Japan Says No To PlayStation Network Restart

tekgoblin writes "Although Sony may be restoring services on the PlayStation Network around the world, one country has said 'No.' Japan has not yet given Sony approval to start up their online services, making the company wait until they have proven that they have taken the necessary measures to secure their network against another incident."

Comments

Bravo Japan!

[cpu6502]

A government that actually does its job (protect the citizens' rights). Good for them.

Re:Bravo Japan!

[somersault]

That's no excuse to be lazy about keeping up to date with patches, and apparently having no disaster recovery plan.

Re:Bravo Japan!

[cpu6502]

>>>"To Serve and Protect"? No. "To Punish After the Fact".

Excellent point. Didn't think of it in that way.
Of course, in order to prevent ANY kind of disaster/theft/etc (i.e. zero such events), the government would have to put its nose into everything. Seems kinda... invasive? Of course if they did that with corporations I'd certainly have no objections.

Re:Bravo Japan!

[skywiseguy]

wow, someone read bruce schneier's interview on kotaku about the PSN outage!

Kudos to Japan

[Hultis]

This is a very nice move by Japan - rather than bending their laws to maximize corporate profit, a disturbing trend, they do the absolute opposite and force Sony to take measures that protect customers (which will cost Sony quite a bit). Customers win, Sony loses. Excellent, they really deserved it!

Re:Kudos to Japan

[Hultis]

Nope, but when a country bends over for the companies it might be time to think it over.

Re:Kudos to Japan

[LastGunslinger]

Your logic would imply slavery is fine so long as the business employing it makes money. Profits are neutral. The methods used to make them are not. Neither the consumer nor the worker should be harmed so the company can profit.

Bedfellows

[Krazy Kanuck]

It says a lot when the country a company is headquartered in tells them their stuff stinks.

+1 Japan for asking what everyone else lacked the sense to question.

Re:Bedfellows

[idontgno]

This is certainly not something I would have expected of the Japanese government, although I'll admit I hadn't thought very much about it since the business-friendly era of the "bend-over-backwards and kiss business' butt" MITI. Of course, that was international trade, and this is about domestic business.

I have the beginnings of a theory, though. The recent revelations about the government's virtually non-existent oversight over the nuclear power industry, and TEPCO in particular, may have sensitized the entire Japanese cabinet and bureaucracy to public perceptions of being asleep at the switch... hence, the surprising and almost-literal leaping to the defense of the public interest against a danger to network and financial security. (Yeah, comparing Fukushima to the PSN hack is ridiculous, except for the change in behavior of the government between the two events. Correlation != causation and all..)

As a theory, it strains my credibility, and I just thought it up, but who knows?

"Prove", ie. "Patch Apache"?

[cmholm]

proven that they have taken the necessary measures to secure their network

IIRC, one rather glaring issue was the use of a bone-stock Apache install that evidently hadn't kept up with any security updates. I wonder what sort of Powerpointology Sony will be needed to prove worthiness, and whether there's enough folks at the Media and Content Industry department to knowledgeably gage the degree to which Sony got its act together?

Re:"Prove", ie. "Patch Apache"?

[wierd_w]

There were also the glaring issues of not hashing passwords, storing all kinds of sensitive information in plain text, failing to offer sunset on old customer data, etc...

Re:"Prove", ie. "Patch Apache"?

[zen_la]

"One other point to clarify is from this weekend’s press conference. While the passwords that were stored were not “encrypted,” they were transformed using a cryptographic hash function. There is a difference between these two types of security measures which is why we said the passwords had not been encrypted. But I want to be very clear that the passwords were not stored in our database in cleartext form. For a description of the difference between encryption and hashing, follow this link." Source: http://blog.us.playstation.com/2011/05/02/playstation-network-security-update/ [playstation.com]

Re:"Prove", ie. "Patch Apache"?

[Chris Mattern]

I believe user2 when he says this. He seems like a trustworthy guy.

Re:"Prove", ie. "Patch Apache"?

[marcansoft]

The same Powerpointology that was used to design the PS3 security system. It includes just about every single crypto buzzword and system under the sun. AES, RSA, Elliptic Curves, CBC, ECB, CTR, CFB, RC4, SHA1, MD5, HMAC, SSL, Full Disk Encryption, Isolated Security System, Hardware Decryption, Secure Boot, Per-Console Encryption, Tokens, Hypervisor, blah blah. You name it, it's in there, used in all the wrong ways and littered with holes.

This is the problem with Sony: they do Security by Powerpoint. Buzzwords a secure system do not make.

Nintendo's security designers at least knew what they were doing, since the Wii's security design is logical, consistent, quite simple (simple is better), and uses the right technologies in the right places. Sadly, their code monkeys failed at coming up with an implementation with fewer holes than swiss cheese. Microsoft is the best of the bunch, as they have a solid, powerful security system with an extremely good implementation so far.

Re:"Prove", ie. "Patch Apache"?

[wierd_w]

There was a whole thread on the PSX-SCENE forums that was over 11 pages long discussing this issue. It was independently verified by several forum members. Sadly, I am at work right now and we have some draconian internet filtering set up, so I cant link to the forum thread. You can find it yourself though. It was in the news section, dated april 30, 2011.

Names and some other information were redacted to protect people from corporate retaliation; remember, this was released at the height of the Geohot lawsuit.

Re:Sony no longer the favorite?!

[JockTroll]

Seems like Japan used to bend over backwards for Sony.

That happened to be the case. However after one earthquake, one tsunami and one muthafucking nuclear disaster they've grown some extra skin and decided Sony deserves some good facefarting.

Sony is claiming this is voluntary...

[onlysolution]

Sony is saying that this is a voluntary effort to cooperate with Japanese authorities, as they are not actually legally obliged to wait for permission to restart their services in Asia.

However, it's worth pointing out that in Japan it is common to allow companies and individuals to take "voluntary" actions to save face or prevent a public appearance of contention. There is also generally a greater public expectation of privacy amongst the Japanese, so their regulators are more less amused with Sony than American authorities.

Make of Sony's voluntary claims what you will.

Re:/. Hypocrisy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. It's almost as if slashdot commenters weren't just one homogenous unit with a fixed opinion on each issue, but instead were a collection of individuals with differing views on any given subject.

Re:Censorship

[obarthelemy]

censorship is about preventing speech because of its content, this is about preventing a database of personal and financial details from going online because its safety is dubious ?

Re:Say no?

[betterunixthanunix]

The service is not legal if the Japanese government does not allow Sony to operate it. You know, kind of like how buying and selling marijuana is illegal in the United States?

What constitutes a "legal service" is entirely dependent on the law of the land. If you are in a country where the law requires you to seek government approval before operating a service, then your service is only "legal" if the government allows it.

Now, whether or not it is morally acceptable to have such a legal system is another question entirely.

Re:/. Hypocrisy?

[betterunixthanunix]

Perhaps because the Japanese government is pressuring Sony to do more to protect user data, whereas the US government is pushing for companies to make it easier to access that data.

Re:Censorship

[betterunixthanunix]

Whose ability to speak is being suppressed?

When it's not a legal service

[name_already_taken]

Can someone remind me how can a government say "no" to someone operating a legal service again?

When it looks like you're operating it in a way that does not comply with all of the laws.

You can read into that the Japanese government believes that PSN is not a legal service in Japan if PSN does not protect the privacy of the users.

Re:they should force them to readd other os!

[Riceballsan]

Again I hold to the fact that I am not convinced that this breach is even connected to geohot in any way more then an opportunistic coverup to cover their asses. I think this was a mass CC# theft intended to use the current tensions between anon and sony as a distraction, possibly even borrow some of anon's members to do a DDOS and keep sony + legal authorities busy chasing 13 year olds while the criminals are unloading money into offshore bank accounts.

Re:/. Hypocrisy?

[Skidborg]

Because it is different people giving the different views on the same subject.