Comparing apples to oranges. Sony does *NOT* get anal over what you do with their VAIO pcs.
Instead, if you make a proper comparison, you'll have to look at Sony's competitors in the console market, and you'll see that Nintendo and Microsoft DO get anal over what you do with the console *you* paid and *you* own.
Microsoft will irrevocably ban your console if they detect you've changed your DVD drive's firmware. And the Nintendo EULA I "agreed" to when using my Nintendo DSi says that Nintendo has the right to *brick* my console if they detect signs of piracy.
Then in your case, you have "out of band" information which is not contained in the image (anatomic knowledge). You're not adding globally missing information, you're combining the visual information with other information coming from an external source.
In our case we do not have that: the algorithm does not know what the 8-bit sprite was meant to represent, so we want to reconstruct an unknown arbitrary function of which we know a (very) limited number of samples. Which is mathematically impossible because there are infinite functions that satisfy those requirements.
This allows elements to be reconstructed even when information is partially missing.
I disagree with this wording: either the information is there, and then it can be extracted by using whatever processing technique, or it isn't there, and then nothing can't be done about that. We can't recover "partially missing" information just like we can't build "partial perpetual motion" machines.
This methods aims at recreating an "artist's depiction" of the pixelated image, which in many cases might be more pleasant to look at by humans, and in some cases won't. But in all cases, the resulting image has nothing to do with the "real" image before pixelation, because that information is unrecoverably lost.
In the last hours I changed my mind, and I'm definitely convinced that Sony didn't spend enough resources in security; all the other successful hacks against other sites belonging to Sony speak clear. They're inexcusable.
I didn't change my mind on the roles though; the criminals are the hackers. Sony is a negligent victim. Users will probably pay more than anyone else in the end.
I thought that a user-contributed ROM couldn't be as reliable as the stock one.
Then I got frustrated for the bugs, the limitations and the obsolescence of the single 1.6 ROM that HTC had granted to my phone and I decided to void the warranty and install CM.
It turned out that CM is much more stable than the stock ROM: just to make a single example of its quality, the original ROM had a delay of a couple of seconds (!) between pushing a button on the headset remote and the phone executing the matching action; and HTC was perfectly happy with that.
And above all, by virtue of being updated to Gingerbread, the phone now has most of the features that I was missing when I switched from Symbian to Donut.
My only concern is that my phone contains a lot of personal information, so I'm a bit afraid of exploitable bugs (or backdoors - hey, you can never be too cautious). But since CM is fully open source, I feel a bit safer for the "many eyes" principle.
Oh well, my PS3 already sent all my personal details to the hackers anyway:D .
Yes of course, there's a separate installer which bootstraps the market and all other closed source Google apps onto the device.
I don't know if it is 100% legal to use Google's closed apps on a unofficial firmware; perhaps it is, because the phone hardware was licensed to run them originally. So far, it doesn't look like Google have had particular problems with people doing this.
It's rather telling that a company as large as Sony would need to bring in a third party in order to diagnose or secure their network. Any company that large, and handling that type of data, should have that kind of personnel in-house and on payroll BEFORE a breach, not after.
And you can say that because you know Sony's organizational chart or out of prejudice?
Moreover, now that the breach has been done, what should Sony do if not consulting specialists about the matter?
Sony shouldn't have been poking the hacker beehive when they didn't have their network secured.
So for fear of the criminals, they should have kept letting the hackers download games for free from their developers' network, and disrupt their honest gamers by playing against the rules in their gamers' network? This is called mafia. Do you think game publishers and players would have accepted that?
Yes, of course it's the fault of the thieves: private property is private proverty, doesn't matter if the owner is evil or a moron or both. I could then sue the storage company if I suspected that they left the doors unlocked when they had promised, either explicitly or implicitly, to lock them.
In this particular case, how can you say that Sony left the doors open and the thieves didn't pick the lock?
You changed the subject.. the subject is Sony probably lost my info.
No. The subject is your speculation about the cause of the "loss of your info". What's certain: hackers. What you speculate: Sony's incompetence. We'll see.
If they had proper security it probably wouldn't have happened.
There is no proper security which can't be defeated by more proper hacks.
Blaming hackers does not absolve sony of responsibility.
Only the judges absolve or condemn. And they will, but only after seeing the facts, which you don't know.
I gave them info with the understanding they would protect it. They did not.
How do you know? What if the hackers exploited an unknown vulnerability?
They tried to bribe users with free games.
Bribe? It doesn't work that way. If they are responsible for the data loss, they'll have to pay a compensation anyway.
NOT because the service was down but because they probably lost my info.
No. Check your mail. Since they lost your info, you'll have received, like all the others, a mail from them which says:
To thank you for your patience during the PSN downtime, we'll soon launch the Welcome Back program for all of the PSN users, which includes free titles to download [...]
See? Not even they pretend the games to be a compensation for the loss of data. They can't, because it wouldn't be adequate.
In fact its almost a certainty they lost my info. You tried to spin it as...
Them being nice because their free service was down.
Which, as you just heard from Sony themselves, is the case.
Sony is responsible for protecting that information. They failed.
So if somebody breaks in my home then "I failed", if somebody robs my bank "I failed", if somebody kidnaps my children "I failed"? I don't think so, that's why we have laws that punish theft, robbery, kidnapping, and hacking secured networks.
Of course people have all the rights to suspect that Sony was negligent, and that's what the lawsuits which have been filed will ascertain.
Why would anyone trust them with updated information in the future?
For the same reason most people trust Microsoft, Google, Apple and every other company whose software has been cracked before.
Ah, because they distracted with shiny games and stuff.
I can give you another example of people whose rationality is distracted by emotion: we don't know *anything* about how the servers were hacked, in fact we don't even know what happened exactly, yet some of us already know that the fault is all of Sony.
Also, that personal information could be used for identity theft.
You think identity theft is based off a credit card number? It's based off the personal information. The credit card is just one small way to abuse the hacked data. Even if the credit card data was not obtained, the personal information can be worth much more.
My name and address are publicly available in the phone book. My email address is scattered all over the internet. My date of birth is public. Is it so easy for people to harm me by knowing them?
You don't think it had anything to do with all that personal information?
No, because that information has been stolen from them, using criminal methods, so for what we know by now, they're the victim. Until a lawsuit will prove otherwise. In that case, Sony will possibly go bankrupt because I suspect the compensation would be much higher.
or because they aren't absolutely sure that the credit card data wasn't compromised?
Definitely, the damage done by the hackers could be severe. Fortunately, without the security code, they can't use that data unless they do some social engineering.
Nice attempt to spin this, but you're comparing apples to oranges here.
I recognise that the two items under comparison are different. The Apple is found to contain yet another manufacturing defect that makes it overheat and stop working. The Orange doesn't, as stated officially by both the manufacturer of the hardware and the programmers of the software. Guess which one gets the bad press? Yeah, yeah, they probably deserve that because of the rootkit fiasco of 2005.
As well, them giving a year of credit protection is worthless.
I clearly remember many comments on Slashdot which invoked credit protection before Sony declared they would be offering it.
3-5 years would be more appropriate.
Yes, but then why not 6-7? Criminals can wait. The truth is that the only solution to sleep well is to change the credit card number, which should be doable in 1 year. Again, I attribute the hassle of doing so to the hackers who performed the attack.
Which (if it really happened, since there's no proof so far that the hackers actually got the information), is a fault to be attributed to the hackers and not to Sony. Unless there is evidence of negligence from Sony's side, which of course will be found by a judge during the lawsuits that are sure to follow, I won't blame the robbed, I will blame the thief.
Selling faulty consoles which melt under normal operation would have been Sony's guilt. But that's the specialty of others.
You can solve a part of your problem by attaching a $5 650-in-1 usb card reader to your new playstation. It will probably read more cards than the native one found in the old models.
Acknowledge the problem, fix it (or replace it in this case with a superior model), and give compensation.
No nonsense customer service, and it gives gives them good PR.
They're not doing anything good. That's the minimum they can do for bricking their users' consoles. Hadn't they done that, they would get sued, lose, and then they'd have to pay both a new console and the lawsuit costs.
Compare that to Sony...
...who only gave away 3 high rated games, one or two months of free premium service, a year of credit card protection, and other junk I can't remember for 3 weeks of downtime of a free service. Those bastards.
They should have done it sooner. The corporations managing the server-side of our smartphones know everything about our lives, and somehow selling this information is their core business. I can't see how my physical position wasn't considered a sensitive information until now. Especially in an era where such information can technically be broadcast to the whole world in a matter of seconds.
I think this is going to get even more important with HMTL5 geolocation APIs. Have you ever tried them? They can give a web page a surprisingly accurate position of the visitor, who typically only has to click some kind of confirmation infobar. Useful, but creepy, too. (And they're surprisingly accurate even without GPS - I guess Android (or equivalent) phones do a very good job of sniffing WiFi access point positions and reporting them to Google (or equivalent)).
It is assumed that data collected by governments will be stored according to the law, and that it will only be accessible to the public authorities, and only with a warrant from the judicial authority.
The same can't be said for the data collected by private entities: even if they do their best, as a corporation, to honour the privacy of user data, the risk of single malevolent employees abusing their position to access the data needs to be taken into account.
About surveillance filming: at least in my country, the presence of video-recording equipment is notified by signs, so in theory you are never filmed without knowing. By the way, sometimes the signs itself are as useful as the real cameras, as a deterrent; fake surveillance cameras are quite common, too.
You mean, just like the Wii and X-box 360 are still secure? After all, they did exactly as you suggest Sony should have done.
I mean that all the PS3 hacks started from its Linux feature. Which is a fact. Thus, until now (five years after the console was released), we can say that if the PS3 hadn't Linux, it would still be safe.
The people who cracked the PS3 found the security severely lacking. Apparently the PS3 security and Sonys network security was built to the same standards.
If it was so, then they would have cracked the console a few weeks after it was out, as they did with the Wii and the XBox 360. Saying that "the security was lacking" after it took you five years to crack it, has no credibility.
I'm not sure about Nintendo, but Microsoft has learned a lot about security since the days of Windows 98.
That's why cracking Windows has got easier and easier since the days of Windows XP.
If anyone want to claim that the X-Box 360 security is as bad as the PS3, I'll want to see some pretty good evidence before I take said person seriously.
I claim that the X-Box 360 security is much worse than the one on the PS3, because you can download from a web forum every single game released for the console, and play it for free, even online if you're cautious, and it has been possible to do so since a few weeks after the console launch. Good enough as evidence?
If the same resources had been thrown at the PS3 and X-Box 360, the X-Box would have lasted longer.
And that's your opinion, not backed by facts, which tell a much different story.
What are you talking about? I have a PSN account and never entered a credit card number anywhere. Furthermore, you can log off PSN anytime you want, and keep playing, if for some reason you don't like trophies.
All PS3 hacks either started on Linux or explicitly required Linux. The final PS3 hack was possible only because the hackers could remotely control from a PC a fat PS3 running Linux (see the fai0verflow press conference on youtube).
So Sony paid dearly the fact that they did make the most open gaming consoles, giving their users an official way to run Linux on both the PS2 and the PS3. Hadn't they done so, just like their competitors such as Microsoft and Nintendo who would not dream of letting you run Linux, their console would still be secure.
Oh, and about the desire to run homebrew software vs. to play games for free: the very first functional hack of the PS3 (the USB dongle one) was released by commercial companies for the sole purpose of running pirated games. And it was devised by looking at the memory dumps of the console, which could only be obtained from Linux by running "super theoretical hacks".
Slashdot Mirror
Instead, if you make a proper comparison, you'll have to look at Sony's competitors in the console market, and you'll see that Nintendo and Microsoft DO get anal over what you do with the console *you* paid and *you* own.
Microsoft will irrevocably ban your console if they detect you've changed your DVD drive's firmware. And the Nintendo EULA I "agreed" to when using my Nintendo DSi says that Nintendo has the right to *brick* my console if they detect signs of piracy.
We're talking about the PS4, not the Xbox 360.
In our case we do not have that: the algorithm does not know what the 8-bit sprite was meant to represent, so we want to reconstruct an unknown arbitrary function of which we know a (very) limited number of samples. Which is mathematically impossible because there are infinite functions that satisfy those requirements.
This allows elements to be reconstructed even when information is partially missing.
I disagree with this wording: either the information is there, and then it can be extracted by using whatever processing technique, or it isn't there, and then nothing can't be done about that. We can't recover "partially missing" information just like we can't build "partial perpetual motion" machines.
This methods aims at recreating an "artist's depiction" of the pixelated image, which in many cases might be more pleasant to look at by humans, and in some cases won't. But in all cases, the resulting image has nothing to do with the "real" image before pixelation, because that information is unrecoverably lost.
In the last hours I changed my mind, and I'm definitely convinced that Sony didn't spend enough resources in security; all the other successful hacks against other sites belonging to Sony speak clear. They're inexcusable.
I didn't change my mind on the roles though; the criminals are the hackers. Sony is a negligent victim. Users will probably pay more than anyone else in the end.
Google : Sony = Rooted Android : Linux on PS3
Then I got frustrated for the bugs, the limitations and the obsolescence of the single 1.6 ROM that HTC had granted to my phone and I decided to void the warranty and install CM.
It turned out that CM is much more stable than the stock ROM: just to make a single example of its quality, the original ROM had a delay of a couple of seconds (!) between pushing a button on the headset remote and the phone executing the matching action; and HTC was perfectly happy with that.
And above all, by virtue of being updated to Gingerbread, the phone now has most of the features that I was missing when I switched from Symbian to Donut.
My only concern is that my phone contains a lot of personal information, so I'm a bit afraid of exploitable bugs (or backdoors - hey, you can never be too cautious). But since CM is fully open source, I feel a bit safer for the "many eyes" principle.
Oh well, my PS3 already sent all my personal details to the hackers anyway :D .
I don't know if it is 100% legal to use Google's closed apps on a unofficial firmware; perhaps it is, because the phone hardware was licensed to run them originally. So far, it doesn't look like Google have had particular problems with people doing this.
Yeah, but they also happen to be among the most expensive ones, too :-/ .
The worst thing about this story is that some people died.
It's rather telling that a company as large as Sony would need to bring in a third party in order to diagnose or secure their network. Any company that large, and handling that type of data, should have that kind of personnel in-house and on payroll BEFORE a breach, not after.
And you can say that because you know Sony's organizational chart or out of prejudice?
Moreover, now that the breach has been done, what should Sony do if not consulting specialists about the matter?
Sony shouldn't have been poking the hacker beehive when they didn't have their network secured.
So for fear of the criminals, they should have kept letting the hackers download games for free from their developers' network, and disrupt their honest gamers by playing against the rules in their gamers' network? This is called mafia. Do you think game publishers and players would have accepted that?
In this particular case, how can you say that Sony left the doors open and the thieves didn't pick the lock?
You changed the subject.. the subject is Sony probably lost my info.
No. The subject is your speculation about the cause of the "loss of your info". What's certain: hackers. What you speculate: Sony's incompetence. We'll see.
If they had proper security it probably wouldn't have happened.
There is no proper security which can't be defeated by more proper hacks.
Blaming hackers does not absolve sony of responsibility.
Only the judges absolve or condemn. And they will, but only after seeing the facts, which you don't know.
I gave them info with the understanding they would protect it. They did not.
How do you know? What if the hackers exploited an unknown vulnerability?
They tried to bribe users with free games.
Bribe? It doesn't work that way. If they are responsible for the data loss, they'll have to pay a compensation anyway.
NOT because the service was down but because they probably lost my info.
No. Check your mail. Since they lost your info, you'll have received, like all the others, a mail from them which says:
See? Not even they pretend the games to be a compensation for the loss of data. They can't, because it wouldn't be adequate.
In fact its almost a certainty they lost my info. You tried to spin it as... Them being nice because their free service was down.
Which, as you just heard from Sony themselves, is the case.
Sony is responsible for protecting that information. They failed.
So if somebody breaks in my home then "I failed", if somebody robs my bank "I failed", if somebody kidnaps my children "I failed"? I don't think so, that's why we have laws that punish theft, robbery, kidnapping, and hacking secured networks.
Of course people have all the rights to suspect that Sony was negligent, and that's what the lawsuits which have been filed will ascertain.
Why would anyone trust them with updated information in the future?
For the same reason most people trust Microsoft, Google, Apple and every other company whose software has been cracked before.
Ah, because they distracted with shiny games and stuff.
I can give you another example of people whose rationality is distracted by emotion: we don't know *anything* about how the servers were hacked, in fact we don't even know what happened exactly, yet some of us already know that the fault is all of Sony.
Also, that personal information could be used for identity theft.
You think identity theft is based off a credit card number? It's based off the personal information. The credit card is just one small way to abuse the hacked data. Even if the credit card data was not obtained, the personal information can be worth much more.
My name and address are publicly available in the phone book. My email address is scattered all over the internet. My date of birth is public. Is it so easy for people to harm me by knowing them?
You don't think it had anything to do with all that personal information?
No, because that information has been stolen from them, using criminal methods, so for what we know by now, they're the victim. Until a lawsuit will prove otherwise. In that case, Sony will possibly go bankrupt because I suspect the compensation would be much higher.
or because they aren't absolutely sure that the credit card data wasn't compromised?
Definitely, the damage done by the hackers could be severe. Fortunately, without the security code, they can't use that data unless they do some social engineering.
Nice attempt to spin this, but you're comparing apples to oranges here.
I recognise that the two items under comparison are different. The Apple is found to contain yet another manufacturing defect that makes it overheat and stop working. The Orange doesn't, as stated officially by both the manufacturer of the hardware and the programmers of the software. Guess which one gets the bad press? Yeah, yeah, they probably deserve that because of the rootkit fiasco of 2005.
As well, them giving a year of credit protection is worthless.
I clearly remember many comments on Slashdot which invoked credit protection before Sony declared they would be offering it.
3-5 years would be more appropriate.
Yes, but then why not 6-7? Criminals can wait. The truth is that the only solution to sleep well is to change the credit card number, which should be doable in 1 year. Again, I attribute the hassle of doing so to the hackers who performed the attack.
Selling faulty consoles which melt under normal operation would have been Sony's guilt. But that's the specialty of others.
You can solve a part of your problem by attaching a $5 650-in-1 usb card reader to your new playstation. It will probably read more cards than the native one found in the old models.
Acknowledge the problem, fix it (or replace it in this case with a superior model), and give compensation.
No nonsense customer service, and it gives gives them good PR.
They're not doing anything good. That's the minimum they can do for bricking their users' consoles. Hadn't they done that, they would get sued, lose, and then they'd have to pay both a new console and the lawsuit costs.
Compare that to Sony...
...who only gave away 3 high rated games, one or two months of free premium service, a year of credit card protection, and other junk I can't remember for 3 weeks of downtime of a free service. Those bastards.
A private contract can't override a law.
I think this is going to get even more important with HMTL5 geolocation APIs. Have you ever tried them? They can give a web page a surprisingly accurate position of the visitor, who typically only has to click some kind of confirmation infobar. Useful, but creepy, too. (And they're surprisingly accurate even without GPS - I guess Android (or equivalent) phones do a very good job of sniffing WiFi access point positions and reporting them to Google (or equivalent)).
The same can't be said for the data collected by private entities: even if they do their best, as a corporation, to honour the privacy of user data, the risk of single malevolent employees abusing their position to access the data needs to be taken into account.
About surveillance filming: at least in my country, the presence of video-recording equipment is notified by signs, so in theory you are never filmed without knowing. By the way, sometimes the signs itself are as useful as the real cameras, as a deterrent; fake surveillance cameras are quite common, too.
No. You can change your password from the console you used to activate the account. The bug affects changing it from the web.
You mean, just like the Wii and X-box 360 are still secure? After all, they did exactly as you suggest Sony should have done.
I mean that all the PS3 hacks started from its Linux feature. Which is a fact. Thus, until now (five years after the console was released), we can say that if the PS3 hadn't Linux, it would still be safe.
The people who cracked the PS3 found the security severely lacking. Apparently the PS3 security and Sonys network security was built to the same standards.
If it was so, then they would have cracked the console a few weeks after it was out, as they did with the Wii and the XBox 360. Saying that "the security was lacking" after it took you five years to crack it, has no credibility.
I'm not sure about Nintendo, but Microsoft has learned a lot about security since the days of Windows 98.
That's why cracking Windows has got easier and easier since the days of Windows XP.
If anyone want to claim that the X-Box 360 security is as bad as the PS3, I'll want to see some pretty good evidence before I take said person seriously.
I claim that the X-Box 360 security is much worse than the one on the PS3, because you can download from a web forum every single game released for the console, and play it for free, even online if you're cautious, and it has been possible to do so since a few weeks after the console launch. Good enough as evidence?
If the same resources had been thrown at the PS3 and X-Box 360, the X-Box would have lasted longer.
And that's your opinion, not backed by facts, which tell a much different story.
What are you talking about? I have a PSN account and never entered a credit card number anywhere. Furthermore, you can log off PSN anytime you want, and keep playing, if for some reason you don't like trophies.
So Sony paid dearly the fact that they did make the most open gaming consoles, giving their users an official way to run Linux on both the PS2 and the PS3. Hadn't they done so, just like their competitors such as Microsoft and Nintendo who would not dream of letting you run Linux, their console would still be secure.
Oh, and about the desire to run homebrew software vs. to play games for free: the very first functional hack of the PS3 (the USB dongle one) was released by commercial companies for the sole purpose of running pirated games. And it was devised by looking at the memory dumps of the console, which could only be obtained from Linux by running "super theoretical hacks".