Sony Sends DMCA Takedown Notice To GitHub 266
Plombo writes "Sony's war against PS3 hacking continues. On January 27, Sony Computer Entertainment America sent a DMCA takedown notice to GitHub demanding the removal of 6 repositories under the 'circumvention device' clause of the DMCA. All of the repositories in question were related to jailbreaking or homebrew development for the PS3."
All Exploits (Score:3)
I wonder if all exploits could fall under the DCMA.
Re:All Exploits (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:All Exploits (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but they don't have a leg to stand on otherwise. It's been settled since all that DeCSS stuff that code is protected by the 1st amendment. So the only way that they could file a takedown notice here would be if they owned the copyright to it.
Sony can't legally file the takedown as they have to state under penalty of perjury that there is no legal use for the software that they want taken down.
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Re:All Exploits (Score:4, Insightful)
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OtherOS is a legitimate feature, since it was advertised on the Boxes by Sony themselves
No, it wasn't. Check your PS3 box...I'll wait.
Re:All Exploits (Score:4, Informative)
First of all, Universal WON that DeCSS case, so it's actually unfavorable.
Second, Sony can file any takedown notice they darn please. All they have to worry about is how much trouble they'll get in if they're caught.
Re:All Exploits (Score:4, Informative)
The DeCSS case specifically was "settled" exactly the opposite way [wikipedia.org]. Freedom of speech didn't do jack to help the glider or bnetd authors either.
Re:All Exploits (Score:4, Informative)
It's all gone back up at gitorious anyway, which is based in Norway and harder to fuck with.
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Nowhere in the text of the DMCA is there any "take down letter" procedure whatsoever for "circumvention devices".
Re:All Exploits (Score:4, Informative)
Would this be the same courts that reamed 2600 magazine for LINKING to deCSS code?
Re:All Exploits (Score:5, Insightful)
All right --- Sony appears to be guilty of perjury after filing a takedown notice for someone else's work.
Who is going to do something about it? Selective enforcement is wonderful, isn't it? If Sony succeeds in this, it'll embolden others to file takedown notices against anything they dislike for any reason whatsoever.
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The developers would, or more likely they'd get the EFF involved. It's not selective enforcement the law leaves it up to the party that's been wronged to enforce it.
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Nobody is going to do anything. Look at the crap that went on taking down domains for the benefit of "rights holders". Money talks, bullshit walks.
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Money talks, bullshit walks.
That doesn't really apply in this case - the bullshitters have the money (so, nothing new there then - or had you not noticed the amount of crap that the monied mega-corps get away with?)
More like "Money talks, everything else bends over and reaches for the vaseline."
Re:All Exploits (Score:5, Informative)
It's not a real takedown. It's a normal cease-and-desist letter, and even if it were a real takedown notice, it's only perjury if the person submitting it isn't authorized to act on behalf of the person claiming ownership of a work being infringed. Neither the copyright holder or his lawyer are guilty of perjury if the copyright holder lies to his lawyer (or is mistaken) and thus causes a frivolous takedown notice to be sent.
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Dammit, stop modding my comment up and mod this one up instead.
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Re:All Exploits (Score:4, Informative)
According to the law at issue, the only portion of a DMCA takedown notice that is under penalty of perjury is that the person filing it is authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner alleging infringement.
For a DMCA takedown counter-notice, the poster needs to assert under penalty of perjury that they have a good faith belief that the takedown was a mistake or misidentification. The lack of a requirement that the party issuing the takedown make a similar statement of belief under penalty of perjury is the real bullshit here, as it violated the principle of equal protection under law.
Not the land of the free (Score:4, Interesting)
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It seems America is not the land of the free unless you can afford to pay for it!
Freedom is never free. You have to pay for either with money or with blood. And like always, you have to be careful that you buy the real stuff and don't fall for some sort of scam, wasting your blood or your money and getting nothing for it.
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Neither the copyright holder or his lawyer are guilty of perjury if the copyright holder lies to his lawyer (or is mistaken) and thus causes a frivolous takedown notice to be sent.
I'm sure there're limits as to how stupid you can pretend to be... But as you said this is not a take down notice, just cease-and-desist, which might constitute harassment...
Re:All Exploits (Score:5, Informative)
No. A DMCA takedown notice is a specific type of notice which follows the provisions of 17 USC 512. The anti-circumvention provisions are a completely separate part of the DMCA, codified in 17 USC 1201. And the DMCA does not provided a process for filing a takedown notice for circumvention devices.
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yeah we'll see who wins.
Re:All Exploits (Score:4, Insightful)
If corporations like it, it's not good for you.
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The takedown notice provision of the DMCA is actually fairly benign. It is there to protect safe harbours. If you host someone else's content for them, then you must comply with a takedown notice filed. You must also comply with a subsequent counter-notice to reinstate it, if the person putting the stuff on your site claims that copyright is not infringed. At that point, it's out of your hands and you still count as a safe harbour (you are not filtering, so you are not responsible for infringing content
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interesting about the "primarily designed to..."
that does not include homebrew. jailbreaking isn't just about piracy. it's about owning the machine you bought.
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not cell phones ones as the law says you have the (Score:2)
not cell phones ones as the law says you have the right to hack them.
wow. they are upsetting pretty dangerous crowds (Score:2, Troll)
but morons which are dubbed as lawyers in some countries naturally would have no idea about that. they got too much used to bullying defenseless citizens through law.
i wonder what will they do to sony's online assets.
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Re:wow. they are upsetting pretty dangerous crowds (Score:4, Insightful)
arent they. the real hacker underground is intertwined with open source. targeting the places where these crowds regular, is not something wise.
but morons which are dubbed as lawyers in some countries naturally would have no idea about that. they got too much used to bullying defenseless citizens through law.
i wonder what will they do to sony's online assets.
Nothing. Stop dramatizing.
They should file a counter-notice (Score:5, Insightful)
They should file a counter-notice, citing the interoperability clauses :)
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They should file a counter notice, citing the fact that they wrote the code themselves and it even compiles with PSl1ght SDK, not the sony SDK, su they are completely in the clear and Sony is just harrassing them. What Sony is doing is completely illegal.
That was fast (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps the real news should be how quickly github caved and removed all of the projects in question.
Re:That was fast (Score:5, Informative)
Re:That was fast (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically what's going on is that Sony had their attorneys file a fraudulent take down request. Github will look at it and probably put the materials back online in the near future. Right now they're pretty clearly commiting perjury
Question: What are the notice and takedown procedures for web sites? [chillingeffects.org]
Question: What are the notice and takedown procedures for web sites?
Answer: In order to have an allegedly infringing web site removed from a service provider's network, or to have access to an allegedly infringing website disabled, the copyright owner must provide notice to the service provider with the following information:
The name, address, and electronic signature of the complaining party [512(c)(3)(A)(i)]
The infringing materials and their Internet location [512(c)(3)(A)(ii-iii)], or if the service provider is an "information location tool" such as a search engine, the reference or link to the infringing materials [512(d)(3)].
Sufficient information to identify the copyrighted works [512(c)(3)(A)(iv)].
A statement by the owner that it has a good faith belief that there is no legal basis for the use of the materials complained of [512(c)(3)(A)(v)].
A statement of the accuracy of the notice and, under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on the behalf of the owner [512(c)(3)(A)(vi)].
Once notice is given to the service provider, or in circumstances where the service provider discovers the infringing material itself, it is required to expeditiously remove, or disable access to, the material. The safe harbor provisions do not require the service provider to notify the individual responsible for the allegedly infringing material before it has been removed, but they do require notification after the material is removed.
Github won't put them back online. (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you really think Github can afford a lengthy trial with mammoth Sony? Not in a million years. The legal team of Sony will bury Github's with so many documents they either have to give up or will lose.
Big corporations have big law departments. The only purpose of these law departments, which cost a lot of money each year, is to make life as easy as possible for the employer, Sony in this case. This means: they'll do everything they can to make the life of the opponent as miserable as possible: lawsuits, burying with massive amounts of documents etc. Github doesn't have a chance.
Re:Github won't put them back online. (Score:4, Informative)
Actually GitHub can have every chance. What they needed to do in this case was simple enough. Contact the owner of the repository and hand over the responsibility to them. If the owner decides that Sony has acted badly and made an incorrect claim then GitHub is cleared of any legal responsibility and can put the work back online.
The procedure is explained at Chilling Effects [chillingeffects.org]. Although the DMCA is widely detested, one of the (only?) things that it does get right is that the legal battle is not between Sony and Github. If Github comply then they get to step to one side with any liability.
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Failing to do so would lose their immunity under the DMCA to prosecution. Once they've done so though, a counter notice is sufficient to restore access to the content though - without losing their immunity.
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They don't have any immunity in the first place, as this notice is not about infringement (it's about circumvention devices), so it isn't covered by the DMCA's safe harbor provision.
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Unfortunately, to send a counter notice you have to allege under penalty of perjury that the violations are untrue, and you also have to consent to be sued.
Seeing as how Sony already sued Geohot without legal provocation on their *own* initiative, I do not think anyone is going to instigate a lawsuit by slapping back a counter-notice.
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It's hardly caving to comply with a federal law that allows the affected party to file a counter notice.
Re:That was fast (Score:4)
Perhaps the real news should be how quickly github caved and removed all of the projects in question.
Agree... The fact that github can be bullied around like this is pretty upsetting...
By the way, may I suggest that someone prints these numbers in a newspaper... Either through a letter to the editor, or in an ad, how hard can that be...
what will they do where there is no DMCA? (Score:2, Insightful)
repositories in the US may work, but It'll just get some dudes to host them from a country with more loose ip laws
Re:what will they do where there is no DMCA? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Doesn't work that way, they'd still be liable for not removing it, and if they've got a legal presence in the US, they could still be held responsible no matter where it is that they keep their servers.
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Did you miss the part about keeping their real identity separate? Obviously, it's pointless to keep your DMCA-forbidden stuff on a foreign website if you proudly proclaim "This code is copyright John Smith, 123 Anytown Ln, USA".
If you put your code on a Russian server, and say, "this code written by D3m0n|C" or something like that, then there's nothing they can do about it.
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There's only one way if you want to be able to safely upload stuff fer real. Outspend the entertainment lobby. It is a lot of hard work, though.
FTFY
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THIS. Anyone hosting DMCA-questionable content should damned well get a server offshore in a country that doesn't care about IP laws and then be sure to take every step to keep their real identity separate from it. I hear Russia is a good place...
No need to go that far east, just try out this Norwegian competitor to GitHub instead: http://gitorious.org/ [gitorious.org] . It might not be completely "outlaw" but without the DMCA the laws are at least a lot saner.
In fact, as others have mentioned further down, a mirror of some of the repos on gitorious is already available @ http://gitorious.org/ps3free [gitorious.org].
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Egypt perhaps.
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You mean like gitorious in Norway - http://gitorious.org/ps3free [gitorious.org]
Online assets? There are better ways than that. (Score:5, Informative)
Screw their "online assets." The link to the contact list of offices for the law firm responsible is right here. [kilpatricktownsend.com] Sony's corporate contact numbers are here. [sony.com] I suggest that each of their offices should receive a good few calls Monday, letting them know what we think about free speech and about restraining it.
It takes a lot fewer calls to pull off a denial of service than it takes packets.
Re:To laughingcoyote (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not giving out any Sooper Seekrit information, just stuff that's on a public website. If it's illegal to "incite" people to protest things by speaking to the parties responsible, then it's even worse than I thought.
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Uh...if I posted my bank and credit card information on a public facing website, and someone else linked to it, I guess I'd have no one but myself to complain at. That's why I've never put my bank or credit card information on a public facing website.
You'll note that here, in contrast, all I did here was give links to information they did freely choose to make available to the public. Seeing the difference here?
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Ah, I misunderstood you then. You're talking about the original posting of the means whereby I can access my property. See, when you sell me something, it is mine. I have every right to take it apart, modify it, tinker with it, or do whatever the hell else I want with it. If you're the manufacturer of said device, you aren't required to make that easy, but you shouldn't be able to prohibit me if I do figure out how, nor should you be able to prohibit me sharing that knowledge.
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> But these are the numbers which matter to Sony.
No, I think the numbers which really mattered to Sony (not that they are going to figure this out) are:
OTOH, I rather doubt Sony will initially sell their next generation consoles with "OtherOS", while at the same time the high-performance computing community is more and more focused on GPGPU acceleration. So maybe they do
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i think it's pretty clear from this saga that there is no ps4 for release any time soon. Otherwise, sony wouldn't be interested in a few crackers targetting a soon to be obsolete platform.
Either that or they're keeping the crackers busy while they experiment with unbreakable designs for the new console.
This is why I never bought any console (Score:2)
Dirty Tricks (Score:4, Interesting)
If you google "sony geohot $1" http://www.google.ca/search?q=sony+geohot+%241 [google.ca] you will get some info along the lines that Sony tried to paypal George Hotz $1 dollar ("Attached hereto as Exhibit DD is true and correct copy of a redacted PayPal receipt from George Hotz, using an account registered to..." from http://psx-scene.com/forums/attachments/f6/23998d1294899764-scea-vs-geohot-day-2-more-files-day-3-now-over-more-files-added-04-pdf [psx-scene.com] ). You can imagine why Sony did this ...
DMCA? FOAD. (Score:4, Insightful)
Hay Sony. I think I'm gonna circumvent you now. Seriously regretting buying that PS3.
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What took you so long? I've avoided them for several years now. They have some nice TVs, but no thanks.
How the mighty have fallen... (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the day, Sony was a pretty cool company. They made affordable audio equipment with decent performance for the price; through high school and college, my turntable (vinyl LPs... remember them?) was a Sony. I also remember my first Sony Walkman cassette portable (early 1980s) and CD DiscMan with great fondness; Sony pretty much single-handedly invented the portable audio industry. My first camcorder was a Sony too, and I enjoyed the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 immensely.
Somewhere along the line, they lost their way. Maybe it had something to do with their transformation into a combination of consumer electronics giant and content provider; I'm not sure. But the CD rootkit fiasco was an indication of where they were heading. My opinion of them also took a nosedive when my second Sony camcorder (purchased around 6 years ago) turned out to be a piece of crap.
These days, they are solidly on my "avoid" list. I used to consider a Sony nameplate to be a badge of quality; now it is more of a warning label.
"It's a Sony!" (Score:2)
The only product of theirs I still have any respect for is the Bravia TV. They are st
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Here's an interesting factoid for you: design and manufacture of most of the Sony video hardware is outsourced...
Sony VCRs: usually made by Samsung. There's a lovely design cockup in the FX-series -- a capacitor was installed the wrong way round, which screwed with the controller and ended up wiping the EEPROM. Only way out of this is a VHS alignment tape (custom to Sony/Samsung and only available to their service centres) and a full reset. Oh, and a new capacitor.
Sony DVD players: Samsung or Philips. Usual
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Sony DVD recorders: Almost always Philips. Utterly crap, slowest processors and worst laser pickups imaginable. Hit STOP then PLAY and you'll be waiting a good minute for the thing to get its act together.
This surprises me. Sony manufacture pickups and having personally used them I can say they are amongst the nicest that I've seen. Fantastically easy to interface and produce a very nice clean datastream.
They do make nice laser pickups (and I think the Philips players use them almost universally), but the CPU, MPEG decoder and error-corrector circuitry (all designed by Philips) is astonishingly bad. If the disc isn't perfectly clean, scratch free and absolutely perfectly mastered, the ECC engine falls over and the picture starts to break up. The CPUs are generally WAY underpowered for what they're doing. I used to hit Record on my Aiwa VCR and it'd start recording within a second or two. The Sony DVD record
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Re:How the mighty have fallen... (Score:4, Insightful)
Talk about a double standard (Score:5, Insightful)
Between all that and their proprietary memory in digital cameras, I avoid ALL thinks Sony. They aren't worth the time. So sad a former leader of technology has descended so low.
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...? Because these things are the same? Are you high?
It's Saturday night! What do you think?!!!
start mirroring. (Score:5, Informative)
all but GaiaManager can be found here:
http://gitorious.org/ps3free [gitorious.org]
there's also a story:
http://www.ps3-hacks.com/2011/01/29/dmcaed-ps3-git-repositories-cloned/ [ps3-hacks.com]
but the site is a bit... busy right now.
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Probably best to torrent it. Taking down P2P files is always more of a hassle than cease-and-desisting hosting companies.
Dear Sony (Score:3)
For the first time in 2011, let me offer you a hearty "Fuck You."
Gotta get that in every year, it seems--this year it either came early, or will come often.
Words Every Website Should Have (Score:2)
Piracy . . . Hack . . . PS3 . . . Jailbreak . . . etc.
Every website should have these words. That's free speech, isn't it?
Mail in your Sony products (Score:2)
We need a mass mailing where 1000's of people mail in their Sony labelled products to Sony. I got plenty of cd and dvd from Sony entertainment plus a few old PS1 laying around that I'm gonna mail in.
The Rise and Fall of Sony (Score:2)
They started off by making tape recorders and became famous by producing small, transistorised radio receivers that were affordable but rather poor quality. I remember my first one that after a few months developed the most scratchy volume control (metal wiper on a carbon path -- I took it apart in the end).
After WWII (not, I'm not that old
It doesn't matter (Score:2)
The awesome thing about Git is that everybody who checked out those repositories has a complete copy with all the revisions, and can exchange commits with the others.
So it should be really easy for somebody to recreate a public repository somewhere else. Anybody got a link?
Oh no (Score:3)
If only git was a de-centralized VCS, these repositories would already have been cloned in the dozens around the world, and this take-down would be completely futile!
Oh, wait.
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Agreed, more fundamental issues (things like freedom and human rights) were the trigger for what happened in Tunisia and Egypt.
Now that i think of it, while freedom and human rights and all that jazz were central to the unrest in the arab world, the thing that got the Middle-class Muhammeds off his behind and into the streets was the economic situation. Runaway inflation and the price rise probably acted as the one issue hot enough to move the usually reluctant masses to action.
Goes to show that you can get away with pretty much anything, as long as you can keep people busy working hard just to make ends met. You let the situatio
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Considering the quality of Sony's products these days, I don't see how a boycott is necessary. They simply won't be in business 10 years from now with their current management.
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What are you talking about? I haven't heard anything about Sony products being any worse than anyone else's. Another poster noted that tens of millions of PS3s have been sold. And as for other electronic devices, they're all about the same quality level these days it seems like. It doesn't even seem like Sony's electronics are really overpriced much anymore, compared to the competition.
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It would be so easy to set up a site to organize a global, world wide boycott about arrogant companies to send loud and clear message...
Like the EFF's "Windows 7 Sins?" Fat lot of good that did.
The only message these "boycotts" ever send is that the geek has a piss-poor bond with the masses.
Re:git clone time (Score:4, Informative)
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It's not. Sony or their attorneys perjured themselves. Either that or their wilfully ignorant. I'm a bit fuzzy where the line is. In order to file the take down notice they have to certify that there is no legal use for the software. It's pretty clear that there are legal uses for the software so they're likely guilty of perjury and if the developers opt to round up funds and sue they'd likely win.
Sony like a lot of corporations files these sorts of notices without any real consideration for the legality an
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wrong!
Sony makes loses on the sale of PS3 hardware
That's no longer true, starting with the PS3 Slim they make at least some money on each console they sell. It was prior to them yanking out most of the electronics that that was the case.
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And who cares if they do or don't lose money on the thing?
SCEA has no constitutionally-protected right to profit.
If they want to sell widgets at a loss, that's their problem: I'm not indebted to them when I buy such a widget.
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I hope all these hackers get butt raped. All they do is cause problems for everyone else on the platform. Awesome. You hacked it. Now we got cheaters. Good going.
The problems they 'cause' are mostly from knee-jerk reactions from the people manning the platform--in this case, Sony--clamoring to come up with a solution that inconveniences the sum-total of the end-users who likely aren't going to be taking the action Sony are attempting to prevent. And cheating? It's been happening for as long as there have been games, more so when you get online. Some of it's glitch exploitation, some of it is botting, some of it is hacking the game and altering its behaviour for
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If that's what you think then... GTFO of my slashdot.
There was a time when people here wouldn't have needed it explaining to them why it was good to be able to run your own code on hardware you own. Unlocking its potential, doing stuff it was never designed to do. Hacking devices, installing other operating systems, non-standard software... it used to be taken as self evident that this was a good thing.
Now we have people who are more concerned about other people cheating in online games (which can be dealt
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Hackers are not responsible for what cheaters and pirates choose to piggy back their work for.
That sort of enforced loyalty to Sony only comes from working for them, in which case you get a slice of their payroll in exchange for being their shills.
Re:The cat...... (Score:4, Insightful)
Because they don't care about customers who don't buy games? And why should they? Why should you care about unprofitable customers?
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Nothing is more open than a x86 pc platform. (even more with linux installed).
Still, gaming works pretty well there, and cheat is decently managed. How can that be ?
Maybe locking every bit of a platform, hardware included is not the only way to deal with cheating ?
Just saying.
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