Agree with you, Hyperbyte. I always go to the notion of “your right to swing your fists around end where my nose begins”. Anonymous has the right to post opinions, flagrantly attack anyone they want with whatever language they want, but as soon as they begin infringing on the freedom of OTHERS by DDOSing their websites or destroying property that doesn’t belong to them, then there’s a problem.
Pretty sure the PSP’s market was gone long before the iPod touch took hold as a gaming platform. Just saying.
EDIT: Double post, forum acting up
Anonymous see themselves as some kind of guardians of the internet, when in reality they’re a bunch of sunlight-deprived adolescents with nasty skin complaints.
In the real world that lies outside of their computer screens people have families that they work hard to support. They put food on the table, a roof over their heads and go somewhere sunny once a year.
In comes anonymous, who decide when they get in from school that a corporation is encroaching upon someone’s freedom. So they decide to attack the corporation, failing to realise that the vast majority of the people who make up a corporation are like our friend I described above.
So what happens? Anonymous feels big hiding behind their monitors, posts a rambling and delusional message on a few websites, and goes to bed. Meanwhile our friend can end up being laid off, having a bunch of idiots he’s never heard of target him with hate mail, or have his and his family’s personal details published online, which has actually happened already in this case. It doesn’t matter what they try to achieve, or what they perceive themselves to be. Cyber crime is still a crime, and has real world consequences. It’s not acceptable.
It’s strange that there is no cast iron law on this, in nearly every country there is a different legal opinion. I think the games companies figure there will be a certain amount of piracy regardless of how good their security is. Softmods seem to cause less concern than hardmods (presumably because hardmods require a particular skill set before you can play pirate games compared to softmods).
Remember PS2 and XBOX modchips came with linux distros preloaded on them. You had to flash them with any piracy enabling software yourself. However I think I am right (or used to be right) in stating that in Australia companies are not supposed to region lock any console. So anything that gets round a region lock out is perfectly legal.
Personally I look at it that I have purchased the damn machine, if I want to run my own custom code on it, then so be it. Otherwise I am just renting a machine. I also think I’m right in saying that even if you do sign a EULA that it is not as concrete as you may think. There was a case a few years ago where someone got out of breach of an EULA by running the defence “Does anyone actually read these things”.
I would be perfectly legal for me to create from scratch a machine capable of playing pirate PS3 games (cleanroom reverse engineer the damn thing) and release it as my own console.
TLDR
Sony shoudn’t have the right to dictate what we do to a console unless they are renting them to us.
Is Anon the same organization that was attacking Scientology, and protesting outside their offices wearing Guy Fawkes masks, or is this a different Anon that is made up of a bunch of whiny wannabes that want attention? I know that Anon trolled Oprah at one point, and they are defending Wikileaks misguided attempt at making government more transparent, but other than that I really don’t know much about them. What, if anything, do they stand for? Have they ever been helpful, or have they always been completely useless?
Less useless than you.
When is the last time you actually stood up for something you believed in?
for once I agree with you
The problem is the way they go about standing up for what they believe in. Resorting to the methods they do win them little support with people in power who can actually change things. Anon’s greatest success is their protesting of scientology, peaceful protest!
Oh man, a lot came out of that.
Why not? It is like a public manifestation on the street or like sending letters and faxes so that they can’t read the important ones.
Not really. Mastercard’s shares dropped 30 or 40%, and Visa’s dropped 10%. You make the costumers angry, they do something about it, that is the idea of any manifestation.
I don’t see any difference. If iPhone can be exploited, then PSP can be as well. Exploitation is the only tool the costumers have to avoid abuse. If they want to fight software piracy, they will have to do it in some other manner, this way they are just hurting their own image, and, to me, all that Anonymous is trying to do is to make this history public and to let the public make their own judgment. If they are doing nothing wrong, then let the public decide that.
I disagree. If someone buys a device, it should be able to use all of its functionality. Impeaching people from using the device’s functionalities is abuse.
It did exactly what a protest is supposed to do. Raise awareness of something. It is nearly impossible for a group like anon to make any real changes in the world. Simply because no matter how big the group is, they are so widely spread in so many countries they only ever look like a small group.
I come to this thread and see a bunch of idiots who don’t even know what anonymous is, they aren’t some group with a leader, rules or a code. They’re just a bunch of people on the internet who are anonymous, and some of them sometimes might get together and do some shit.
This is false however. As Sony created the PS3 it is copy-written to Sony. Reverse engineering is copy-write infringement. Thats the same as printing a report offline that someone has already written, and then handing it in as your own. They don’t let you do that in school and in society you can be arrested for it.
Who gives a fuck? Two thumb-sticks.
Not really, as long as he could produce it using diffrent hardware it would be legal. This has been decided in court btw.
Remember this?
There isn’t and explicit leader, but there is an implicit leadership. Every group of people has an implicit leadership. In this case, the implicit leaders are the owners of IRC chat rooms. Of course anonymous are free to follow what they say or not, but most of them do.
There also is a code: no use of violence and the fight is for freedom of speech. The anonymous do make an internal propaganda of this code. It is like how communism spreads itself: even though there is no leader, there is a set of codes that communists follow. The set of codes might vary, but they have a lot in common.
Anyway, you can think of the anonymous as an “disorganized organization”. Spiritism also works like that: there is no central set of rules that all spiritists should follow, but there are a pattern of behavior among them and a common set of ideas. By the say, any big social group or religion is like that, there is always segregation but there also are lots of common ideas and behavior, and there always are leaders that most of the group respects despite segregation.
You mean “copyright”, not “copy-write”.
Reverse engineering is allowed by law as long as you don’t “copy” the circuit or “see” how it works from the inside, but you are allowed to test how the components work by “blackbox testing”.
Umm, what? Sure most of these things like attacks begin when some guy says they should do this or that, and when an amount of people agree they should do that that doesn’t mean that the person who started it will remain a leader. And I think that a very few of the collective anonymous took part in this, most of them probably don’t care. You’re giving them too much credit, you’re making them into something more amazing than they actually are.
Anonymous are people who whose identity is unknown, that’s all they are. When a person decides to kill an entire school worth of children and escapes without anyone seeing him or knowing who he was, that person is still anonymous, it doesn’t matter if he’s given a catchy nickname by the media. The point still stands, anyone can be anonymous and they could do anything the want when they are one.
The behaviour they have doesn’t change what they are, especially the anonymous, when they already have a definition. If so, then call them something else because they are not anonymous.
I don’t use consoles much, but I’m pretty much disgusted by Sony’s actions. I despise the corporate mentality regarding both hardware and software that has evolved over the last 12 years. The notion is that rather than purchasing the actual software or hardware, you purchase the right to use it instead. People that have come to accept this fact are, in my opinion, giant pussies that have let corporations bend them over their kitchen tables and fuck them over.
When Windows XP came out, everyone was in upheaval. Everybody. I’ve seen those same outraged people become people like the OP who now say that it’s just the way it is. Back then this was new enough to us that we could recognize it for what it is. Unfair. Seems like a childish word to use, but isn’t it the corporations that are the one’s label what we are allowed to do with the software we purchase as ‘fair use’?
But as wrong as it is, we have other areas to focus our efforts on. Hardware is an area that I feel needs to come last. We need to focus on our rights as consumers on software right now, specifically DRM and copy protection that prevents legitimate users from using their own property.