS3 to Play GAMES ITS MAGICAL at only $49.99**
* These features may be removed at any time. No refunds. If these features are reintroduced you may need to purchase them again.
** Sony has the right to introduce features into its system to 'refinish' the surface of your game disks. Sony is not responsible for any damage done to your game disks.

PS Sony would like to thank our customers for their hard earned cash and would like to thank them by saying "SUCK IT"

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[kenshin33]

what linux lead to was an initial dump of some memory locations ... and even that required a hardware mod not possible for the common joe blow.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[eyenot]

It's great how you've presented each POV. I am entirely in the dark on handheld gaming right now.

You might not be surprised that I (and some) would argue all four sides independently.

Full ownership, good. It's yours to fuck up as you please, including the quality of your gaming experience.

And yeah, it sure sucks competing against the borg. You shouldn't be allowed on the network with a hacked console, or, if the parent company feels generous, you shouldn't e allowed on the mainstream network with a hacked console but have to stay in some overcrowded semi public channels.

And sure, it's Sony's network and it's their manifest destiny (we could say) to fuck with your device that they built in a way that you don't know squat about before it happens because micro technology has progressed so far that such a method is possible.

And right, that pisses some people off (me, included) mostly because it goes against the concept of honest business and is akin to selling booby traps. So governments representing the people should take issue.

Its a bright opportunity to design new ware and new methods to ensure that the arguments for and against console hacking are satisfied. It's the best business model and other approaches should be seen as the result of failing to appeal to the cognitive elite and instead asking marketers about security and accountants about response.

What will happen instead is the old arena-based bickering and rebellious super vocalizing of (ultimately) self-inflicted malcontent, crying over the obvious economic sink of entertainment funds and loathing over the ridiculousness of such matters as so weighty in times of global economic turmoil, and therefore less attention paid to more important matters leading to even greater ignorance, setting populations up for repeat performances of the whole "who could have predicted such a tragedy, it's just like in the movies" posturing and swooning.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[kenshin33]

I licked my wound learned my lesson. If it's the last company on earth and their product will save my life I won't buy it !

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[CapOblivious2010]

You must have been living under a rock for the last year.

Too bad there's not a "-1 Snarky" moderator option.

Yes, your post is very informative. But you might also find it informative to know that not everyone owns a PS3 (I've never owned a sony console in my life), not everyone wants to run linux on everything from their car to their toaster, and not everyone follows stories like this in any detail whatsoever. Still, when an interesting event occurs (like a judge ruling that sony must pay people actual cash for screwing with their functionality via firmware updates), people may be intrigued by it - not so much so they can hop in a time machine, buy a PS3, come back to the present, and cash in, but rather because of the implications a precedent like this sets for other companies and products.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[bhtooefr]

To go into more detail on the hacking thing...

The intent of OtherOS was to allow you to run your own software. (Although, some say that the intent was to try to get the PS3 legally considered as a computer for taxation reasons.)

There are two groups that were wanting to hack the console: Those wanting full access or access at all to the console's hardware for their own software, and pirates/cheaters. The pirates/cheaters are basically script kiddies, though - in other words, they don't have the technical ability to actually hack it.

I believe there was minor progress, early on, made towards using more of the console's hardware within OtherOS than Sony allowed, but not much was done with it.

In any case, Sony's attempt to get the PS3 classified as a computer failed, so they removed OtherOS from the PS3 Slim.

That pissed off the people who were wanting more access for their own software, not none whatsoever, so they began hacking the console, to see how to get OtherOS back onto the Slim. An impractical exploit for normal use, but one that exposed more info about the console, was used by Geohot.

That scared the crap out of Sony, and that's what caused them to remove OtherOS from existing consoles.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[JonJ]

These people make up the bulk of /. commenters, but by and large are in a minority if you look at various PS3 forums

That's really strange, imagine a bunch of Sony-fanboys being positive to taking it up the ass from Sony. AMAZING.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you should remove the board in front of your own head. The OtherOS option was a legal feature that allowed to install Linux on the PS3. It has nothing to do with custom firmware or hacking the console.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[DarkOx]

Its those against that are the problem with society today. I have nothing against people acting in their own self interest. I would never ask or expect someone to act against their own self interest. What I find sad about most people is short sightedness. Its not at all in their self interest to let Sony get away with abuses like this just because it does not effect them and it means a cheaper video game today. Tomorrow when they become the victim of such practices they will have discouraged those who might have stood with them, and they will have created precedent against themselves.

As a consumer its impossible for me to understand how anyone else thinks its a good idea to create a trade environment where manufacturers are free to materially alter products after sale without my consent. There is just no way that is going to work to my favor over the long term. If people won't exercise enough sense to oppose it now wherever they spot it while its relatively benign, its going to be much harder later.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

> for every good use of an object, there are equal numbers of bad uses.

Okay, so #(good uses) == #(bad uses)

> And the bad uses tend to outnumber the good ones

Okay, so #(bad uses) > #(good uses)

I'm confused now.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Man On Pink Corner]

Idiots weren't happy with the Linux playground they were given to them, no, they wanted more, they wanted to break through the hypervisor. Well, they managed to get more privileges.

I understand a talking snake and a naked chick was involved somewhere, and something about Apple. A lot has been lost in translation, apparently.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Arancaytar]

Sony gets a cut from the games sold. Sony would therefore like it if people buy lots of games, and particularly would not like it if they buy a console to get a powerful graphics processor for their own purposes, and particularly not 1760 of them in order to build a high-performance cluster. (For the military to do something as unorthodox as using gaming consoles for serious computing probably means that it must be significantly cheaper this way.)

The claims about hacking and piracy and so on are shaky, and the real reason is more than likely to protect their own business model.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[DarkOx]

So you translate your post...

I don't care if Sony is abusing others because they are not hurting me personally, and I am a short sighted selfish douche who can't see the harm in permitting the destruction of personal property and consumer rights just so I can more fun today.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[indeterminator]

All of this and the Fins are bitch wanting wtf, 100 Euros per customer? I would have to look at these fucking Fins and say; "Look douchebags, if you are going to force me to give up the protections on this system and open it up to whatever, then we are going to sue the fucking shit out of you when the entire game platform goes into the toilet because nobody plays the fucker due to all the cheaters on it. So, please, is your country worth that much even? Do I get to kick you all out if I win the lawsuit if you can't pay it? Granted, you people are fucking RETARDS, and obviously don't understand WTF a gaming system is and keeping one up, running and secure from ratfuck cheaters and whatnot. But I am willing to overlook that, providing you pull your collective heads out of your asses.

To make a car analogy, Sony pulling the Other OS feature is similar to someone having bought a car with an AC unit, and getting their car back from the yearly servicing finds out that AC has been disabled because it interferes with the airbag system.

In both cases, it's about safety and security, but it's the fault of the manufacturer in the first place. The car manufacturer could argue that 'most people are not using the AC anyway, and it's still a perfectly good car', but they would still have to either compensate their customers or fix those cars.

This is not about evil hackers at all, this is about a corporation selling something, then changing the deal afterwards.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Kryptonian Jor-El]

You're missing the biggest point. Sony didn't just remove OtherOS from the Slim, they removed it from all current and past PS3s by a forced PSN update. This forced consumers to either keep OtherOS and lose PSN access, or give up PSN access to keeo OtherOS

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Gaygirlie]

It was used for hacking the console, making it possible to run your own software, hacked games and backups of games.

That's a downright lie right there: OtherOS NEVER allowed for playing backups or hacking games. First of all, the PS3's own filesystem is encrypted and on a separate partition from the OtherOS partition, so there was no access to the files there in the first place. Secondly, there was no access to GameOS functions whatsoever. OtherOS was absolutely not used for running PS3 games, not then and not now.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[DrXym]

I've been looking around a bit, but I haven't been able to find a good explanation to why Sony is removing the feature in the first place.

Does it allow hacking the console? Does it cost too much to maintain? Anyone knows?

It became an attack vector to break the hypervisor and gain control of the box. Other OS was entirely absent from the slim models, probably as a cost saving measure.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Z00L00K]

It also stops you from building your own supercomputer.

Maybe US DoD was involved?

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[DrXym]

Yes it had everything to do with custom firmware and hacking. Other OS became an viable attack vector. Sony was obviously not going to put their entire platform at risk for the sake of the minimal number of people who bothered running Other OS. I find it laughable all the uproar about a feature that I suspect very few people complaining now even bothered to use when it was available.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, a little full of yourself eh.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[biryokumaru]

Yes, but not on the side you seem to be suggesting.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[DrXym]

No, Geohot demonstrated a viable attack on the hypervisor. A contemporary report of which is here. Sony had no choice but to shut OtherOS down before the attack was refined into an ISO that people could download, burn & install on the PS3 to root the thing completely.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sony sells the PS3 at a loss. Customers buying lots of PS3s to run Linux-based grid computers were costing Sony big money, so they broke laws to remove the function. It'll be cheaper for them to weather the fallout than to leave the function in.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[The MAZZTer]

I'm not a PS3 owner but I noticed that there seemed to be no hacks for the PS3 (that I heard of anyway), and I assumed that was because having Linux was "good enough" for most people. I recall hearing about hacks shortly after hearing about Linux removal, and I assume the two were related.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Jesus_666]

Well, all sides are acting rationally:

The hackers want Other OS because it's something they paid for and that the console was advertised with. That's rational.

The regular gamers are happy with Other OS being taken away because not only it it something they don't need, it's actually detrimental to them (as it forces them to deal with cheating to a greater extent). It's rational to be in favor of something exclusively detrimental to one to be removed.

Sony shut Other OS off because it makes it easier to run unlicensed copies of games and to run homebrew that wasn't sold through PSN. Since game sales are essentially what makes the platform profitable it's rational for Sony to try to protect their bottom line.

The legislators point out that the PS3 EULA contains unenforcable provisions and hence Sony didn't have the right to turn off Other OS in their country.


All sides have good arguments. There's no sense to let people run arbitrary code on a device which you use precisely because people can't run arbitrary code on it (while a game is running); I can understand the regular gamers in that regard. On the other hand it's not okay to sell something with a certain feature set and then remove features you decide you don't want on the market after all so the postion of the hackers and the legislators makes sense as well. Ultimately I'd side with the hackers (Sony just handled the whole thing very badly) but I wouldn't call any side in this argument irrational. They just happen to have different perspectives.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Bert64]

Only all the successful console hacks seem to have occurred after removal of the OtherOS feature....

And other consoles which never had any such features have also been hacked.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Bert64]

OtherOS had no detrimental effects to regular gamers, it did not permit cheating in any way...

OtherOS did not make it easier to run copied games...
It did make it easier to run homebrew, but that was the whole point of it in the first place, and the homebrew it could run was intentionally crippled so it could not compete with profit generating games.

Successful hacks against the ps3, which do make it easier to both cheat and run copied games only became available long after the OtherOS feature was removed.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[drinkypoo]

OtherOS was used for making images of Blu-Ray movies which you can accomplish with nothing more than dd on a ps3 because of the way the drivers worked, but for which you need to use more complicated programs on other systems. Or so I have read in multiple fora; I've never owned a PS3 because I swore off Sony when they killed Lik-Sang. Thus my last Sony experience was Gran Turismo 3 and 4 on the PS2 Slim. Byebye, Sony. You will not be missed.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Bert64]

You also lose the ability to play new games, not just PSN...

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[duguk]

Yes it had everything to do with custom firmware and hacking. Other OS became an viable attack vector. Sony was obviously not going to put their entire platform at risk for the sake of the minimal number of people who bothered running Other OS. I find it laughable all the uproar about a feature that I suspect very few people complaining now even bothered to use when it was available.

Sony were the ones who offered this feature, then removed it to all their existing customers. Attack vectors aren't the point here; the PS3 product was sold with OtherOS, and later removed. Surely that demands compensation.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[betterunixthanunix]

Does it allow hacking the console?

Yes, and this is the excuse Sony apologists have been using for its removal.

Does it cost too much to maintain?

In a sense, yes: people who use OtherOS are far less likely to buy games for the PS3, and so Sony does not get as much money from game publishers. This is probably the real reason Sony wanted to remove OtherOS, and the hacking incident was just a convenient excuse for doing so.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[betterunixthanunix]

s/game console/computer with TV outputs/

FTFY

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Jesus_666]

One could argue that it started with Sony's marketing as they never pointed out that Other OS would be useless for what most people assumed it would be good for (full access to the PS3's hardware; IIRC, Other OS had some rather arbitrary restrictions). So the hackers poked around and Sony panicked (and even you agree that Sony handled the case badly).

I'd say the main fault lies with Sony for selling the PS3 with a feature they didn't intend to actually support; everything else flowed from that. You can't sell a device based on one feature which you then implement differently from what you advertised and which you deem too expensive to actually support. In the end I'd put it down as a marketing fault on Sony's side; Other OS should never have been advertised in the first place. The rest is people (Sony, the hackers, the gamers, various countries) getting pissed off at one another because everyone has different ideas about what their respective rights are.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the problem with PSN in the last few days, it appears there's no viable option left but use the PS3 as an offline gaming machine, an ordinary Blu-ray player or maybe a space heater :-)

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Jesus_666]

You're right, I did get some things in the wrong chronological order in my head. Sony shut off Other OS because it lost them money (hardware sales to people who didn't intend to buy games while the console was a loss leader), then the hackers got angry and hacked the whole system until they got far enough that they're losing Sony money in entirely new ways (copied games).

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Gaygirlie]

OtherOS was used for making images of Blu-Ray movies which you can accomplish with nothing more than dd on a ps3 because of the way the drivers worked, but for which you need to use more complicated programs on other systems. Or so I have read in multiple fora

OP claimed the issue was backups of games, and those cannot be copied with a simple dd. The Blu-Ray drive doesn't allow any access to itself if there is a game disc inside.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[WhirlwindMonk]

Yup. Because not using something you paid for is TOTALLY a legit reason for the person you bought it from taking it back. I hope you use that fire extinguisher within a few years of buying it, otherwise when you need it, you might just find that Home Depot took it back.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[cheekyjohnson]

people who use OtherOS are far less likely to buy games for the PS3, and so Sony does not get as much money from game publishers.

Or so they think. There doesn't seem to be any viable way to prove it, though.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[WhirlwindMonk]

Maybe you should read it as well? GeoHot maybe kinda sorta found a bug, or something, that might, maybe, someday, somehow allow him to access the graphics hardware on the PS3 via OtherOS, which might, eventually, somehow, some way allow them to run pirated games via OtherOS. That was it. That's all. Nothing more. Nothing less. SCEA vs. GeoHot was about GeoHot publishing some sort of encryption key that allowed people to hack GameOS, and he did this MONTHS after OtherOS had been removed.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[HikingStick]

I, too, am glad for this decision, because it kept a bad policy from becoming an accepted precedent. If Sony won, it wouldn't be a stretch to envision a world where networked appliances might have their settings overridden by manufacturers in support of some internal policy or due to external pressures:

• To comply with a push to conserve energy, refridgerator manufacturers implements an override that keeps the temperature from being set below a certain temperature (i.e., no more ice-cold milk for you!)
• Similar restrictions on air conditioning systems (beyond current opt-in programs available through utility companies).
• Televisions/screens that shut off for a mandatory 15 minute break (during which you can't power it back on) every two hours in the name of health.
• Blue Ray optical players that receive instructions to no longer play back DVD format disks, so as to force the consumer to buy again under the current format.

Sure, these examples may seem rediculous, but once you set a precedent that allows companies the right to change the basic features of the product after the sale, you open yourself up to all sorts of crap.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[WhirlwindMonk]

No, Geohot demonstrated a viable attack on the hypervisor. A contemporary report of which is here. Sony had no choice but to shut OtherOS down before the attack was refined into an ISO that people could download, burn & install on the PS3 to root the thing completely.

No choice? Huh, I could have SWORN there could be other options like "Patch the vulnerability without screwing their customers." You know, a REASONABLE response.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[WhirlwindMonk]

Absolutely. The people skilled enough to hack in general are not pirates. They want homebrew, a powerful development platform, etc. Linux on the PS3 gave them that. Then, once that was removed, they hacked the HECK out of the PS3 to get it back, and then the less skilled pirate hackers took what they did and finished the job, allowing piracy that likely never would have happened (or at least taken nearly until the end of the console's life-cycle) had they just left the feature there.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[omglolbah]

Nobody said it was a good idea, but that was supposedly the reason they did it.

Geohot (I think it was?) found some flaws in the hypervisor and a bit later they yanked the option altogether.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[DrJimbo]

The PS3 was sold as a loss leader. It cost more to make than what it was being sold for. Sony made their profit from licensing fees from games sold for the PS3. If someone bought a PS3 and only used it for Linux then Sony lost money on that unit. They lost money on a thousand units when someone like the US Air Force built a supercomputer out of a cluster of a thousand PS3s. As production costs dropped, it is possible that Sony is now turning a profit on PS3 sales but the real money is still in the games.

There is also speculation that the ability to run Linux on cheap, discounted PS3's was hurting the market for cell processors and computers based on cell processors.

I don't think there was much development cost or support cost for the existing OtherOS feature in the PS3. There were extra testing costs for each firmware release but I think these were very minor when compared to losses from selling PS3s and revenues from games.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[reboot246]

Sony says "We don't care what you bought, our EULA allows us to add and remove features as we wish."

What's next? Can General Motors remove my steering wheel?
Yeah, I know there's no EULA with GM -- we just needed a bad car analogy here.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[hairyfeet]

I'd say nope, and I'll probably get flamed but here goes: Sony had to kill OtherOS because they were bleeding to death, full stop. Hell there was a site set up showing how to make clusters out of PS3s and every single day a new cluster was highlighted 24/7/365. Now up until recently Sony sold the PS3 at a loss, and I'd wager now the margin is so razor thin they probably are lucky to get $1 after covering the BOM and shipping. The BR drive was stupid and kept their prices higher since they never really took off, and with the X360 being so aggressive they couldn't keep the price high enough to make decent profit on the hardware like Nintendo.

No my friends, once OtherOS and the tutorials showed how damned easy it was to cluster the things every geek and their dog were buying two three four, hell a dozen of the things, and not a single disc or peripheral to go with it. Without the much vaunted sell through Sony was suffering a death by a thousand cuts at a time they could LEAST afford it. While I'm sure you heard of that 24k USAF node what you probably didn't hear of was damned near every college was looking at PS3s and making mini superclusters of their own. Hell right before the killing of OtherOS even the little college down the street was pricing a 12 node setup to give the science dept.

Should they have just killed OtherOS dead? No, IMHO they should have came up with a $1000 "PS3 Supercluster edition" with a GB Ethernet onboard, maybe added a "megacluster edition" with FC connects. Instead they watched in horror as their sell through rate fell off the planet while the X360 was getting something like 8 games per system numbers (last I checked Sony had 3, worse than BOTH the X360 and the Wii) and panicked. They had to come up with a BS excuse because "We can't afford to keep having PS3s end up in clusters, they are killin us" would have been jumped on by MSFT who would have had a field day with the PR.

No they could have handled it better but they had a very good reason for killing OtherOS, they simply couldn't afford to keep it going with their position at last place. I bet even with the hacks that came after their sell through rate went up simply because there weren't so many units going straight from the factory to some lab, and without decent return per unit they won't be able to afford the massive R&D to make PS4. My prediction is that unless they go seriously into debt they may not have the money anyway, especially if MSFT goes big bucks on the X720 or whatever they call it. But the OtherOS wasn't helping them, only hurting.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[yodleboy]

i bought my PS3 (fatty) because at the time it was one of the best blu-ray players available AND was cheaper than stand-alone models. Might as well get a game console thrown in. I got mine cheap (defintiely a loss leader) and bought 1 game. 1, which i failed to even play more than a couple of hours. Just decided to stick with PC gaming. So yeah, the effort to entice me with a cheap console never paid off with game sales.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[mcgrew]

Does it allow hacking the console?

Of course it does. That's the whole point, that you can run Linux or BSD or whatever on it. It's your computer, you should be able to do what you want with it. If you want your toaster to be a TV, start hacking and more to you.

Personally, I won't buy Sony any more. XCP should have taught us that Sony has no respect for property you bought and paid for. This OtherOS debacle didn't surprise me a bit.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[jimicus]

This is the motor industry you're talking about here.

An industry which seems to think it's above normal consumer law (you buy something, it's faulty, you can return it for repair/refund/replacement) and in many parts of the world the legislators have had to pass another, separate law essentially saying "Yes, this also includes the motor industry. Just because you're selling expensive items does not exempt you from it."

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[fast turtle]

The only thing wrong with your argument is

"The moment you use other peoples media on that device, it stops being yours to do whatever you want with it."

because I bought and paid for that physical media. It's called the "Doctrine of First Sale" and this consumer protection law specifically prevents companies from pulling this kind of shit. Sorry but what you're saying is I signed a negotiated contract with Sony and each and every Media Producer when I purchased that PS3 from Walmart/BestBuy/Circuit City/Fry's/Sams Club/Name your Retailer and you're absolutely incorrect, which is what this judgement was all about. They sold these devices with this feature as a feature . Obligatory Car Analogy

Your take your car in for service and the Dealer removes the A/C system entirely as the Manufacturer has said, we decided to not offer the A/C on your car (usually between 0.8 - 1.2K $ in the U.S.)

The other issues you speak of are Copyright Issues, thus must follow Copyright Law in order to be enforced. Otherwise, these companies have taken the Law Into their own Hands and have decided that you no longer need access to that which you paid for.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[DrXym]

You assume there was a way of fixing it. And what they did was a reasonable response as far as they were concerned. It stopped their platform being opened up to rampant piracy which is overwhelmingly more important to them than pissing off a miniscule number of people using Other OS.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[DrXym]

I guess that depends if you or Sony have proof you used the feature in the first place. Certainly it wouldn't be something that any slim owner would be entitled to compensation for because it never shipped on the slim.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[westlake]

You also lose the ability to play new games, not just PSN...

The firmware upgrade is needed to support new Blu-Ray videos. stereographic 3D video and gaming, the MOVE controller and other enhancements like deep color and 1080p Netflix streams with full theater sound.

This is a no-brainer in the home entertainment market - and the geek needs to see that clearly.

The OtherOS implied dual-booting into a DIY install of an obscure Linux distro with a desktop GUI and significantly restricted access to system resources.

Unity comes too late..

You could argue quite fairly, I think, that all Linux distributions are little known in the home market.

The Android logo is Eve's brother, not Tux. after all.

But the point is that, if you can't get the masses behind the OtherOS and Homebrew, you have no leverage.

Your aging PS3 Fat is out of production, out of warranty, and no one gives a damn.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Spaseboy]

Geohot found a way to access the hypervisor to get all seven cores running in Linux. I don't know if Sony ever officially stated the reason why they disabled OtherOS other than "security concerns", but it has been theorised they were afraid of piracy, yes.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[DrXym]

Don't buy a device with a EULA if you don't want to be subject to what the provider chooses to add or remove. Aside from that, it was a no-brainer from Sony's POV what to do when Other OS became an attack vector. They inconvenienced a small number of people (which I doubt includes most of the people howling about it now) and saved their platform from endemic piracy and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of lost revenue. Hardly a difficult choice to make.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[TheRaven64]

If they were breaking even on the PS3s, then that doesn't really hold water. Even if they were making a small loss, it doesn't for several reasons:

Firstly, the number of people building PS3 clusters is tiny compared with the total number of sales. They've sold about 50 million PS3s so far. I'd be very surprised if even 100,000 of those were for clusters. A typical small cluster only has about 100 nodes, so even if every university in the EU and USA had one (most don't) then it would still be quite a small percentage of total sales. Most universities that were considering buying them for number crunching just bought one or two as Cell development machines (oops - no cheap way of doing that anymore, I bet IBM and Toshiba are really happy about that), they didn't build complete clusters. The PS3's lack of Infiniband or any equivalent and tiny amount of RAM make it pretty useless for most cluster problems. These days, you can probably get better performance out of GPGPU or some other normal CPU, depending on your workload than from a Cell.

Secondly, if you think that a cluster of PS3s means no game sales then you've never worked in a university research group. I've talked to people in a couple of places where they did build PS3 clusters (a few years ago, when the price/performance actually made sense) at conferences, and their cluster designs had one thing in common: they were designed so that it was really easy to pull a couple of the units out and plug them into projectors for postgrads to play games on when no one was using the cluster.

Thirdly, the 'PS3 is used in supercomputers' meme was great advertising for Sony. No one was building clusters out of the XBox 360 or the Wii. Any time the USAF or anyone else talked about their cheap supercomputer built with PS3s, it was free advertising. The total losses from all of the sales of PS3s for supercomputers are tiny compared to the advertising budget for Sony's PS3 division.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[CronoCloud]

(Although, some say that the intent was to try to get the PS3 legally considered as a computer for taxation reasons.)

And they would be wrong, because that difference in tariffs between consoles and computers in the EU was removed in the PS2 days....BEFORE Linux was ever released on the PS2 or PS3. If you must know, it was the YaBasic discs that shipped with early EU PS2's that was attempt to get around the tarriff...not Linux.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Steeltoe]

No problem. I imposed a Never-Buy-Anything-Sony-Again rule on my own person ca 1999, after buying a crippled digital camera with inferior and propriertary Memorysticks. They've never been there for MY NEEDS, so I will never buy anything Sony again no matter what!

Same with Apple ca some time after iJail came out.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[krazytekn0]

#overthehead Um, I'm pretty sure GP was talking about that article more in the sense of "now we have it so we don't want anyone else to"

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Steeltoe]

My new shiny laptop got blueray, it even came with a preview demo-blueray.

But Windows 7 can neither play Blueray and DVDs, and while the latter is easily fixed with VLC, I have yet to find a blueray player in Windows, either free or non-free.

So I canned the blueray demo-disc, and never intend to play blueray again until there is a free player available or they give it to me.

These companies seem hell-bent to try to screw over their own customers. Bad move.. Blueray is Sony, so I'm not interested anyways.

We need to support heroes like DVD-Jon, not Sony or Apple.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[CronoCloud]

The issue is the Original, "FAT" PS3's that had this feature advertised on the box.

It's not mentioned on the box, never was. I don't know how that "rumor" got started, because it's not true. Show me a picture.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[ifiwereasculptor]

Don't buy a device with a EULA

That's the hard part right there. It may still be easy enough in some markets, if you do some research, right now, but it's definitely getting increasingly harder. Phones, consoles, OSs, ebooks...

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

The PS3 was sold as a loss leader.

*WAS*

It cost more to make than what it was being sold for.

No longer true.

Sony made their profit from licensing fees from games sold for the PS3.

Mostly true: even with the hardware not generating a loss, most of their profit would still be from games

If someone bought a PS3 and only used it for Linux then Sony lost money on that unit.

But, by the time it was removed, those (FAT) units had already been sold: Sony had already lost that money years ago.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[hxnwix]

You assume there was a way of fixing it. And what they did was a reasonable response as far as they were concerned. It stopped their platform being opened up to rampant piracy which is overwhelmingly more important to them than pissing off a miniscule number of people using Other OS.

Did it? The release of Sony's private signing key was motivated by the removal of Other OS. They tried to take away Other OS in order to keep their platform locked down, but it cost them their own private key! Even Sony's disembrained management must comprehend that the outcome achieved is the opposite of that intended.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is interesting though:

However, another Sony representative had this to say to quell everyone’s concerns:
        Please be assured that SCE is committed to continue
        the support for previously sold models that have the
        “Install Other OS” feature and that this feature will
        not be disabled in future firmware releases.
        -Geoff
So there you have it.

http://gamesilike.com/?p=98

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[neokushan]

It seems you are correct. I have no idea why I remember seeing it on a box, I must be getting mixed up with a leaflet or poster or something, I remember seeing something about "supports additional operating systems" but I have no idea where.
Sony definitely did use it in advertising and marketing, it was absolutely an advertised feature, just not on the box itself.
I stand completely corrected.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[drinkypoo]

Right, and I'm arguing that the issue is not backups of games, but instead, the issue was backups of Blu-Ray movies. You may have noticed that Sony has a lot of time, effort, and presumably money invested in Blu-Ray and creating a Blu-Ray copier was on on the list of things to do. When you add in the cost of supporting it and the fact that someone who uses only Linux on their PS3 makes Sony little to no money since they're not paying additional license fees, it only makes sense for them to drop Linux if they can get away with it, since they are a corporation and thus soulless.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Travelsonic]

There are two groups that were wanting to hack the console: Those wanting full access or access at all to the console's hardware for their own software, and pirates/cheaters .

Don't you mean 3 categories: Those wanting full access, pirates, and cheaters? Pirates =/= cheaters, as in you can be one, or the other, or both, being one doesn't make you the other.

There are two groups that were wanting to hack the console: Those wanting full access or access at all to the console's hardware for their own software, and pirates/cheaters .

The pirates/cheaters are basically script kiddies, though - in other words, they don't have the technical ability to actually hack it.

And again, you mis-characterize these people. Some, hell, *maybe* most don't, but to get this working, to exploit these games you do need to know how to hack.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Khyber]

I'd give a damn, actually. Current ads for the PS3 are "It does everything" when the original had more capability. It's a flat-out lie and Sony should be sued over that as well.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[GCsoftware]

Yup. There are no Bluray players for Windows, especially none that are found by doing a google search for "blu ray player windows" and called PowerDVD 11.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Mad Leper]

It was removed because it was used pretty much 99% as a gateway to cracking the PS3 and getting access to security keys and PSN.

Sony gave it's customers a choice of keeping OtherOS or being cut off from the network, the hackers & pirates took great offence and launched an attack against Sony and it's paying customers that continues to this day.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[RobertLTux]

and now give a link to a legit full version (not trial) of said program that is free

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people dont care about OtherOS, and Im not sure if youve ever played an online game with honest-to-goodness botters/cheaters, but it utterly kills the fun of it.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Mad Leper]

Dammit, I meant a choice between keeping OtherOs and being cut off from PSN OR keeping PSN and losing OtherOs. Sorry.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Mad Leper]

Ahem, it wasn't forced. Sony offered a choice between PSN or OtherOs. Not many people saw the point in hacking the PS3 if it meant being unable to cheat & pirate, hence the outrage.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[geminidomino]

An industry which seems to think it's above normal consumer law (you buy something, it's faulty, you can return it for repair/refund/replacement)

Those fools. Everyone knows that only applies to the multimedia entertainment industry!

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[TFAFalcon]

I'm sure you wouldn't have a problem if your car manufacturer gave you the option between driving on odd or even days.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Mad Leper]

Inserted somewhere into that timeline was the theft of a hardware dongle from Sony that was briefly being offered for $273 dollars a copy (I think), followed shortly after by a software only version that would put your PS3 into debug/repair mode and essentially expose the guts for all to see.

Geohot took that software and used it to rape PS3 security then openly published the full set of security keys, essential cracking the PS3 wide open. Voila, rampant piracy, hacking PSN and cheating online for all.

If Geohot had kept his mouth shut for the second hack, I doubt Sony would have gone the lengths that they did. But hey, Geohot is all about the self promotion & bragging so there's no way he would have shown a little restraint.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[kenshin33]

Yes he did that by hooking something to the memory bus to insert glitchs. not your simple everyday's hack that's one. More importanely what Fail0verflow demonstrated that wasn;t even needed (linux and stuff) eventually someone would have caught the FAIL in the signature code and we'de be in the same spot as we are now !

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Travelsonic]

hacked the whole system until they got far enough that they're losing Sony money in entirely new ways (copied games).

Isn't that speculatorial at best? I mean, for the common person, think about how unfeasible it is right now to pirate PS3 games.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[neokushan]

No, you've got it all wrong there.

For one, the "timeline" already mentions this -

6 months later, PSJAILBREAK was released

Furthermore, Geohot didn't actually perform the hack that "released the guts of the PS3", it was a different group (called Fail0verflow) that discovered the flaw in Sony's Encryption that allows you to mathematically calculate the private keys of every module on the system. They are the ones that released the info and tools to do this. All Geohot did was use this knowledge to release the key to metldr, the first stage of the PS3's boot process. Enough information was out there to create custom firmwares WITHOUT anything Geohot released.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Travelsonic]

... what? Why should it even be a choice between otherOS and being able to access PSN [AND play newer games that require new firmware]? Choice my ass.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Travelsonic]

What does that have to do with anything? Really, so what? There are botters/cheaters, so instead of going after them in a logical and effective method, we should be contempt with them removing something even though its link to them cheating is dubious at best? [think memory card exploits and other cheating methods that existed before OtherOS, and its removal]

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Mad Leper]

So I lost OtherOS, and gained many other features (too many to list here, WikiPedia has the full set)

So my PS3 does more now that it did when I first purchased it, no lie there.

And by the way, just what does "it only does everything" mean exactly, other than a marketing slogan. If my PS3 cannot do my laundry, did Sony lie to me?

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[marcansoft]

People are going to reply that either 1) it was used to break into the console and pirate games/break DRM/hack online games, or 2) it was costly to maintain. Those are what Sony would like you to believe. However, both of those are lies.

It is true that the first remotely notable break in PS3 security occurred through the use of the Linux functionality. This was geohot's original hypervisor exploit. However, that exploit required hardware (a RAM glitching setup), was extremely unreliable, and didn't get you any further than hypervisor access. Nothing ever came out of that hack directly, it was more of an academic thing. This has never had anything to do with piracy and has never been used for piracy.

The next big PS3 hack (which was actually designed for piracy) was a GameOS exploit (PSJailbreak), and later the core of the PS3 security was compromised, with the goal of running Linux, but without depending on any existing Linux functionality (which had been removed by then). So, in fact, OtherOS has never caused security problems from the PS3. In fact, the only thing it clearly did was prevent attack by giving power users a way to run their own code. The vast majority of people who I know participated in developing PS3 hacks (myself included) did so after Sony removed OtherOS, and wouldn't have done so otherwise.

So that takes care about option #1. What about #2? That's what Sony implied when they removed OtherOS from the PS3 Slim (which, remember, happened before any PS3 security issue at all). And we bought it at the time. And then the PS3 security was broken, Slim included, and we found out that GameOS uses the same hypervisor interface as Linux, and that Linux happily ran on the Slim with trivial modification. The truth is that GameOS depends on the same hypervisor as Linux, and OtherOS is nothing but a launcher and a different guest profile in the hypervisor. The amount of code required is insignificant, and the maintenance required just about nonexistent. By maintaining GameOS they are implicitly maintaining OtherOS. High maintenance cost? My ass. This also exculpates geohot's original hack, since that happened after Linux was removed from the Slim, and we now know that the given reason for removing it from the Slim was bullshit.

Then there's the whole selling PS3s at a loss deal, but we all know that Sony is now making a profit on all PS3s, so Linux doesn't hurt there either.

They turned it off because they WANTED to turn it off. The real motive? There clearly is one, but we don't know what it is. The only mildly plausible explanation that I've read is that Sony wanted to push emulated PSN games a la Virtual Console, but studios were concerned about unofficial emulation via Linux. But that's still not terribly convincing.

Note: I was one of the people named in the Sony lawsuit for bringing Linux back on the PS3, so I think I know what I'm talking about.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[kenshin33]

It's a principle stand ... this time it was linux ... what would it be next time?
This has in fact set a very dangerous precedent, it says to anyone interested you can remove advertised features and get away with it.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[GCsoftware]

The parent stated that he couldn't find a Bluray player for his laptop at all - free or commercial. I don't know whether there are free Bluray players out there for Windows, possibly not - but that wasn't what I was replying to.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[peppepz]

That's a downright lie right there: OtherOS NEVER allowed for playing backups or hacking games

No, that's a downright truth. *ALL* PS3 exploits started on Linux. Hotz found a way to tamper with the firmware, from Linux, as he proudly demonstrated with screenshots from his blog. He didn't manage to go beyond some unuseful demos, but he showed the way. AFTER the encryption keys were dumped, from Linux, by other people, it became possible to hack even the PS3s lacking the Linux feature.

The result is that now hackers own the platform, there's no point to play online anymore because of cheaters, and you can't do it anyway, because hackers brought the PSN down; honest users pay games for "developers" who get to play for free by downloading games from torrents, Sony removed OtherOS from the honest users who made use of it, and surely they will think 999 times before putting OtherOS on their next consoles.

I guess "developers" will then have to buy other consoles, which support the installation of Linux, have free online gaming, work with standard peripherals instead of expensive proprietary ones. Until now only Sony's consoles did that.

Thank you Hotz, you're so cool.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[peppepz]

Yesterday somebody asked me for $1.000. I guess I'll have to give him the money, otherwise he'll be motivated to break in my house and take all my money anyway.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[peppepz]

While of course Sony's behaviour towards existing OtherOS users is deprecable, odious and probably unlawful, I still have to find a gaming console which is more open than the PS3 even without OtherOS. I'm open to suggestions.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

They claimed that with the release of the Slim and its lack of OtherOS that maintaining the two architectures was a burden. However this was proven false as many of the now being sued hackers were able to run Linux on the Slim with absolutely no modification.

They've been neutering it since day one when people discovered they had full 3d access. When Geohot's memory exploit was released, that was the final straw.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Khyber]

Does your PS3 have backwards compatibility?

Newer PS3 models can't do what older ones could (backwards compatibility.). Saying it does everything when the newer model actually doesn't do what the original does is a flat out lie.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Runaway1956]

I, for one, simply don't give a rat's ass if Sony were losing money on those PS3's. If indeed, they were, they had several options.
1: sell a new model that didn't have the OtherOS enabled
2: simply raise the price on the original PS3 so that they made a profit
3: change the existing PS3's into two lines, one optimized for the clusters, the other optimized for gaming, and price them accordingly
4: design, build and sell yet another PS3 that was even better for clustering, and price them accordingly - and remove the gaming features from that machine
5: just leave things alone, and when the cluster market was saturated, the gamers would eventually do what gamers do - keep buying consoles for gaming.

I'm sure that others can come up with other ideas. Bottom line - Sony had no right to remove or disable features that they sold. That's right, SOLD. EULA's mean diddly shit - they are coercive in nature, and the only people who "agree" to them are those who simply don't care. I'll click through EULAs all day long, in order to get to the end that I have in mind. I just don't give a shit. Microsoft, Sony, websites, I don't care. They mean nothing to me, and I'll break them forever.

Now, as for that cash settlement - I find that to be unsatisfactory. Any rational court of law should force Sony to restore those features that the original purchasers paid for, AND give them the cash in consideration of all the inconvenience a bunch of jackbooted Gestapo wannabes caused the owners of those PS3's.

Auto analogy? General Motors sold half a zillion cars with turbochargers, then decided that they didn't like their cars running so fast. So - GM recalled all those vehicles and removed the turbochargers. But, rather than just a recall, they sent a mechanic to every home that had a car in their driveway, jacked the car up, and forcibly took out those turbochargers. The owner of the car had zero say in the matter, because each mechanic was accompanied by enough force to ensure that the owner didn't interfere.

Totally wrong, no matter how you look at it.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't be arsed to log in, but wow you're an idiot.

Do you believe everything Sony tells you?

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[BronsCon]

It was used (as advertised) for making it possible to run your own software. It was used in conjunction with a hardware hack to gain full access to the hypervisor; something that likely could have been done (as evidenced by the fact that it has been) without the availability of the feature. It, in itself, was not used for hacking the console.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[sjames]

That is the crux of the issue. People bought their older PS3 complete with OtherOS. At least some of those people saw OtherOS as the key determining factor in their purchase. Then Sony effectively stole that value from those buyers by altering the device after the fact without discussion or compensation of any kind. The practical effects are indistinguishable from outright theft.

It's sad that thus far, only Finland has seem fit to do anything at all about it abd even then has only managed to make a "recommendation" and it doesn't involve any kind of criminal proceeding. This is hardly the first time Sony has done something on a global scale that would be treated as a serious crime if an individual did it even once to a single person.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[marcansoft]

I should point out - Sony had decided that the PS3 slim would never have OtherOS support long before this happened, but that's ok

It isn't OK, actually. Not because it's illegal or wrong (they have every right to do it), but because they lied about their motive. It that further confirms that they lied about why they removed Linux on the Fats.

They claimed they removed Linux from the Slim due to cost saving reasons, but now we know that Linux "just works" on the Slim because it runs on top of the same hypervisor that GameOS uses. In other words, maintenance cost was implicitly zero due to the way the PS3 works, and they actually had to put more development time into removing Linux than they would've if they'd just left it there. This means that they had a reason to remove Linux a long time ago already.

They lied about why they removed Linux on the Slim, and we don't know their real reason. It follows that they lied about why they removed Linux on the Fat; they were just itching to remove it for the same (unknown) reason they did on the Slim. The Geohot hack was just a poor excuse that they could use.

One possible explanation is that they were planning on removing Linux across all consoles all along to save money in the long term (simply because they wouldn't have to support the tiny launcher in future firmwares - this doesn't save money if you only do it on the Slim, but it does save some money if you do it across all consoles). Or maybe there's an entirely different reason that we don't know about.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[rapiddescent]

I'd suspect that it was more about economics and the fact that the console import duty for the EU is at 0% now.

In the UK, even the PS2 had a disk included in the original box that allowed the owner to code in BASIC in an attempt to be classified as a computer (import duty 0%) and not a games console (import duty 2.2%). HOWEVER, the UK HMRC looked in detail when SONY tried to get £50m in tax rebates and decided (not surprisingly!) that it was a sham and charged them 2.2% import levy anyway). The same negotiation happened with the PS3 - SONY really thought they could avoid import duty.

in the EU, the import levy varied over the years from 0.6% to 2.2%. Of course, local VAT was compounded on top of those rates. Today, the import duty from Japan to the UK is 0% (i.e.no incentive for even trying with OtherOS)

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[SCPRedMage]

I take it you've never heard of SlySoft, or a little piece of software they make by the name of "AnyDVD HD"? You know, software that seamlessly removes ALL copy-protection from BluRay discs, making it entirely unnecessary to use a PS3 in such a manner?

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[kenshin33]

define open ?

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cheating in games on ps3 existed before the ability to run bluray games from the harddrive or any kind of piracy. The piracy is just a scapegoat for the cheating that is happening.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Lemmy Caution]

I'm closer to a regular gamer - I didn't get a PS3 for OtherOS - but it is in my rational self-interest to see fewer, rather than more, restrictions on the things I buy. The problem with your formulation is that it reduces people to one single element of their personal interest. Insofar as we are all citizens with a desire to be reasonable free, the "regular gamers" who support Sony taking legal action against people tinkering with their own hardware are actually not being rational: they are thinking in the very short term, and impulsively.

This is one of the problems I have with the more naive conceptions of behavioral economics: it thinks it can understand human subjects just by looking at their immediate, local positions.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. You're cool.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[drinkypoo]

I have DVD HD Decrypter from Fabwhatever but I only use the DVD features. My point is that the PS3 was really good at it for whatever reason and Sony wanted to put a stop to that.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

psn is full of '90s homebrew quality stuff and worse. also, dosbox would run enough to run a number of titles in their original form, for free, even on the crappy otheros balls cut environment.

why would you pay for tetris, if you already paid for tetris ten times and could hack it together in an afternoon? just saying that you deserve it for buying shit from sony doesn't quite cut it, even when it's true, they do sell after all actual pc's where you can run homebrew. and they marketed it as "very powerful" and all that jazz, the few finnish lap lackey magazines also touted the feature back in the day so sony did mention and push it back then, like they had pushed the crappy ps2 linux as well. it was crap for the money, really was, but the mags never said that firmly enough(wanna know why? they never say anything bad about what they perceive as big sellers for ads, because they're like that, starving, because everybody is cancelling their subscriptions because their news are 3 months old(even though, the subs wouldn't be going away if they said things like they were, my all time favorite review on them was for some shitty c64 commando clone, the review literally said "p*sk* commando klooni" which translates to sh*t commando clone. they should have printed just about that about the otheros possibility because as experts they should have known where they were headed, it just doesn't fit in with psn, not anymore than other appstores fit apple's plans on their hw).

so the consumers, if they just went and looked at the box, could have thought that they could run some custom program on it, even if they were what constitues as local 'experts' on the subject. they can't(run custom programs), so sony is lying and should pony up. now if they would extend this to cover mobile phones and we'd be all set(though technically nokia is just lying to 98% of devs and letting 2% club get the api's and support).

sony should just manufacture hw and ask the going price for it or GTFO - it's not like we need them for quality gaming, quite the opposite.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[dmomo]

"Rational people generally are in the minority like that."

And ironically, the majority of people seem to agree!

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

The intent of OtherOS was to allow you to run your own software. (Although, some say that the intent was to try to get the PS3 legally considered as a computer for taxation reasons.)

I'm fairly certain those odd laws were repealed a few years ago now. I mean why would a computer be taxed less than a console anyway? It doesn't make any sense, it's basically just a different form factor.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[thetoadwarrior]

I don't think that's the case. I do think they removed it due to the cost of maintaining working functionality that hardly anyone used. Of course now that it has been removed everyone on the internet is in an uproar over it. It enabled homebrew gaming which is no threat to Sony.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[thetoadwarrior]

I believe it was a cost cutting feature. The PS3 didn't really have issues with piracy until geohot crack it wide open. A lot of people claim to be upset now that the feature is removed but the fact is hardly anyone used it. Sony didn't want to waste time and money ensuring the functionality worked for a handful of people every time they upgraded the firmware.

They should have provided it as is and if it broke in a firmware upgrade just say tough shit or fix it after the fact. It didn't really bring on piracy and homebrew games were hardly a threat to them.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[shutdown -p now]

Also, fuck you and your PSN hack, you cunts may think it's giggly cute to put the shithammer to Sony, but all you are doing is fucking over people trying to enjoy their system. I have went from "meh, who cares" to "FUCK YOU CUNT HACKERS...HUNT YOU ALL DOWN, KILL YOU, AND YOUR FUCKING FAMILY, YOUR FUCKING DOG, YOUR CAT, YOUR FUCKING GOLD FISH, SALT YOUR LAWN, PISS IN YOUR POOL, PUSH OVER YOUR BIRDBATH, LEAVE MY FUCKING GAME NETWORK ALONE YOU GREASY RATFUCKS!!!!!1111!!", or something like that. (in regards to the Sony Network being FOBAR for days now)

As they say when playing online these days, "u mad?"

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason Hotz did this was because they removed OtherOS from the PS3 Slim. There was no reason for the removal in the first place, and the poor decision resulted in the public keys being leaked and the ps3key. After this, they removed OtherOS from normal PS3s with an unwarranted forced update. They also disabled the ps3key exploit, which meant Hotz did a little more work and this time not only re-added OtherOS but brought full and widespread hacking to the console in a form that did not require a fancy device and could be accomplished by a layman.

The PS2 had linux and it was removed for a completely logical reason in newer, slimmer models: you just couldn't fit a goddamn hard drive in it. So, current Linux users lived on happily and made their little homebrew programs and Sony happily sold their games on an relatively untainted platform.

So, lesson learned:

Keep the Linux nuts occupied! Let them have their own little sandbox and they will leave you alone. Piss them off with shit like this and you are done for.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont like the fact that they removed it. I even used it at one point. Know what though. I took it off. I bought a computer and put linux on it. It was 'kinda neat' that it could do that. The usefulness however was rather limited. Maybe it had got better but it was 'flakey'. Oh it 'worked' but not as solid as a proper linux install.

I really dont care however that they did remove it. In 20 years when I am playing a ps3 game on my PC thru some emulator I will not really care still.

I should care but I dont. Most people seem to be miffed that they removed it. Yet MOST people did not really even use it in the first place. Im sure Sony had the stats on it and what it was costing them. They took a risk that no one would care. It backfired.

It will hurt them on the next console round though. Many will assume Sony will just do the same thing again next gen (why would we believe otherwise). There will be a few 'nah I will get whatever the latest nintendo or xbox is' (even though they could do the same thing). All the way thru instead of adding sold cool features. They have added little 'wtf' features and removed the some of the ones we bought it for (solid PS2 emulation and linux support). Then the features they did add were rather half assed ones. Media capabilities is weak and garbage to a real media center such as what MS has or even xbmc. They added the folding thing that was kind of cool but destroyed your power bill. All in all Sony software is 'kinda' cool but rather half assed. It is like it could be cool but isnt. When MS is doing things better than you on something you dominated you have a problem. Then home which was supposed to be there on launch didnt launch until 3 years after. And then it is ho hum...

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Spewns]

I should care but I dont.

Eventually they will step on something you care about, and it'll be too late by that point since you'd already conceded so much ownership and control of the device you paid money to take home. Shortsighted, unprincipled, and arbitrary responses of "Sony better not remove something I personally like, but it's okay if they remove something I don't use" are great for Sony's objective.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[mdielmann]

Sony didn't just remove OtherOS from the Slim, they removed it from all current and past PS3s by a forced PSN update.

And you're missing one key sentence. From the GPP:

That scared the crap out of Sony, and that's what caused them to remove OtherOS from existing consoles.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is there for them to step on?

"You can no longer play games!"

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Stupendoussteve]

The upgrade was not mandatory. The catch was, if you did not upgrade and remove the feature, you could no longer get on PlayStation Network. Apparently this was unfair.

I think Sony should just release an optional OtherOS patch, which unlocks the full functionality of the PlayStation but removes the ability to use PlayStation Network, except for a path to go back to the "commercial" version. Maybe take it to the next level and provide a full dev kit with access to every part of the device, but remove the ability to use any commercially released games while using it. I think many of the tinkerers would not even mind, assuming there was a restore process.

I understand why they removed it, but it could have been handled much better, even to the point where the hackers got more functionality and the gamers will still protected from software cheats and piracy.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Stupendoussteve]

Why should it? Have you read any of this thread?

Because people were looking to pirate and/or cheat on PSN. By far the majority of PS3 owners were using PSN and NOT OtherOS, and would be much more put out if the cheaters were using OtherOS to disrupt their gameplay.

I agree not giving any kind of compensation was wrong, but forcing people to choose what was important to them was not necessarily unfair. The only rub is there is no way to downgrade or reenable the functionality, which really should be provided.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Stupendoussteve]

Those opt-in utility programs will probably become mandatory at some point, or the utilities charge more for those who do not opt-in. Regardless, none of the features you mentioned requires a change after the sale, you just have to get the majority of manufacturers to change it on all future products and eventually everyone is using products with those features.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Stupendoussteve]

There may not have been a logical need for a removal from the Slim, but customers KNEW that they were buying a console without that feature. I can't really defend Hotz for using that has a reason to hack the system's security, he had the option to just not buy the Slim model.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[westlake]

I, for one, simply don't give a rat's ass if Sony were losing money on those PS3's

You don't care.

But Walmart did.

It needs to see a product with a compelling feature set, an attractive price, and strong after-market sales.

It needs to see synergy. The HD video game console that helps drive sales of the big screen HDTV set.

PS2 emulation? Too expensive.

SACD? High end audiophile market. Not our thing.

The OtherOS?

Dual boot into a DIY install of an obscure Linux distro with a desktop GUI and limited access to system resoutces.

How do we sell this? How do we support it? We can't. We won't.

3: change the existing PS3's into two lines, one optimized for the clusters, the other optimized for gaming, and price them accordingly

Why do you think the cash-strapped research lab buys video game consoles in wholesale lots?

EULA's mean diddly shit. ... They mean nothing to me, and I'll break them forever.

They may mean something to your lawyer and they may mean something to your wife when she sees service of process.

Now, as for that cash settlement - I find that to be unsatisfactory. Any rational court of law should force Sony to restore those features that the original purchasers paid for.

Your aging PS3 Fat is a small appliance three years out of production and even longer out of warranty.

A court will put a monetary value on the OtherOS.

That is what courts do. It would be reasonable as well, I think, for a court to consider the monetary value of subsequent firmware upgrades.

If the coldly calculated cash value of a PS3 Fat with support for MOVE, Avatar on Blu-Ray and the 1080p Netflix stream is more than the PS3 with the OtherOS, you have a problem when you demand the big-bucks refund.

In framing a remedy, a court must look at the impact on other users of the PS3, and on other parties whose interests are at stake.

It is certainly within bounds to consider the impact on multiplayer gaming, intellectual property rights and so on.

The cash settlement, I am afraid to tell you, is as good as it gets.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Stupendoussteve]

It doesn't matter why they removed it from the Slim, even if they "lied" in some product report somewhere. Nobody expected OtherOS to be on the Slim because they said it wouldn't, I don't have to go around questioning their motives to know better than to expect it to be there. I never expected the Slim to play PS2 games either, not because it physically couldn't, but because they said it wouldn't. Cisco/Linksys removed Linux from the WRT54G, and never gave any explanation whatsoever... but then they released the WRT54GL which costs more, I bet they were doing it to create a new product that costs more! And?

It is perfectly alright for a company to remove features on another revision when they say "Heads up, we're doing this on the next model!" If I want to buy one with that feature I buy it right then, or decide I don't really need the feature. Their motives for the change are not really important at that point because it's their product.

I think they removed it from the Slim because they figured out these vulnerabilities and hoped people would eventually upgrade out of the fat consoles and not figure it out, but I certainly wouldn't expect them to advertise this as the reason. I don't really care about that, except that it was of course not right to remove the feature from the fat PS3 even after the vulnerabilities were out in the open.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Stupendoussteve]

No they don't sell them at a loss. They did at first, for a while.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[marcansoft]

Of course nobody expected Linux to be on the Slim (and nobody can complain that they don't have linux on their Slim). I'm just pointing out that removing Linux from the Slim (which in and of itself is fine) is related to removing Linux on the Fat, which isn't. The underlying reason is almost certainly the same, and it's neither (legitimate, i.e. Slim-only) cost saving nor geohot's hack.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[lexsird]

They have to oversee a game system versus cheaters who hack. If this means that the cheaters were making use of the Other OS feature, then by all means, it had to go and if you can't understand that, then I don't know what to say.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the clever people who put linux on everything from supercomputers to my can opener. Holy fuck, are they innovative, but damn it there are some greasy rat fucks who take advantage of this and CHEAT. It's all fun until someone gets CHEATED.

Now if you can prove to me that this Other OS feature was NOT in anyway used by cheaters to exploit their fellow players, then I am with you. Seriously, who cares what you do with the PS3 as long as you don't dick with the sanctity of the games? You can tie one to each of your hands and feet, and walk around with them as shoes, and beat them together like cymbals, nobody would care, including Sony.

STOMP STOMP CRASH CRASH CRASH STOMP CRASH..STOMP.....STOMP......CRASH.. *crickets* See, nobody cares.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

It may or may not have been on the box, but it was clearly marketed as a feature and selling point because there were two reasons I bought a PS3 for $750 - one was to play GTA4, the other was OtherOS - This is my first console since the Sega Genesis/Megadrive and I never would have purchased it without OtherOS.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[AlReece45]

Seems a little off:

Yesterday, MegaCorp2020 legally removed $1000 from your safe without permission. You are now motivated to do something about it.

Your options:

1) Do nothing (congratulations laziness)
2) Go through the proper authorities to respond to the wrongdoing (4 years later: after utilizing 80 hours of your time at the beginning of this case, we have determined this was wrong in a class-action lawsuit: you can either have $200 or go against MegaCorp2020 by yourself)
3) Reclaim what was lost on your own (Suspect left a signed blank check under your safe, where your money was, it'll take 2 hours of your time to use it)
4) Respond with revenge (his house has a lot more bullet holes than it used to)

While I certainly understand that ethically/legally the actions may be wrong-- and two wrongs don't make a right-- when someone unethically takes something from their customers, is it surprising that the customers responded with their most logical choice (#3)

Legally: Its probably illegal.

Ethically: There's a lot of gray-- this is a shade of gray; Not a black.

* IANAL: I AM NOT A LAWYER
** Blank check is equivalent to "the signing key is a fixed part of the console's firmware" (use Search Engine).I don't know how accurate it is, but I haven't found any contradicting evidence.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Rational people generally are in the minority like that.

...so says everyone who is committed to acting irrationally on a given issue. The difficulty lies, of course, in the fact that rational people who are in the minority also tend to say the same thing. So, how do we tell the difference? We ask for rational justifications for their beliefs. If they can't provide one, or provide one with faulty rationale, then we settle for them being irrational.

So, what rational argument do you have for believing that buying the console means that you can do what you like? Before you answer, bear in mind that paying for something is not a sufficient condition for ownership (otherwise I would own the DVDs I borrow from the video store).

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[cheekyjohnson]

rampant piracy

Was there even any proof that such a thing existed? And even if so, how is removing an advertised feature from all systems a good solution? Is hurting your customers 'okay' just because only a few of them would use it? They should have better secured their system. Since they didn't, they should deal with it.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[hairyfeet]

And the funny part Westlake? if my Supercenter is like the rest (and I haven't seen anything to tell me different) than less than 20% of the shelf space is now for Sony (and that is split between PS3,PS2,and PSP) with the rest split between the X360 and the Nintendo juggernauts of Wii and DS.

As a PC user and gamer it doesn't affect me (my youngest has a Wii and DS he never plays, both would rather play MMOs now) but those that still think PS3 has a snowball's chance in hell really needs to wake up and smell the fail. Their price today is STILL too high (the local Supercenter sells an X360 at $150, or the big one for like $200 with two games) and sticking on the BD to try to force the switch was a BAD idea, hell the few people I know with PS3s use them as glorified BD players and spend all their time on XBL, and from everything I've read the Cell royally sucks major ass to program for, whereas MSFT embraced their "developers developers developers" mantra and made porting between the X360 and PC pretty easy.

I think the stink over OtherOS was just one more mistake in a huge line of mistakes, one that will ultimately leave Sony in the same position Sega was in after the Saturn. The big question is will they be able to come up with the massive R&D budget for PS4, especially given that MSFT will blow crazy money on the X720 (which they can afford since the stated goal since the first Xbox was NOT to make money, but to get MSFT into the living room so they can tie in Windows and probably the WinPhone now as well) and will they be able to do so at a competitive price?

The bottom line is the next gen should be the deciding one as far as Sony. With the Wii2 and the x720 most likely having backwards compatibility that means that if the PS4 is to have it for better or worse they are stuck with cell, and if they can't get more third party titles and more sell through then I think they could be seriously hurt. Pissing off everyone and getting the regulators involved with OtherOS was just one more stupid move that will end up costing them $$$ in the long run, the big question is will they be able to continue to bleed out like they have been.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[pakar]

Incorrect.... That's only what Sony has been trying to push...

Read this:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110310172538157

160. On its website, SCEA wrote: Why did you delete the “Other OS” feature?

        A. To protect the intellectual property of the content offered on the PS3 system as well as to provide a more secure system for those users who are enjoying games and other entertainment content on the PS3 system, we have decided to delete the feature to address security vulnerabilities of the system.

161. This statement is a fabrication. SCEA gave these reasons as a pretext so that it could attempt to argue that the Warranty, SSLA, and/or TOS allowed for the removal of the “Other OS” feature. In reality, SCEI and SCEA removed this feature because it was expensive to maintain (as they previously admitted when the feature was removed from the “slim” models – but which they conveniently removed from SCEA’s website); they were losing money on every PS3 unit sold (due to poor decisions in the planning and design of the Cell chip as noted above and given the PS3’s extra features); SCEA needed to promote and sell games to make their money back on the loss-leading PS3 consoles (and there was no profit in users utilizing the computer functions of the PS3); and IBM wanted to sell its expensive servers utilizing the Cell processor (users could cluster PS3s for the same purposes much less expensively).

162. SCEA has never revealed how its “intellectual property” would be unprotected through the use of Linux on the PS3. Moreover, the utilization of Linux did not make the PS3 less “secure.”

163. It is virtually impossible to use the “Other OS” for piracy because the PS3 is specifically designed to avoid allowing piracy through using the “Other OS” feature. When the “Other OS” feature is enabled, the software prevents the proper operation of the gaming feature to avoid allowing the features to interplay. In order for a hacker to pirate a game, it is necessary to perfectly emulate the operating system for which the game is designed, including the API, which is the interface for the game OS that supports all of the features of a game. However, when the Other OS is in use, the API and other hardware features are blocked, including the graphics chip in the PS3, which makes it impossible to run a pirated game on the Other OS. As of January 2011, Sony had yet to identify a single instance in which someone used the Other OS to pirate protected content.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[pakar]

EULA's mean diddly shit. ... They mean nothing to me, and I'll break them forever.

They may mean something to your lawyer and they may mean something to your wife when she sees service of process.

Well... that's for countries that allows EULA's... lots of countries EULA's are invalid since they are presented after purchase... Also, a EULA cannot override consumer-laws.. Atleast not in Sweden and Finland it seems, and i think i heard something about Norway... And lets not forget that UK guy that got money back after the OtherOS removal...

I don't care about the money... i just want to keep OtherOS and be able to upgrade so i can play on PSN.......

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[SharpFang]

German law is interesting in this matter: consumer laws state that if manufacturer removed some feature, the user has the right to put it back in the device by means of modifying the device. Which means the moment SONY removed "Other OS" they essentially legalized all modchips and the likes in PS3 in Germany.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[peppepz]

- Use standard protocols, cables and connectors (usb, bluetooth);
- Support many connectivity methods (wifi, ethernet);
- Work with off-the-shelf hardware (sata drives, usb drives, UVC webcams, bluetooth keyboards, bluetooth headsets);
- Allow free storage and loading of media files to / from the console with no DRM getting in the way and no crazy partitioning schemes required on storage media;
- Support more stuff beyond gaming (browsing the web, organizing photos, ...)

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[SharpFang]

Those against say "Games are expensive enough as it is, if there's more piracy they'll get even dearer.

You realize this is bullshit?
Make the games more expensive, more people switch to piracy.
The prices are so high because of massive return on investment expectations and marketing budget that dwarfs development budget by comparison.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Dekonega]

And not just PSN (access to multiplayer, stuff you might have paid for, drm protected content, etc.) or ability to play newer games. You cannot also watch newer Blu-Ray movies and cannot just access to all DRM protected material from other computers you might have in your house.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[cheros]

Sorry, I don't buy your arguments. The value of the PS/3 is irrelevant.

What is relevant is that the product was sold with a specific, DOCUMENTED feature set, a bit like a car is sold with certain accessories. This drives a purchase decision.

If the product post-sale is adjusted to no longer support the original feature set you have been misleading the consumer, which in many countries is termed misleading marketing or misleading product description. It's equivalent to selling someone a car with alloy wheels, and swap them for cheap steel rims the next time the car comes in for a service. It is NOT acceptable in any way, shape or form.

The arguments Sony has brought for this just do not stack up, and they know it. They are just hoping to get away with it, like they have been trying to get away with other creative approaches like rootkitting the PCs of consumers that bought their products.

Sony makes good enough products not to need this crap, yet they persist in doing it. In the process they have lost the trust of many technically capable buyers - exactly the kind of buyers who would shell out a premium to get better kit. It's corporate suicide, but that has either not registered, or someone is sitting somewhere with their fingers in their ears, hoping not to lose face over this idiocy.

I really regret not being able to buy Sony anymore, but trust matters to me. Plenty others to take up the slack.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[SharpFang]

Note, for Win7. Which isn't all that old and loaded with a bunch of new DRM. Meaning possibly players that worked with older Windows didn't work with Win7 at first. And at the time he did seek, it is quite possible there were no Bluray players for Win7 at all.

Later on some have sprouted but he got disgruntled with it, and his expectations have risen: must be free.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, both sides are acting "rationally", but no, both sides do not have good arguments. The "it's my console and I'll hack it if I want to" argument is both rational and good. The "people who exercise their freedoms make life harder for the sheep" argument is rational, but not "good". In the first place it's deceptive to claim that running arbitrary code on a console somehow makes it impossible to prevent online cheating. It's easy enough to build checksum routines into servers to ensure clients are using legitimate unmodified code: Sony had the option of going in this direction for their customers' benefit, or going in the direction of limiting their customers' choices in order to make more profit. This, of course, is what they've done, and this is the guts of the anti-piracy argument too (which is at least honest enough to admit that it's all about the money). No doubt the Sony fans are right that piracy could eventually reduce the quality of available games, at least for a while, by making professional game development less profitable. Hmmm...politically significant freedoms or fancier computer games...tricky...I guess like most such decisions (e.g. "lifting another family out of poverty or buying myself another sports car") we can rest assured that the vast majority of television-educated large-bodied-infants will opt for the fancier games.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Riceballsan]

Plain and simple, the issue here isn't the specific value of the feature, or how many people did or didn't use it. It's the matter of a company having the option to determine that. Car analogy time. It's the equivelent of ford selling a car that comes with an HD radio, then 3 years later instructing all auto shops to disable it on the next tuneup. I don't care if only 1 guy used the other OS feature, it's a precedent that should not be tolerated, that opens up slippyer more dangerous slopes. If a company is not required or expected to keep the same features something is sold with after it is sold, they can force upgrades. Imagine if blu ray players can start determining that disks older then 10 years are deemed out of date and must be repurchased. If the manufacturers can change what you bought after the fact, and secure the right via battles people don't care about to establish a precedent. They have the rights to do it on the bigger things.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Goaway]

Well, that article certainly has no idea what it's talking about.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[jimicus]

I wasn't passing comment on any of the arguments, I just wanted to give an idea of what the typical arguments were.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[QQ2]

Well phrased, en essence this exact behavior is what allows 'evil' in all it's forms to penetrate society. It also shows the danger of the asymmetry in relationship between person en corporation: the symmetry of resources. If Sony loses a suit like this that is annoying and might cost the company some money but it doesn't take away something from a person. You the consumer at best end up with having a pittance paid back to you and at worst having to pay proceeding costs. You have to be mad to engage in something like that. For large issues, especially in multi party governed systems, political parties exist to offset this. In this case though the group is to small and the matter to technical for them to be interested. Thus everything remains as is and the world got a little worse because of it
First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[mcvos]

Maybe OtherOS did make it easier somehow, but the removal of OtherOS is what made it necessary. Apparently it's still necessity and not convenience that's the mother of invention.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

eh, what... Most of that stuff is court-records... Stuff that Sony does *not* dispute...

So i would say... You don't know what you are speaking about..

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[kenshin33]

yes indeed. By that definition windows is very very very open too. (and it is smart of them ... why try to reinvent the wheel)

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Maestro4k]

Sony shut Other OS off because it makes it easier to run unlicensed copies of games and to run homebrew that wasn't sold through PSN. Since game sales are essentially what makes the platform profitable it's rational for Sony to try to protect their bottom line.

Congratulations, you've fallen for Sony's propaganda on this issue. I don't even own a PS3 and I know this is bullshit. What actually happened was Sony removed OtherOS from the PS3 slim. Hackers, Geohotz among them, started looking more seriously at the PS3 to try to find a way to enable OtherOS on the slim (note: playing copies of games and cheating online were not reasons they were trying to do this). Geohotz published some info that suggested he might manage to pull this off using OtherOS to access the hypervisor on a normal non-slim PS3. No actual working exploit to do anything with was released however. Sony saw this, used it as an excuse (or simply freaked out and overreacted) and removed OtherOS from ALL PS3s via a firmware update. Of course Sony insists they didn't actually remove it, users were given a choice: keep OtherOS or lose all access to PSN. (And also not be able to play any future games that required a higher firmware version than the last one that allowed OtherOS.) Not much of a choice as this result from the Finnish board has upheld, it was a removal of functionality no matter what the PS3 owner did.

The predictable happened at that point, hackers started looking at the PS3 seriously and in less than a year it was hacked so severely that the root key was obtained. (Helped along by Sony royally fucking up their public key crypto implementation on the console.) At that point, which was back in December/January, it became possible to start pirating games and cheating online. That point was a good 9 months AFTER OtherOS was removed entirely. (And OtherOS wasn't used to pull off breaking the PS3's security.) OtherOS never allowed cheating, or playing pirated games. But Sony wants gamers to think that's why they removed it, and they have good reasons to be fighting that battle. They're being sued in a class-action lawsuit over removal of OtherOS in the US. If they lose in that lawsuit it could cost them very dearly.

So stop drinking the Sony cool-aid and stop spreading their propaganda. The reality is far, far different than Sony wants you to believe it is.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Maestro4k]

The upgrade was not mandatory. The catch was, if you did not upgrade and remove the feature, you could no longer get on PlayStation Network. Apparently this was unfair.

Well the sheer fact that you had to give up functionality you paid for when you bought the PS3 no matter which option you chose is rather unfair. People do tend to react poorly to having their legitimately owned devices suddenly neutered in some way. And who can blame them? However, this goes beyond just not being able to access the PSN. It prevents you from playing any games online, which is a rather large selling point in many games nowadays. You also can't access any games you had paid for via PSN, something many had done (because despite what Sony wants you to believe many of those using OtherOS also used their PS3s for gaming extensively). You'll also be unable to play many future games AT ALL, because games require certain firmware versions to run, and they'll install the required version if you don't have it. (Which is what happened to the guy in the article, a game he bought installed a firmware update and he lost his OtherOS.)

So this isn't simply a "can't access PSN", it's a major loss of functionality of the console no matter what you do. You basically get to decide between having a PS3 to run Linux on or having a gaming console, whereas before you had both in one device.

I should note I don't own a PS3 so this hasn't impacted me personally, but what Sony did is unfair to consumers and it shouldn't be allowed. We wouldn't allow this type of behavior in any other device (can you even imagine a car company being allowed to remove functionality from a car after it was sold?) so why do we allow it on a console? And Sony is being sued over this in the US as well. They're being absolute dicks in that lawsuit too, including demanding to search the hard drives of the defendant's PS3s. (I am not making this up, check GrokLaw, PJ's done some articles about it.)

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Maestro4k]

Why should it? Have you read any of this thread?

Because people were looking to pirate and/or cheat on PSN. By far the majority of PS3 owners were using PSN and NOT OtherOS, and would be much more put out if the cheaters were using OtherOS to disrupt their gameplay.

I agree not giving any kind of compensation was wrong, but forcing people to choose what was important to them was not necessarily unfair. The only rub is there is no way to downgrade or reenable the functionality, which really should be provided.

Except that OtherOS never, ever allowed people to cheat. That was only possible starting in December/January, some 9 months after OtherOS was removed. (And those who did break the PS3's security didn't use OtherOS to do so.) Also it wasn't choosing what was important to you, it was a choice between losing one type of major functionality or another type of major functionality. It's not just losing PSN, you basically lose the ability to play any future games as well because games require certain firmware levels to play and will install the required firmware if you don't have it. (See the article, this is what happened to the guy in Finland.) As someone else who replied to the grandparent noted, this is similar to a car manufacturer retroactively making it so you can only drive your car on even or odd days, but not both like you could when you bought it.

So perhaps you should read the thread yourself, you're at best misinformed (OtherOS = cheating is total bullshit), or at worst a shill.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Jesus_666]

I corrected myself in an answer to one of your siblings; it was not a cause of believing Sony but of getting things in the wrong chronological order in my head (I put the game copy launcher at the beginning when it belonged at the end).

So here's the fixed rundown: Sony first disabled Other OS on the slim PS3 because it was deemed too expensive (what with the Other OS clientele usually not buying games and all), the hackers tried to get it back, Sony panicked and removed it everywhere and then the hackers dismantled the entire firmware, which in turn enabled someone to write a launcher for copied games.

Of course what I also forget to mention is that the regular gamers' position (non-Sony firmwares enable cheating) is also mainly due to Sony's inept handling of the situation as without that people would probably still not have started messing with Game OS.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[DrXym]

rampant piracy

Was there even any proof that such a thing existed? And even if so, how is removing an advertised feature from all systems a good solution? Is hurting your customers 'okay' just because only a few of them would use it? They should have better secured their system. Since they didn't, they should deal with it.

Rampant piracy exists on the DS and PSP and the Wii isn't looking good either. It's not a stretch to see the PS3 becoming just like the PSP with custom firmware facilitating piracy and legitimate sales taking a dive. Sony would lose hundreds of millions of dollars. It would harm end users too since if the money isn't there to make premium games, they won't be made at all. 3rd parties would desert the platform and it would be left to die a protracted death with a drought of premium titles and sea of shovelware.

As for they should have better secured their system, well yeah, but now they are in this situation you think they should stand back and do nothing? Security should be in depth and adaptable. Fact is they had options and they took them. In this instance they could have kept Other OS, a feature used by a miniscule number of users, and cast their platform to the four winds of piracy, or they could remove Other OS. It's a no brainer.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[cheekyjohnson]

Rampant piracy exists on the DS and PSP and the Wii isn't looking good either.

So you say. But, can you prove it?

It would harm end users too since if the money isn't there to make premium games

How? If hardly anyone uses OtherOS (or has the technical expertise to enable the hacks), then how could they possibly 'lose' significant portions of potential profit?

As for they should have better secured their system, well yeah, but now they are in this situation you think they should stand back and do nothing?

Since it is/was an advertised feature: yes. They won't ever stop 'pirates'. They will be there, OtherOS or not.

a feature used by a miniscule number of users

Yet there's rampant 'piracy' because of it? Taking things away and tricking customers is 'okay' as long as there's only a few of them?

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[DrXym]

So you say. But, can you prove it?

I don't have to "prove" it, it's obvious from the statements made by Nintendo and Sony, e.g. Peter Dille calls the rampant piracy sickening. It's obvious just from looking at the torrent sites. You will also note his comments about the effect piracy has on 3rd parties. Simply put no one will sink millions on a premium game if it cannot be profitable due to the amount of sales lost due to piracy. Instead the platform turns into shovelware hell with perhaps a few 1st party titles dotted around. So users suffer from not experiencing premium games because the money isn't there to justify making them.

How? If hardly anyone uses OtherOS (or has the technical expertise to enable the hacks), then how could they possibly 'lose' significant portions of potential profit?

If Other OS became a means to root the PS3, then it would not be long before custom Linux isos appeared whose express purpose was to install, root the box and install CFW. It wouldn't be a case of people using Other OS for it's legitimate purpose before this happened, but how many would be using it afterwards as a means to root the box.

Yet there's rampant 'piracy' because of it? Taking things away and tricking customers is 'okay' as long as there's only a few of them?

I suggest you furnish yourself with a clue concerning what the threat meant. Simply put it meant the PS3 being totally opened up to custom firmware, piracy and everything implied by that. Sony would have to be out of their minds to permit that and hence the course of action they chose.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody seems to be bringing up what I believe to be the real reason. No I am not an expert, I've just been following the news on this closely. fail0verflow showed that Sony did not use random numbers in their encryption codes. Not only is this a huge security flaw, but it brings up the possibility of lawsuit from their third party developers since they didn't deliver a secure content delivery mechanism. Which I'm sure is promised in the contracts made with those developers. A little distraction on Sony's part so the big dogs don't come nipping at their heals, maybe?

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[cheekyjohnson]

I don't have to "prove" it, it's obvious from the statements made by Nintendo and Sony, e.g. Peter Dille calls the rampant piracy sickening [gamasutra.com]. It's obvious just from looking at the torrent sites.

But how do you or they know how many there truly are? Did they scour the entire internet and find every single 'pirate', past and present?

If Other OS became a means to root the PS3, then it would not be long before custom Linux isos appeared whose express purpose was to install, root the box and install CFW.

I see. So everyone would just magically gain technical expertise. The average person doesn't even know how to install a crack, apparently.

I suggest you furnish yourself with a clue concerning what the threat meant.

I know what it meant. Rampant 'piracy' or not, it was an advertised feature that was used by some people, and it was removed. The people who used it should possibly be compensated for that. If they didn't want it, they should not have put it in, or they should have better secured it. It should be far, far too late after the customer bought it to decide to remove it. EULAs don't override the law, either. I think that there's something terribly wrong if corporations can, at any time, change their terms, and then remove advertised features present in their product from all customers.

If they don't like 'pirates', they should go after them individually like they would have to otherwise, not remove features for everyone because they're paranoid. The 'pirates' will just find a way around this, as well.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[AmiMoJo]

Some gamers have already been burnt by Sony's PSN updates. After the hack came out which used USB devices to get past the security measures Sony did an update that fixed the bug. In doing so they also killed some 3rd party controllers, notably a popular MadCatz arcade stick. MadCatz offered a warranty replacement of affected devices, but since they were on sale shortly after the PS3 launched they will all be outside the 1 or 2 year warranty period.

Whose fault is that, Sony or the people who cracked the PS3?

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Goaway]

The stuff in court records is not the problem. The problem is statements like "Moreover, the utilization of Linux did not make the PS3 less “secure.”" and "However, when the Other OS is in use, the API and other hardware features are blocked, including the graphics chip in the PS3, which makes it impossible to run a pirated game on the Other OS.".

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Anonymous Coward]

[citation needed]

On what basis are you claiming that the statement is inaccurate or improper?

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[HikingStick]

Every technology can be made obsolete by time and progress, but the fact remains that the current state of technology would enable such changes to occur in many existing devices (anything with network connectivity of any sort and flashable memory).

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[zeroshade]

Exchanging something to purchase something is completely a sufficient condition for ownership. The reason you do not own DVDs you borrow from the video store is because your transaction is not a transaction of purchase but of renting. Similar to leasing a vehicle vs purchasing it. If you lease the vehicle, you can't do whatever you want to it, if you purchase it then you can.

Therefore, if I purchase the console then that means I own it. Think about it rationally, I have paid the store money in return for an exchange of ownership of the console. Just like I would any other product. There is no agreement made with the manufacturer in this transaction. The transaction is simply between me and the store trading money for a transfer of ownership of the product from the store to me. After this transaction no one may forcibly remove the console from my possession because I own it.

Now that we've established I own the console, what rational argument do you have for believing that I cannot do what I like with my property?

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Exchanging something to purchase something is completely a sufficient condition for ownership. The reason you do not own DVDs you borrow from the video store is because your transaction is not a transaction of purchase but of renting. Similar to leasing a vehicle vs purchasing it. If you lease the vehicle, you can't do whatever you want to it, if you purchase it then you can.

OK, so what makes you think that you have purchased your console? You paid money for it, but as we both agree, you can pay for things that you don't subsequently own.

It seems that the way you justify that conclusion is that you paid money in a store like you would if you were to buy anything else, without agreements. I suppose that is a good enough reason, if you don't agree with the EULA. If you do, then you are under an agreement, and the case could easily be made that you cannot do what you like to the console.

I should also point out that the inference that "you own it, therefore you may do what you like with it" is possibly fallacious. It depends on what definition of ownership you use. For example, if I buy a house, most people would say that I own it. Yet, I need to get council approvement if want to, say, build an extra five stories on top of it. If the inference were valid, then logically, I would not own the house, because I could not do what I liked to it. I'm happy to say that I do not own the house I paid for (i.e. define ownership around this inference), just so long as we are clear.

Or, you could just ignore my pedantry. I enjoy picking apart those who deem themselves the rational side. More often than not, they don't have a rationale; it's mostly emotion driving their opinion. Of the people who do have a rationale, it often has flaws in it (which I can respect; at least they tried).

Now that we've established I own the console, what rational argument do you have for believing that I cannot do what I like with my property?

I never claimed that I believed that, nor did I claim to be rational. :-)

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[zeroshade]

OK, so what makes you think that you have purchased your console? You paid money for it, but as we both agree, you can pay for things that you don't subsequently own.

It seems that the way you justify that conclusion is that you paid money in a store like you would if you were to buy anything else, without agreements. I suppose that is a good enough reason, if you don't agree with the EULA. If you do, then you are under an agreement, and the case could easily be made that you cannot do what you like to the console.

In any circumstance upon which you are paying for something which you don't subsequently own, you have made an agreement as such. Whether it's the lease on a car or a verbal agreement with the clerk at your local video rental store, there's an agreement made. It's generally understood that if I purchase something, by giving money to a store for a product, in absence of other agreements, I own that which I purchased. It's one of the bases of a market economy.

As far as the EULA is concerned, the EULA applies only to the software that comes with the console. Assuming that you agree with the existance of a EULA. Even in that situation, if you only use the console to tweak and hack and not in the circumstances under which the EULA is applicable, have you really agreed to it? The EULA essentially holds you hostage, can I return the console for a full refund if I disagree with the EULA? In most cases I cannot (I can only trade it in for less, it's considered used because it is open). Thus it's completely rational to reject the validity of a EULA and it's also rational to assume that if you do believe the EULA is valid, jumping straight to hacking/tweaking your console without using the console in such a way that you'd have to agree to the EULA, then you are not bound by the EULA.

I should also point out that the inference that "you own it, therefore you may do what you like with it" is possibly fallacious. It depends on what definition of ownership you use. For example, if I buy a house, most people would say that I own it. Yet, I need to get council approvement if want to, say, build an extra five stories on top of it. If the inference were valid, then logically, I would not own the house, because I could not do what I liked to it. I'm happy to say that I do not own the house I paid for (i.e. define ownership around this inference), just so long as we are clear.

You do have a point that without clarification, the statement "you own it, therefore you may do what you like with it" is not entirely true. Such as just because I own a knife, does not mean I can stab someone with it. Therefore let's consider what specifically can be stated to clarify the statement correctly. Clearly we can say that if i own it, i may do what I like with it providing that my actions to not break the law. That covers the knife example. Your house example is slightly more complex. It can be considered that needing the council to approve the building is "the law" ad thus the statement works, though I'm open to other interpretations. Theoretically, the only thing that "prevents" one from hacking or tweaking the hardware they buy would be a EULA because they don't sign any kind of agreement at purchase. Thus this description of ownership is workable. :) It's obviously not perfect though.

I enjoy rational and logical discussion so this is fun. :) I see the questioning of the rationale as a challenge for me to meet. Though, it is rational to assume someone who is being pedantic about being rational and having rational arguments is, themself, rational lol. If you aren't rational, this won't be as much fun to continue, so I hope you are. As this is quite amusing to me. :)

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[Goaway]

The fact that Linux was used in the original breaking of several parts of the PS3 DRM system.

Re:Why is it being removed in the first place?

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

In any circumstance upon which you are paying for something which you don't subsequently own, you have made an agreement as such. Whether it's the lease on a car or a verbal agreement with the clerk at your local video rental store, there's an agreement made. It's generally understood that if I purchase something, by giving money to a store for a product, in absence of other agreements, I own that which I purchased. It's one of the bases of a market economy.

Agreed.

As far as the EULA is concerned, the EULA applies only to the software that comes with the console. Assuming that you agree with the existance of a EULA.

The EULA would disagree. It is an agreement that you need to "agree" to in order to use the software, but the terms of the agreement could extend to hardware, if not further.

Even in that situation, if you only use the console to tweak and hack and not in the circumstances under which the EULA is applicable, have you really agreed to it?

Well, we could talk about whether or not terms in the (software) EULA that pertain to hardware are legally enforceable or not, but I don't really know much about that. My law student friend told me once that in Australia, where we live, a contract (including an EULA) is only enforceable when both parties understand the terms of the agreement, and so an EULA cannot be enforced without the user actually bothering to take the time to read it. In more natural terms, I would agree that it is not possible to agree to something without first understanding it. In that respect, to me, all EULAs are not true agreements, rather a set of conditions by which users may optionally be bound. I only wish that the courts in other countries would agree.

You do have a point that without clarification, the statement "you own it, therefore you may do what you like with it" is not entirely true. Such as just because I own a knife, does not mean I can stab someone with it. Therefore let's consider what specifically can be stated to clarify the statement correctly. Clearly we can say that if i own it, i may do what I like with it providing that my actions to not break the law. That covers the knife example. Your house example is slightly more complex. It can be considered that needing the council to approve the building is "the law" ad thus the statement works, though I'm open to other interpretations. Theoretically, the only thing that "prevents" one from hacking or tweaking the hardware they buy would be a EULA because they don't sign any kind of agreement at purchase. Thus this description of ownership is workable. :) It's obviously not perfect though.

I agree. What more can I say? :-)

I enjoy rational and logical discussion so this is fun. :) I see the questioning of the rationale as a challenge for me to meet.

And you have succeeded admirably!

Though, it is rational to assume someone who is being pedantic about being rational and having rational arguments is, themself, rational lol. If you aren't rational, this won't be as much fun to continue, so I hope you are. As this is quite amusing to me. :)

Well then, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I am actually a conglomerate of a million monkeys on a million typewriters, with a panel of human editors, who's job it is to edinbfn234 29qwdjjna;w ubeqwruo ruj sdfh

Good move

[RenHoek]

That's should stop a lot of companies from removing features at will..

Re:Good move

[dimethylxanthine]

If Amazon, Apple and Sony get the message this would take care of a hefty share of offenders.

Re:Good move

[Anonymous Coward]

Just curious, can you give examples for Amazon's and Apple's removed features?

Re:Good move

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know. Finland has what, 6 million inhabitants? How many of them bought PS3s? How many PS3s were sold worldwide?

If you assume a target market of, say, one billion possible buyers worldwide, compared to Finland's six million (seems fair enough - the USA, Canada, the EU, Japan and East Asia, Australia/NZ etc., ...), then that's about 0.6%. So it's fair to assume that 0.6% of all PS3s sales took place in Finland, too. Now assume that this actually goes through and that every last Finnish PS3 buyer actually collects their 100 EUR; globally, that boils down to 0.60 EUR per PS3 sold, then.

60 cents. Is that enough to make Sony (or any company) think twice next time?

Re:Good move

[nbetcher]

Sorry to sound like part of the problem than the solution, but this ruling means little since it's unlikely to go any further than Finland. In the places that matter the most to this particular ruling (i.e. the places with the highest PS3 ownership), it's doubtful that Sony will have troubles paying off the judges either directly or indirectly (i.e. campaign funds to pro-business politicians). I applaud the Finnish though - definitely what I wish the US was.

Re:Good move

[gerddie]

Don't know about Apple, but Amazon deleted books at the kindle after people bought them, but at least they refunded the money and they also said they wouldn't do it any more.

Re:Good move

[RenHoek]

Amazon giveth.. http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/10/24/222237/Amazon-To-Allow-Book-Lending-On-the-Kindle

And Amazon taketh away.. http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/03/22/0231214/Amazon-Stymies-Lendle-E-book-Lending-Service

Re:Good move

[Xelios]

It's not even a ruling, it's a 'suggestion' from a government consumer rights watchdog that has no legal power by itself. Courts in Finland will take it into consideration, but nothing's been legally decided yet.

Re:Good move

[Anonymous Coward]

Finland is a member of EU. With any luck it will apply to all of EU.

Re:Good move

[Anonymous Coward]

In my experience (as a Finn) both small and large companies follow their "suggestions" without even complaining. I don't know why they have such power, it could be a desire to avoid getting on their public "blacklist" or maybe courts are very likely to come to the same conclusion. For instance, I got a washing machine replaced five years after the two-year-warranty had expired simply because I mentioned that I'll contact the consumer rights authorities, if they don't at least don't give me a substantial discount on a new one. I had a recollection, which turned out to be correct, that consumer rights authorities have guidelines for how long certain products are expected to last so that they at least function reasonably well. A warranty by manufacturers is only seen as an extension of what is required. That is, a warranty guarantees flawless operation whilst consumer rights authorities decide how long it's reasonable to be able to use a product you've bought. Once I also found an interesting statement by the consumer rights authorities, they said that you can essentially tell software companies to take their EULAs and shove them. So whenever I have a problem with a product I've bought, I certainly don't hesitate to contact them because companies do respect their decisions.

Re:Good move

[syousef]

That's should stop a lot of companies from removing features at will..

Sorry if this sounds like a flame but are you insane or obtuse? All this will do is jack up the price of consoles, dev licenses and games, so that games companies can cover their losses when forced to pay punitive damages.

Re:Good move

[Anonymous Coward]

No it won't - it will cause companies to think long andhard when thinking about what features to include when something comes out. They will now think about what controllers to allow, etc, etc, and effectively lock down the systems even more so retards like the Fin government won't have anyplace to go.

Re:Good move

[nschubach]

Effectively shooting themselves in the foot as people move to XBox?

Re:Good move

[Chatterton]

Each eu country is autonomous for its own laws except if a law come from the eu. But this could send some ideas to other consumer organisation thru eu... I hope so.

Re:Good move

[Posting=!Working]

If this costs Sony a ton of money, then the console makers will stay far away from ever trying this sort of blatant, anti-consumer, post-purchase downgrade again.

Jacking up the price of the consoles and games will just make people not buy them. They can't just charge whatever they want, that's not how economics works. Jacking up developer licenses would cause the console to die entirely as new games would be few and far between.

Re:Good move

[nurb432]

Or adding features.... It could go both ways.

Re:Good move

[Anonymous Coward]

Says something when Microsoft is the least Big Brother of all the console makers.

Re:Good move

[mysidia]

Just curious, can you give examples for Amazon's and Apple's removed features?

Text to speech.

It used to be a feature of all books. At the behest of a certain publisher monopoly (who wants to charge extra for 'audio books'); Amazon turned removed the feature for any publisher who decided after the fact they wanted the feature removed.

Re:Good move

[SydShamino]

You really think the market will let Sony raise the console and game prices, when they are competing now against cell phones ("free" for gaming because they were bought for another purpose) with $1 games?

Do you really think Sony will try to raise their new console price over the ~$800 that the PS3 initially released for, when they are competing against Nintendo and Microsoft in the sub-$500 range?

If Sony tries those things to recoup this cost, it's the fault of the consumers who fall for it.

Re:Good move

[Anonymous Coward]

And we don't punish companies from changing what you bought with your money after the purchase has occurred?

They have to be punished; if they pass the cost on to their customer, then maybe Sony will have less customers. Illegal acts deserve legal punishment. Just because it increases the cost of business for violators, does not mean violators should get off scott free.

If I bought a car from Ford, and later on during a maintenance appointment at my Ford dealership they remove my car radio, I'd expect to have some legal recourse.

Re:Good move

[X.25]

In my experience (as a Finn) both small and large companies follow their "suggestions" without even complaining. I don't know why they have such power, it could be a desire to avoid getting on their public "blacklist" or maybe courts are very likely to come to the same conclusion. For instance, I got a washing machine replaced five years after the two-year-warranty had expired simply because I mentioned that I'll contact the consumer rights authorities, if they don't at least don't give me a substantial discount on a new one. I had a recollection, which turned out to be correct, that consumer rights authorities have guidelines for how long certain products are expected to last so that they at least function reasonably well. A warranty by manufacturers is only seen as an extension of what is required. That is, a warranty guarantees flawless operation whilst consumer rights authorities decide how long it's reasonable to be able to use a product you've bought. Once I also found an interesting statement by the consumer rights authorities, they said that you can essentially tell software companies to take their EULAs and shove them. So whenever I have a problem with a product I've bought, I certainly don't hesitate to contact them because companies do respect their decisions.

Thanks for making me check Finnish immigration rules, you bastard :)

Re:Good move

[Anonymous Coward]

I applaud the Finnish though

"Oh, it's not over yet." - Sony

Re:Good move

[westlake]

That's should stop a lot of companies from removing features at will..

It will stop companies from adding features that appeal to a tiny minority of users and may prove troublesome somewhere down the road.

The next generation "console" may be an Internet app for your Roku set top box or wll-sized Internet enabled HDTV.

There will be nothing in the stores to buy but the controller.

Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[Viol8]

Because most techie types simply will refuse to buy it. Anything Sony has a bad smell about it now and that won't change anytime soon. Sure, techies may only be a small percentage of total buyers but even if its only 1 or 2% thats still a lot of sales money for Sony to lose to its competitors.

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[Tangential]

Indeed.

I haven't bought any Sony branded equipment since 2005 when it was revealed that they believed that rootkit'ing their customers was a valid business practice.

It's about time that a company as overtly evil as Sony gets it comeupance.

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but we techies are also the ones who write the reviews other ppl read before they buy!
 
Our numbers may be small, but we carry a BIG STICK.

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[Immostlyharmless]

Techies may one be a very small percentage of Sonys base customers, however, I've noticed as a group that when they talk loudly and badly enough about stuff, it eventually gets through to the masses, witness the falling market share of Internet Explorer if you doubt what Im saying. The masses tend to listen to techies....when they talk about tech, because the masses *don't* know any better.

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, we've been hearing about how Sony is going to collapse for dozens of reasons that would make "techie types" take their dollars elsewhere. It hasn't happened before and it won't happen now because the masses don't really give a fuck. Feel free to separate yourself from their tech all you want but Sony isn't going to crumble because some geeks get their panties in a bunch over some technology that 99.8% of all consumers never used. Get use to it.

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt Sony caters to techies. Have you read the comments on their blog post regarding the geohot settlement? They cater to blind fanboys and the mentally handicapped.

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[rvw]

Techies may one be a very small percentage of Sonys base customers, however, I've noticed as a group that when they talk loudly and badly enough about stuff, it eventually gets through to the masses, witness the falling market share of Internet Explorer if you doubt what Im saying. The masses tend to listen to techies....when they talk about tech, because the masses *don't* know any better.

Techies might have a bigger impact on browser use than on game console preferences. It's very simple. As a "techie", I configured my parents PC, and have set Firefox as default browser. They don't know better. I do the same with every other PC I install, for someone who doesn't know 0 from 1 in tech-country.

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[Anonymous Coward]

Techies might have a bigger impact on browser use than on game console preferences. It's very simple. As a "techie", I configured my parents PC, and have set Firefox as default browser. They don't know better. I do the same with every other PC I install, for someone who doesn't know 0 from 1 in tech-country.

Funny you say that. When I work on someone's computer and they ask, "what are you doing?" -- I always say (jokingly, of course), "It doesn't matter. I'll make it sound so technical that you'll have no choice to believe everything I say!".

Of course though, I do throughly explain what I'm really doing.

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[thegrassyknowl]

*grr* I sooo moderated in this, but I couldn't let your comment go to waste.

Sony will get nothing of what I so dearly wish they had coming to them without a huge smack-down from the courts.

A lot of these so-called "techies" have kids, partners or both, who will beg and nag and want PS4 for $LATEST_SHINY_REHASH_OF_GAME.

Have you ever tried to tell your wife she can't have something? Go out and get a wife (or husband, but it's not quite the same) if you don't have one and then try tell them that they can't have something they want. Now imagine that they want it because the kids are dead-set on it. "No! Dear, I run the tech in this house and you are not buying Sony! The foot is down!". Tell me how that works out for you!

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[PopeRatzo]

Yes, Sony should "pay", but with its life.

I agree that the only thing Sony could do that would give it back some credit with the techie types would be to come out with an unlocked, quad-core Android tablet better than the iPad and sell it for $99.

And donate the rights to its entire music catalog to the Electronic Freedom Foundation.

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[Anonymous Coward]

You are simple creature, aren't you?
1) You can always bullshit them? :)
2) Find reasons why other consoles may be better, less expensive, less problematic by means of DRM and similar stuff.
3) Simply explain, that Sony can disable games/features and a few hundred bucks you spend on it will go up in flames. That you rather spend money on WII, since it's cheaper anyway and doesn't do this sort of shit with costumers.
4) explain that Sony was putting rootkit and its higly unlikely that PS3 will be secure.

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[mysidia]

Sure, techies may only be a small percentage of total buyers but even if its only 1 or 2% thats still a lot of sales money for Sony to lose to its competitors.

There's another factor.... many techies do have friends and will tell them something about Sony and the PS3 or PS4. If the techie doesn't like Sony, it probably won't be a very positive message that the friends get told.

Techies might influence non-techie friends to buy something else instead; especially after giving glowing recounts of their experience with the Xbox, versus the PS3, an expensive brick.

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a perfect illustration of why the GP's post is wrong. Sony doesn't care about losing that 1 or 2%, there's no company metric for pissed of techies. There are plenty of people out there with money to burn for their kids and themselves that don't give a shit about stuff like this and Sony will be fine. Sorry but you're not hurting Sony at all by not buying their crapware that is completely useless for your life anyway.

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, so some new super secret spin off brand of the playstation will come out as the newest console leader, beating sony at everything, and people will flock to it.

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[joocemann]

I moderated too. And now I'm blowing points because you appear to believe married people can't have a clear and critical talk about expenses and businesses.... or that parents have no control over their children.

People in unstable relationships might not express their concerns, and parents who don't really do their part get walked over.

But not everyone is like this. Your view of relationships and parenting is immature and ignorant.

Had to clear tht up. I regularly talk with my wife about purchases and political/social reasonings about them. My kids don't get what I've already vetted to be appropriate. You can do it too.

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[xtracto]

With Sony (and Apple) it is actually quite simple, at least with my wife. It is very pragmatic things that allows us to decide no to buy certain technology. We usually do not buy a "brand", but a product. If I want a refrigeration I will check several of them and buy the one with the best features.

Nevertheless, with Sony and Apple, all their products are going to be crippled in some way (proprietary memory cards, enforcing proprietary software, etc., ) It is only a matter of *educating* people, once people know the *why*, it is also easy for them to make the right decision.

 

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[sjames]

Well, if you're taking the do as I say because I said so approach, sure, you'll get blowback from hell, and rightly so.

OTOH, why not try explaining that Sony are dirty thieves who think they're above the law. They have hacked millions of PCs and they have gone round in the middle of the night and stolen features people paid for. They are deeply dishonest and criminal in nature and that you want your children to understand that that sort of behavior is unacceptable. Then show her selected news items backing your assertions.

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[smellotron]

Have you ever tried to tell your wife she can't have something?

Yes on both accounts. It's not really a problem. We regularly patronize or avoid stores/brands for moral reasons. Have you considered that your problem here is with communication? Look at this difference:

Dear, I run the tech in this house and you are not buying Sony! The foot is down!

vs.

Dear, we should not buy Sony products because they have repeatedly demonstrated unethical business practices [citations provided]. They lie to their customers and treat them like thieves.

This is not changed by the presence of children. In fact, you have a decent chance at spinning it as a moralistic example in your favor.

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[Weezul]

I'd recommend running an concerted campaign by slashdot based "trolls" to trash the PS4 itself, all it's games, and all game companies that make games for the PS4. Every PS4 related product gets derided mercilessly on Amazon, Review sites, blogs, etc.

Just fyi, I've been absolutely thrilled by Portal 2, clearly the best game produced by anyone for any platform since well Portal, maybe since Starcraft. And it'll never appear on the PS3 or PS4 if Valve is to be believed.

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[Anonymous Coward]

You think PS3 sales are driven by people's wives?

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[Anonymous Coward]

God you're an idiot! Join the real world please.

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[Anonymous Coward]

Works perfectly for me. I have Sony-free for more than 10 years, with wife and children. What is exactly your problem ?

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[Anonymous Coward]

Works great for me always:
'they are not a very nice company, did you hear about their rootkit/what happened with scox/...'
'are you sure you want to trust brand x with that particular piece of information?'
'they are a competitor, let's choose brand y instead'
'closed source is not so nice, with open source you can read the code if you want to know how it works'
'if kids want game z they are free to write their own version thereof and maybe learn something useful while at it'

I think you just need to re-establish your tech running authority =)

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[Anonymous Coward]

You wouldn't know relationship if it came out of your ass, waved hello, and jumped down your throat.

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[Anonymous Coward]

Grow a set of testicles. We won't own anymore Sony items in my house because of this fiasco, my wife understands why, and that's the end of it.

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[Anonymous Coward]

"No! Dear, I run the tech in this house and you are not buying Sony! The foot is down!". Tell me how that works out for you!

It works fine here actually. Me and my wife trust each others judgement and have decided that no Microsoft or Sony product is bought. We have kept that promise for 7 years now and, yes, all our computers run Ubuntu (since 5.04, Mandrake before that). We got our kid a Nintendo DSi (the 3D in 3DS does not make up for the battery life on long travels) to let him game on.
You know, there are always alternatives.

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[xero314]

Because most techie types simply will refuse to buy it.

The real "techie types" will not refuse to buy the PS4 because of this issue. Real "techie types" realize that even though Sony removed this feature, if you voluntarily installed a firmware update, they were also the only console maker to even offer such a feature to begin with. Twice now Sony has officially an operating system that allowed developers access to unique processing hardware. Neither Nintendo or MS has had unique cutting edge hardware, nor offered user the ability to access that hardware fro development purposes. The real "techie types" are still using the Other OS feature on their cluster of PS3s, they were never using the PS3 to play games.

This is going to end up right up there with Sony's other historic mistakes. In other words, it's not going to change much because Sony still offers more for the money than any other console maker.

Re:Sony will get its comeuppence with the PS4

[joocemann]

Ubuntu is the african word for "I don't have time for this shit, but microsoft sucks"

I keep waiting for the Air Force to say something

[Tangential]

They've got 1760 PS3's in a supercomputer cluster (http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomputer.html) I wonder what happens there if they ever need an update or want to add more nodes?

Re:I keep waiting for the Air Force to say somethi

[Psychotria]

They've got 1760 PS3's in a supercomputer cluster (http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomputer.html)

I wonder what happens there if they ever need an update or want to add more nodes?

They'll probably just send a few of their planes with big bombs and stuff out (they have them, right?) to circle Sony headquarters until the matter is resolved.

Re:I keep waiting for the Air Force to say somethi

[Anonymous Coward]

We can only HOPE!! 8)

ps3 sold at loss

[Jeek Elemental]

sony sells the ps3 at a loss, gambling that game purchases will give profit.
With otheros it was increasingly popular to buy them in bulk and use in clusters, with no game purchases.

Maybe they also ran into licensing issues with the cell chip, if it was used for other than entertainment.

Re:ps3 sold at loss

[sergioag]

then they shouldn't have released the console with the "other os" option in the first place.

Re:ps3 sold at loss

[Gaygirlie]

sony sells the ps3 at a loss, gambling that game purchases will give profit.

Actually PS3 hasn't been sold at a loss for a long time now. At first it was, yes, but as time passed the parts needed for production of PS3 fat model became cheaper and that's when they weren't no longer sold at a loss. The slim model hasn't been sold at a loss at all.

Re:ps3 sold at loss

[91degrees]

If they sell at a loss, then they're taking a risk. It's their risk. It's not up to the rest of us to subsidise them if the risk doesn't pan out. We only do that for bankers.

Re:ps3 sold at loss

[hedwards]

And don't forget that as time went by they started to remove hardware functionality such that the PS3 slim can't really be considered the same console as the original was. Seeing as it completely lacks any ability to play PS2 games because Sony felt the need to remove the necessary chips.

I wonder sometimes what it's like to live in a country with actual consumer protection laws.

Re:ps3 sold at loss

[joocemann]

Ps3 hasn't been sold at a loss since 2009

And as we all know

[Anonymous Coward]

Where Finland leads, the rest of the world is sure to follow.

Re:And as we all know

[cyberfin]

I surely hope so, even if it is just on a EU level. In fact I would be thrilled this to be put forth to the EU Commission as a violation of consumer rights and confidence. I know there are lots of big companies that have similar practices and I think that they should be made to an example.

Re:And as we all know

[Anonymous Coward]

They fucked up the Russians pretty good in the Winter War, so it's best to pay attention. :)

Re:I keep waiting for the Air Force to say somethi

[Bios_Hakr]

Same thing we do with Cisco, Microsoft, RedHat, and any other company we buy things from; we don't buy without a good SLA.

If nodes need to be added, we can get them from Sony with whatever firmware revision we want.

Punitive measures please

[Lemming Mark]

A very good step in the right direction, compensating consumers who have been misled. However, I really think that what Sony did requires some kind of punishment. Require them to pay punitive damages to consumers, fine them substantially, do something.

Otherwise, what are we saying? That it's OK to forcibly revoke something somebody's bought so long as you pay for the thing you took away? What Sony did was far more akin to old fashioned theft than piracy *ever* has been. Why? Because they're not getting something for free, they're actively depriving others of valuable things they own. They should be punished for this kind of trick (in a way that they'll notice, rather than just writing off as a minor expense) and / or made to restore the functionality.

This doesn't bother as many people as it should - it's niche functionality, so people don't care, apparently it's OK to swindle as long as it's small numbers of people. Wait a few years and see if you find your music or video playback from non-approved disks and memory cards retroactively disabled or your car satnav is disabled because someone found out how to upload non-approved maps. Then see whether the precedents set on this case look like a good thing.

Re:Punitive measures please

[mysidia]

I agree.. As their punishment; the court should order Sony to turn over all intellectual property related to the PS3 hardware and firmware to the public domain, together with all source code, and full rights granted to the public in perpetuity.

Abuse your customer; misuse your government granted patent and copyrights, then lose those special rights.

Re:Punitive measures please

[Mad Leper]

Hmm, did you purchase the software when you bought the hardware? I don't se any swindle here, the nature of these devices is that they are a combination of hardware, software and services, all with different righted and privileges as granted to the purchaser by the owner.

If I buy a DVD, do I own the rights to the movie? If I buy a smartphone, do I own the network? If I buy a Linux netback, do I own the Ubuntu source code?

Re:Punitive measures please

[puhuri]

However, I really think that what Sony did requires some kind of punishment. Require them to pay punitive damages to consumers, fine them substantially, do something.

Maybe in US that would work, but Finnish legal system does know about punitive damages. Victims are paid with actual damages that in some cases can be significant - like young person injured and not able to work on profession she is studying for: damages are amount of salary earned in life-time. But no slap-like damages to customers. Goverment may ask for wrongfully earned money and issue fine.

Re:Punitive measures please

[BronsCon]

No, I purchased hardware running firmware with a specific set of features; additionally, I purchased a license to use said firmware and features. If Sony wants to add features to future firmwares, they have the option of doing so for free or charging a nominal fee for those additional features; however, it becomes (theft, fraud, breach of contract, some other criminal or civil offense, IANAL but I do know it's a legal liability) when they take away some feature I have paid for without at least offering me a choice between selling the entire system back to them, at the original sale price, or receiving reasonable monetary compensation for the removed feature.

Why the choice? Because someone who bought the unit only for the feature being removed is left with a paperweight they shouldn't be forced to take a loss on, while someone who didn't use the feature or used some other features as well may still want the unit but still deserves compensation for the reduction in functionality.

When you buy a DVD, you buy a license to play it on any equipment bearing the DVD logo. If you buy a DVD that uses nonstandard (but somehow compatible with all existing player firmwares) copy protections and, one day, manufacturers release firmware updates patching their players to better follow the standard; now your DVD won't play; should you be out the money you spent on that DVD just because the DVD manufacturer chose to break the standard for their copy protection? Are player manufacturers liable for updating their firmware to better follow the standard, is the DVD manufacturer liable for selling something that they knew didn't follow the standard (while labeling it as following the standard), or is nobody liable because, I mean, fuck, they already have your money and you agreed to their license terms?

If you buy a smartphone made by RIM, Apple, HTC, Samsung, or, really, any other company that makes phones (note that none of those actually own networks), why in the fuck would you think you owned AT&T's, T-Mobile's, Verizon's, Sprint's, or any other carrier's network? Fuck. Just... fuck. However, if you buy a smartphone capable of being used on AT&T's network AND T-Mobile's network and the phone manufacturer later releases a firmware update that disables compatibility with T-Mobile's network, it doesn't matter whether you're using it with ST&T or T-Mobile, you've lost functionality and should be compensated; if you're using it with T-Mobile the manufacturer should buy the phone back from you at the original sale price, if you're using AT&T the manufacturer should refund the portion of the purchase price that came from the dual-network capability. Are you fucking stupid?

If you buy a Linux netbook, it's probably shipping with some distro that's not Ubuntu, so I'm gonna say probably fucking not. You do, however, get a license to do whatever you want with the source code of the Linux kernel, including (provided that you release under the same license) release and distribute that product. Most, if not all, of the software included on that netbook will have the same license. If you bought that netbook, obtained the source code, developed your own distro that people thought was worth paying you for, began selling it, and suddenly the netbook manufacturer retroactively changes their licensing (assume, for a moment, that they buy this right from the entirety of the Linux community) such that your distro is now illegal, that would be breach of contract on their part.

Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut... Since you disagree with all of this, I have a proposition for you. How would you like to work for me? I can offer you a position as a software developer, with 100% of any revenue your work generates going directly to you on the first day of your second year working for me (you get no pay during the first year, with all revenue being placed in an account for you, not to be touched by me). I can't fire you, no matter what you do, but the terms of your employment can be changed at any time. Surely you have no issues with me making a few changes to your employment terms on day 365. Sound good? You can start tomorrow if you want.

Re:Punitive measures please

[Anonymous Coward]

A perfect punishment would, I think, be this: every person who states that they were using the OtherOS feature on their PS3 is entitled to a second PS3, so that they can have one PS3 for gaming and another for OtherOS (i.e., the same capability as they had before).

Re:Punitive measures please

[Travelsonic]

If I buy a DVD, do I own the rights to the movie? If I buy a smartphone, do I own the network?

Yeah, 'cause that is totally apt as analogies go. Right.

Re:Punitive measures please

[jonaskoelker]

What Sony did was far more akin to old fashioned theft than piracy *ever* has been. Why? Because they're not getting something for free, they're actively depriving others of valuable things they own.

So when copyright holders get compensated for "lost sales", should Sony pay each and every person who bought a PS3 the price they paid as a compensation for a "lost non-sale" (or falsely/fraudulently gained sale)?

"Sony tried to point out that"

[unity100]

"Sony tried to point out that the user agreed to the PS3 EULA, BUT, the consumer board noted that such agreements can't go around consumer laws."

and thats the way how it is, in any decent society based on laws.

however in usa, law, for some reason, can be undone by contracts. and then rabid corporations which get used to this in usa, try to perpetuate the same filth in other countries too, saying that it is 'standard practice' and whatnot.

really. america is producing so much filth in the form of rabid corporations that it suffices for entire world. you people really need to put down the law there. that is, if you can.

Re:"Sony tried to point out that"

[nschubach]

I think your rampant hate for the US is starting to affect your sanity.

You make it sound as though I can fill up a room with people, force them to all sign on the dotted line and fill the room with nerve gas. Laws cannot be 'undone' by contracts. There are no activities that I am aware (feel free to point out one) that can violate the law when dealing with rights of an individual. I cannot think of a single contract that violates basic human rights. Most of what I see is service limitations and you are fully capable of not buying that product.

This Sony ordeal sucks, and I truly think someone should step up in the US courts, but there simply isn't enough people effected by it to raise that concern and it's not like it's going to kill me to not run Linux on my PS3. I have my other computers to do that. I really only installed Linux on my PS3 because I could, but I never used it.

Re:"Sony tried to point out that"

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh another foreigner who doesn't know shit about what they're talking about but has all sorts of ideas on how the US can improve their "evil" ways. Grow a fucking brain.

Re:"Sony tried to point out that"

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 "if you can"

It's a really big if. My Yankee legal system strongly resembles the class and caste systems from the middle ages and if anything it's only getting stronger. Just do find and replace for king/corp along with knight/attorney. We had a revolution to divest ourselves of it a few centuries back. For you all that stayed home any pointers in your history for upheaval of the caste system?

Re:"Sony tried to point out that"

[GeneralERA]

That's a very relevant point, what with this story discussing a Japanese company in a European court...

Re:"Sony tried to point out that"

[pruss]

IANAL, but it seems to me that even if you do allow contracts to do undo some consumer protections, nonetheless there is a false advertising problem. Namely, if Sony was advertising features and requiring contracts that allow Sony to remove the features, then correct advertising would have been: "You can run other operating systems like Linux, unless we choose to remove them." Moreover, it is my understanding that even in the U.S., unfair contractual provisions that a reasonable person would expect not to be there are not valid. If that's right, then a clause in a software EULA that says that if you run the program more than three times all your real property belongs to the software provider would be invalid. And a reasonable person would not expect contractual provisions allowing the removal of advertised features. That said, there would be nothing wrong with a car manufacturer that had you sign a contract clearly requiring you to give back the car's air conditioning system as soon as they request you to do so (since that's a clause you wouldn't expect, imagine that the clause is clearly highlighted and requires a separate signature), as long as they clearly stated in their advertising that they have the right to take the air conditioning back. In that case, the market should reduce the price of the car by approximately the cost of installing a new air conditioning system multiplied by an estimate of the probability of such take-back, and a consumer would have nothing to complain about, having paid a lower price in exchange for accepting this risk.

Re:"Sony tried to point out that"

[Svartalf]

Actually, there's quite a few consumer protection laws in the varying states that you CAN'T just simply agree away your rights- you'd need a Lawyer present and the said Lawyer having advised you that carrying out the transaction voids part or all of your legal rights. Putting verbiage in an EULA of this nature would imply willful violation of the laws in question and would make it worse for the company doing it. It's a bit of a shame that my damages aren't large and you can't really use it in a Class Action suit (well, nobody's tried, I suppose...) but the whole thing is in violation of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act as an example- and the Court will hammer them with sextuple damages (Triple Actual and then doubled for aggrivation/pain/suffering/etc.) as a result of attempting to skirt the law that way.

Re:"Sony tried to point out that"

[Svartalf]

Depends on whether you're talking civil or criminal code. Some things CAN be waived by contract. The laws that aren't impacted in the civil space are ones where the law explicitly states that you can't waive something. You can't waive your protections from deceptive trade practices as an example. Your examples are good ones where you can't waive your rights. However, you can waive many of your employee rights to a court trial and let things be settled by arbitration- as an example of something that CAN be done by contract.

Re:"Sony tried to point out that"

[nschubach]

There are things, like underage (below legal age) marriage, that can be signed off as well. The way the OP positioned himself, it made it sound as though corporations could sign away your life and it's all the fault of the USA. As if you could position yourself to be threatened by signing a dotted line.

Most cases I can think of actually give the citizen more choice though. (ie: I choose to get married early. I accept this waver of trial hearing for faster resolution.) I see no moral dilemma with these examples though unless you are truly an absolute authoritarian and think that government knows absolute best. No law can be waved.

I simply can't think of anything that you wave your rights outright by signing a dotted line that cannot be resolved because "the corporation said so." That's my issue with his post.

Re:"Sony tried to point out that"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Sony tried to point out that the user agreed to the PS3 EULA, BUT, the consumer board noted that such agreements can't go around consumer laws."

and thats the way how it is, in any decent society based on laws.

however in usa, law, for some reason, can be undone by contracts. and then rabid corporations which get used to this in usa, try to perpetuate the same filth in other countries too, saying that it is 'standard practice' and whatnot.

really. america is producing so much filth in the form of rabid corporations that it suffices for entire world. you people really need to put down the law there. that is, if you can.

Who do you think makes the law in the US. (Hint - they're rabid).

Re:"Sony tried to point out that"

[Dhalka226]

You make it sound as though I can fill up a room with people, force them to all sign on the dotted line and fill the room with nerve gas.

Nah. But ironically, in most states, the only thing stopping you from avoiding the wrongful death lawsuits with your paperwork is the concept of strict liability ("that was SO fucking dangerous that it doesn't even matter if they signed away their right to sue you"). You'll still go down for murder, of course, though you might have grounds to argue down the charges.

Anyway, my point is this: You can't necessarily circumvent the law, but if you can legally get people to sign (click) away their ability to sue for their rights, you're most of the way to where you want to be. Unless a state AG or other authorized governmental entity steps in, Sony would be in the clear. Even if they did, it's bad but not nearly as bad as it could--and should--be for them.

I really only installed Linux on my PS3 because I could, but I never used it.

And I never even got to the install it step, but that doesn't mean it wasn't something that influenced my decision to buy. More to the point, a product I paid for is getting less and less features. Other OS is gone from my console after I bought it. Playstation Network has been down for two days and counting, rumor has it because it was hacked for free games. PS3 Slim dropped hardware backward compatibility and eventually stopped bothering supporting software compatibility (luckily for me I have the original) -- I can't speak for others, but that would have ABSOLUTELY been the difference between a sale and not a sale for me; I have too many old PS2 games that I'm not going to just throw away. The cherry on top? This is being done to me, a legitimate, paying customer, because of the fear that somebody, somewhere might be pirating games. Sony, that ship has sailed. Ages ago. And if the Air Force wants to build a cheap supercomputing cluster with them, it's none of your fucking business once they buy it. Don't like it? Don't sell your hardware at a loss.

Did I have a choice in these magical disappearing features? Technically yes. I could have chosen to render my PS3 useless for anything that touches the Internet -- no 'net play, no Netflix, no roster updates for my sports games, etc. That's not a choice in any real sense of the word. It's a choice like a mobster telling you it would be a shame if anything happened to your business leaves you a choice of whether or not to pay them. You do it or your shit gets broken. How this is not a collossal and incredibly damaging class action lawsuit, I truly have no idea. In that I have to side with the OP; there's obviously some idiocy in US law that prevents it. (And yes, to the best of my recollection somebody did try and was shot down.)

Re:"Sony tried to point out that"

[yeshuawatso]

You can't contract around the law in the USA either. For instance, you can't contract your way around murder, around theft, nor around any statute or case law created at any level. Unfortunatly, the only real laws to protect consumers come in the form of anti-trust and collusion. Protecting the consumers' interest isn't something the US holds value to anymore, so instead of convoluted contracts to try to sidestep the laws, we simply allow the largest companies to create the law to their liking, and the contracts cover everything else that's not protecting the corp's interest.

It's not pretty and may not be fair, but capitalism never is fair.

Re:"Sony tried to point out that"

[91degrees]

you can't contract your way around murder, around theft, nor around any statute or case law created at any level.

Surely any time you create a contract transferring ownership, whether by a formal legal transfer or simply by purchasing something in a shop (technically a contract), you're contracting around theft by both parties agreeing that you're the legal owner.

But really the problem is consumer protection laws. Companies are all too willing to add to terms and conditions "By agreeing you waive your right under XXX laws", which tends not to be an enforcible condition in the US or anywhere else. Consumer protection laws would be useless if they could be circumvented so easily.

The main problem is a perception that they can be, and also the perception that challenging the company is expensive. The fact is most countries have a small claims system.

Re:"Sony tried to point out that"

[Anonymous Coward]

The rabid corporations are the law.

Re:"Sony tried to point out that"

[webheaded]

Right on. Thank you for that. I had a good laugh. :)

Re:"Sony tried to point out that"

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean not all multinationals are american? o_O

Re:"Sony tried to point out that"

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of people in finland try to do just that, get around the laws with contracts that say you can't even talk about the contract. which makes it funny, because it makes the whole contracts unbinding in most of the cases, especially when you're required to sign it to get a shot at a job. also, non-competes don't actually count for anything in Finland.

for a long time computers and computer related stuff seemed exempt from the consumer protection laws, basically to protect the fleecing importers(it used to be that you might have had to wait a month, or more, to get a replacement hd with the shop which had sold the hd just washing their hands of the whole thing, this was totally illegal in every sense possible, as the burden of risk should have been on the shop, so the consumer could have estimated his/her budget for having a functional product _in_use_. now if you were running the ps3 to do some calculations, it's the same thing, you no longer had a functional product).

Re:"Sony tried to point out that"

[Anonymous Coward]

however in usa, law, for some reason, can be undone by contracts. and then rabid corporations which get used to this in usa, try to perpetuate the same filth in other countries too, saying that it is 'standard practice' and whatnot.

That's a bit oversimplified. IANAL, but my understanding is that many laws cannot be undone by contracts. For example, when you go skydiving you will sign a contract that says you can't sue them even if they push you out of the plane without a parachute (I'm paraphrasing here...) Anyway, it turns out you can still sue them if they are negligent.

The problem is, a consumer protection law may or may not mean that a consumer can't remove a feature in a later version of the software.

Re:"Sony tried to point out that"

[IrquiM]

Because the same company delivers hardware to US as well.

Consult a lawyer before Sony purchase

[andydread]

It seems that Sony takes their holy EULA to be the end-all for any legal situation more so than most. I would advise people to seek the advice of legal counsel before purchasing *any* Sony products. Or just simply avoid Sony products all-together. When you look at the history of Sony and the consumer you see that they are consistently hostile towards the consumer. Cracking down on home brew, The wholesale disablement of their customers CD-R Drives on their computers with a rootkit. They also have tried relentlessly to lock people into proprietary technologies and control media standards over the decades. Beta-Max, Memory Stick, Mini-Disc, And finally better success with Blu-Ray. And now draconian legal policies against consumer freedom to tinker with products they bought and share information. At this point avoiding Sony products should be a no-brainer. I for one will advise anyone that mentions the word Sony in my presence to stay far far far away from Sony products.

Re:Consult a lawyer before Sony purchase

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless your lawyer will be able to renegotiate the sony contract for you, don't bother. Any lawyer should tell you not to buy/accept the contract.
Try showing the Microsoft EULA for MS Word and MS Windows to the lawyers in your corporation and see the fun happen :-)

Re:Consult a lawyer before Sony purchase

[Mad Leper]

Sorry, all I see from you is FUD and paranoia. No one has forced you to buy any Sony products, and Sony has never broken into my or anyone else's home and forced them at gunpoint to buy Sony memory sticks or else.

The hostility the you apparently feel Sony is directing at you is likely due to your inability to get Sony to bend to your will. Trust me, you represent a very tiny percentage of people and the vast majority of Sony customers have never had an issue with the company. Even the rootlet incident has become so overblown that it's becoming a tired internet meme that's outlived its novelty.

If Sony has something that I need, I'll buy it. If someone I know could be best served by the choice of a Sony product (or any other manufacturer) then I'll recommend that. I certainly won't be modifying my or anyone else's behaviour to satisfy your persecution complex.

Re:Consult a lawyer before Sony purchase

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet another corporation apologist that feels it's perfectly fine to break any law and commit any crime, as long as it is only against a small percentage of the pool of possible victims.

Re:Consult a lawyer before Sony purchase

[andydread]

Thats good for you if it makes you feel better. No one said they broke the law. That was not even the discussion here. The discussion is that Sony in particular is hostile to the consumer and consumer rights and when you agree to their EULA they believe that they have every right to take away something you have purchased from them because of that EULA. I will advise anyone I know purchasing Sony products to seek the advice of a Lawyer before purchasing such products. This is the way the free market works. If a company believes they have the right because of their EULA to remove features after they have been sold to you then the customer has the right to avoid that company's products. And I have the right to alert everyone I know about the practices of this company in the marketplace. If I know someone who purchased a 4-door car and the manufacturer came into their driveway and welded the 2 back doors shut because they feel the EULA allowed them to do that then I have the right to advise friends, family and all my customers to avoid the products of such a company. Sony is such a company. No FUD its real.

Re:Consult a lawyer before Sony purchase

[aonaran]

Just wait till they start enforcing the new one:
http://slashdot.org/submission/1535196/Why-doesnt-SONY-like-Canadians

FUCK the EULA

[Anonymous Coward]

Companies like Sony think their god damn EULA is a "do what every you want at any time" contract that they can change at will. They try to justify crippling the system that people bought with the EULA...but how many times has Sony changed the stupid EULA this year alone?

Excellent remark

[Anonymous Coward]

(mega)corporations find it harder and harder to understand that national laws trump civil contracts. A reminder every now and then is definitely useful.

Re:I keep waiting for the Air Force to say somethi

[Joreallean]

This is why the OtherOS option got removed in the first place. Tell where else you can spend as little as $800,000 or less to have a decryption engine that is probably capable of decrypting even the strongest of keys. Some say that it was a cluster like this that was used to decrypt the Military footage that Wikileaks released and that's why it got killed. The PS3 has a very powerful core when used in a raw unhindered state, especially for the price tag.

Re:I keep waiting for the Air Force to say somethi

[Eponymous Coward]

Easy, they will buy more machines and install the properly signed software that they wrote with their DECR-1000A workstations. They weren't relying on the crippled OtherOS feature.

Re:I keep waiting for the Air Force to say somethi

[toriver]

Well, the PS3 "fats" that supported OtherOS are out of production anyway. I am sure the people who set up the cluster knew that at some point the manufacturer was going to discontinue support for their platform and they had to do everything themselves.

Re:I keep waiting for the Air Force to say somethi

[finkployd]

Tell where else you can spend as little as $800,000 or less to have a decryption engine that is probably capable of decrypting even the strongest of keys.

Not even every PS3 in existence could do this with AES256.

Re:I keep waiting for the Air Force to say somethi

[Posting=!Working]

I calculated a while back that the Air Force cluster would still take a million times longer than the universe has existed to brute force AES-256 encryption (which doesn't have any known cryptanalytic vulnerabilities, so brute force is it). Can't find that post yet (it wasn't here,) so it may have only been as little as 1,000 times the age of everything.

Re:I keep waiting for the Air Force to say somethi

[mysidia]

They've got 1760 PS3's in a supercomputer cluster (http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomputer.html) I wonder what happens there if they ever need an update or want to add more nodes?

You think they lack the expertise to reverse engineer Sony's software and hack around any new restrictions?

It's also probable (more likely) they got a special deal with Sony to supply the hardware in a state suitable to them.

No they won't: They're not charity organizations

[Anonymous Coward]

The laws of supply and demand are in effect here. They already ask as high prices as they can while still getting the consumers to buy the product. To claim anything else is to claim that they are charity organizations that sell products for less profit that they could in order to provide affordable consoles to the general population... But no. The prices they ask are already optimized for maxium profit for the company. They've deemed rising the prices to be a bad idea and that is the case whether they get fines for illegal behaviour or not.

Living the dream.

[westlake]

Because most techie types simply will refuse to buy it. Anything Sony has a bad smell about it now

The PS3 has an installed base of 50 million.

It delivers a sophisticated mix of social networking, high definition console gaming, media play and online services.

It is a friends-and-family oriented home entertainment product - which the Walmart Superstore sells as the perfect compliant for your big screen HDTV.

What the techie is more likely to accomplish than wounding Sony is to give the OnLive! gaming app a boost-up on every Internet enabled HDTV and "Roku" set-top box.

There is nothing in the store to buy but the controller. The cheat, the pirate and the modder are left out in the cold.

PS3 does make a great, if noisy space heater

[name_already_taken]

Given the problem with PSN in the last few days, it appears there's no viable option left but use the PS3 as an offline gaming machine, an ordinary Blu-ray player or maybe a space heater :-)

It makes a fantastic space heater, easily rivaling the Power Mac G5 Quad I have upstairs, which can actually be used to heat the whole upstairs of our house just by having it transcode a video.

I make sure to turn off the power switch on the back of our PS3 after shutting it down, as there were many times I would come into the living room to find the PS3 running its fans at full speed and blasting out heat - hours after it had been shut down. I don't really care to know what it was doing, I just wanted it to stay "off".

They should have sold OtherOS as an add-on

[name_already_taken]

The PS3 was sold as a loss leader...

Maybe they should have priced it so that it wasn't a money loser, or better yet - price it where it was, but sell the OtherOS functionality as an add-on for the difference in cost between the PS3 retail price, and the actual cost + profit margin.

I thought OtherOS was removed due to alternative u

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought the primary reason Sony was pissed about (and removed) the Other OS feature) was because groups were purchasing quantities of PS3's, and loading Linux on them, and creating super-computer parallel computing farms out of them.

As I understand it, Sony runs on the "usual" model of build the gaming platform for more than they sell it for... then expect to recover production costs, etc via software sales... but unit's being used for this alternative purpose weren't ever going to be used as part of the gaming environment in the first place.

Everyone always focuses on supposed piracy... if you pay attention to the video's and statements, the "hackers" involved with breaking the PS3 weren't interested in supporting Piracy... they were supporting the ability to use this boxes for Alternative uses.

Honestly, this whole argument about being able to mod or not mod a game console you've purchased is bizzare. Imaging buying a car and being told you can't mod it at all... there's a whole subset of businesses that survive because of automotive modding. Or buying a computer and modding it to eek out more speed, or whatever.

Piracy isn't always the "end goal" of buying a gaming console and modding it.

Re:I thought OtherOS was removed due to alternativ

[PPH]

You'd have thought that Sony would have anticipated the loss of a bit of gaming revenue from the people who installed OtrherOS for purposes other than gaming. I figured they were allowing this as a loss leader in order to earn some good PR with the software community. I mean, how many supercomputer clusters do you think get built around the world compared to the gaming market?

Perhaps more people switched over to Linux than they anticipated. So much for it being an OS that only appeals to a few mad hackers.

Re:latively benign now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Me thinking you were born yesturday..

Not THAT impressive...

[MidnightBrewer]

Considering that the judgement is only an opinion and doesn't have the force of law. TFA says that the court would consider the board's opinion in a case, but this is nothing like a done deal.

Obviously not in US

[Usefull Idiot]

Sony should pay up 100 euros to a console owner

In the US they would either pay the federal entity directly, or be required to provide a $10 voucher to but another Sony product. If it was a class action suit, the customers would get no more than $2 a piece, because the lawyers had to get paid. That's the US for you though, suing culture, but only the lawyers get paid.

Re:I keep waiting for the Air Force to say somethi

[Anonymous Coward]

USAF: Hi, we need 50 more PS3s for replacements in our computing cluster.

Sony: Sorry, we don't sell PS3s with OtherOS/linux support anymore. You'll have switch your cluster to something else.

USAF: Sorry, I think you misheard me. 2 Delta Force Blackhawks, a C-130 gunship, 2 B-52s, a half dozen F-22s and A-10s, and C-130 transport will be at your office at precisely 10am next Wednesday to pick up the PS3s I'm ordering.

Sony: Yes, Sir!

Or at least that's how it worked out in my (green army man and micro-machines) simulation...

Consoles suck anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just build your own computer; you will be much more powerful than any console and can upgrade to add more memory, or a faster graphics card, or whatever every couple of years.

Re:Consoles suck anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

And you can even install teh lunix on it if you want.

The thing is, most gamers can't be bothered to build and maintain a PC. They don't even know how to spec them properly, they end up paying way to much because the machines labeled "gaming PCs" by the OEMs are unnecessarily pimped out. They don't want to deal with driver updates or pay attention to system requirements. They just want to put in the disc and play games.

This is why consoles are so wildly popular despite the many advantages of PC gaming.

Re:I keep waiting for the Air Force to say somethi

[Mad Leper]

Nothing I guess.

First I doubt that they have all those PS3's signed into PSN, the OtherOS removal was voluntary so I guess they just say "No" to the update and that's that.

Second I'm sure they bought enough spares just in case.

Third I'm sure they made arrangements for servicing & support from Sony, after all no-one would be stupid enough to run a big project like this without arranging for support right?

Well done!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well done, guys.

By suing Sony, you have just ensured that no consumer devices will ever again support Teh Lunix, because it's just too expensive.

Re:I keep waiting for the Air Force to say somethi

[YXdr]

Quick note: some analysts have found some completely impractical vulnerabilities in AES-256 (but not AES-128 !?!).
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/another_new_aes.html

That's NOT how it works

[pavon]

Here is an interview with the guy who built the airforce PS3 cluster. They haven't gotten any special privileges from Sony:

"The server runs on a Linux operating system that isn't available on the newer firmware of current systems," said Mr. Barnell. "We have to abide by the end-user license agreement like everyone else, so we're only able to use the systems as we get them."

If a Condor PS3 breaks it can't be sent in for repairs because it comes back with system updates that are unable to run Linux. After an update, it's useless in the Condor cluster.

"I have a few spares," he said. "But as they break, we'll end up removing consoles from the cluster."

Re:Why is it being removed? Money

[Fallen Kell]

The answer is money. Sony noticed that they were selling a lot of PS3 hardware to corporations and research facilities which had no intent on purchasing games and/or accessories. They wanted to use them to create very cheap and fast computer clusters running linux. Since Sony was and is still selling the hardware at a net loss expecting to make the money back on game and accessory sales, these large number of console sales were creating a direct loss to their profits.

So first Sony did it the proper way and released a new revision of the PS3 which didn't include OtherOS (as well as other features like backwards compatibility with PS1/2 games), but stated they would not be removing OtherOS from existing PS3 (which many people were yelling about since they saw the writing on the wall, because there was no way Sony was going to want to have to maintain multiple firmware revisions for updates). Fast forward a few months and all the people who said that started the "we told you so", after Sony then announced it was dropping OtherOS. It cost way too much to maintain multiple version of the firmware as it causes double the amount of testing and work to add new features or tweak existing ones. After Sony had dealt with 2 or 3 minor updates they realized how much of a pain it would be as well and so dropped it, screwing everyone who was using OtherOS in the process.

I am really glad that the EU is at least protecting their consumers. Now if only the US would wake up as well. To be honest, the EU's response in my opinion is not far enough for the people who actually use OtherOS. Sony should either be forced to add the feature back, give a new PS3 to the consumer (and allow the consumer to install the older firmware on their existing PS3 which supported OtherOS), or give a full refund of the purchase price. That is the only way to make the consumer "whole" again.

That's not how pricing works

[artor3]

I see posts like this all the time. "We can't punish the companies, because they'll just jack up prices to push the cost on to us!" That's what the companies want you to think, because that way they don't get punished.

The truth is that the price of a good has very little to do with the cost to make it. The price is set based on how much people are willing to pay -- and if that price isn't high enough to turn a profit, the product doesn't get made.

People are willing to pay $50 to $60 for a video game. If Sony tries to jack up prices, they'll just lose market share because people aren't willing to pay that much.

No, Sony will eat this loss and avoid incurring it in the future, just as the GP suggested.

Re:That's not how pricing works

[syousef]

I see posts like this all the time. "We can't punish the companies, because they'll just jack up prices to push the cost on to us!" That's what the companies want you to think, because that way they don't get punished.

That is NOT what I'm saying AT ALL. I said they should not be punished in that way and you leapt to the conclusion I wanted to let them get away with it. They should be forced to reinstate the feature, not charged money (ultimately passed on to the consumer) and allowed to continue on their merry way. You should not be permitted to take away something you've sold after the fact. Period.

To Get the PS4 Project Moving

[bill_mcgonigle]

None of the usual explanations I've heard make much sense under careful examination.

Sony needs to keep things moving along so people will buy the latest and greatest and keep their revenue cycle going. The PS4 will do that for them.

But, the PS3 was going gangbusters. No piracy scene worth worrying about, good-enough graphics for most users, and a sales plateau due to average gamers having a decent stash of games by this point.

By killing the OtherOS feature which the geeks liked, they initiated the inevitable result of the PS3 getting completely rooted. This became sufficient justification inside Sony to get the PS4 project green-lighted, and to get the big games developers interested in re-writing for a 'more secure' platform.

Bait and switch

[Cybrknight1970]

It's amazing that this actually flew here in Australia, as such 'bait and switch' tactics are highly illegal.

Flogging...

[AlienIntelligence]

The problem with that... the amount of ACTUAL
people that would attempt to claim $xx would be
trivial enough as that this would be nothing to them.

What needs to be done:
THIS is a Japanese company. We need to go old
school and give the dumbasses that incarnated this
idea a good dose of "hey, you'll think twice next time".

-AI

Sony's forced updates - license issues?

[Channard]

I used to have a 360, and I remember Microsoft rolling out various 360 dash updates etc. But you were never forced to accept them - worse case scenario, you weren't allowed on Live till you updated.

Sony, on the other hand, force you to apply an update before you can play a game if your system has the lower version of the game. This has always bugged me - they're actually stopping you playing games you legally buy unless you let them modify the functionality of your console. And that's what they are doing - granted, every update may not remove a feature like OtherOS, but they're still altering a product that you legally own.

What happens if you say no to the update's licence terms anyway? Has anyone tried returning a game because they refused to accept/apply the update? It seems kind of a drastic thing to do, but I'd like to see this get tested - I can't see many stores accepting an opened return on the grounds of not accepting the licence/update.

What R&D has the ps3 got?

[cheekyboy]

Sony didnt make the graphics chip, they got Nvidia to make it, zero R&D, just a purchase.

Second, Cell chip, IBM did it all, its just a cost item, like ram.

BluRay, well..... thats about it.... but now i can buy BD players for $49 at cheap grocery retailers.

ps4 = more ram, latest nvidia chip, more wireless N, maybe 16 cells (dual core cell).

besides the cell, any one with 1M and a lab can make a ps4 prototype considering 90% of the parts are off the shelf.

That billion in r&d is not r&d , its pre-order costs for factories/training/people/land/power and machinary, and parts from 1000 suppliers.

Their biggest cost is probably paying level3 for the data center for all the servers they need and for all the software development kits/server code they need to do.

They long gave up on building their own hardware, its just another 'slim PC'

Re:What R&D has the ps3 got?

[SharpFang]

Don't forget the DRM. The DRM put in the console must account for a lion share of the R&D costs... ...unless they bought it from someone too?

+100 points for the Finnish

[johncandale]

Keep on rocking

Re:I keep waiting for the Air Force to say somethi

[Legion303]

I hear they're pretty good with elliptic curve crypto, though. Well, depending on the implementation.

*cough*