Sony Taking Down PSP Titles In Response To Vita Hackers 293
Carlos Rodriguez writes "The hacker community has found a way to make the Vita run unsigned code by exploiting weaknesses in PSP games available for download in the PSN store. In response, Sony has made the affected games unavailable for download for all platforms — PSP and Vita both — even if you had already paid for it and hadn't had the chance to download it yet. In the case of 'Everybody's Tennis', the game was removed from the PSN worldwide after the modder community bragged about the game being exploitable but before any exploit was released for it. Is Sony being too overzealous in its fight against piracy?"
This is Sony (Score:5, Informative)
For those not familiar with this company, who may ask "But won't they lose money if they take down the games?", let me give you some background. This is a company that would rather pull EVERY game on PSN than to lose even the slightest bit of control over their locked-down system. This is a company that will infect their CD's with viruses [wikipedia.org] to prevent copying, a company that repeatedly kills its own platforms with its insistence on proprietary [wikipedia.org] formats [wikipedia.org], a company that doesn't care [anandtech.com] if your old blu-ray player plays the latest blu-rays or not--a company that will remove any feature [wikipedia.org], cripple any platform [1up.com], pull any game, destroy any product line--all to maintain control. If Sony were faced tomorrow morning with the choice between risking people copying even one of their movies and bulldozing the entire PSP line into a landfill, they would have that landfill full before the sun went down.
This is what happens when you allow a media producer to mix in the same company with the producer of the hardware that plays said media.
Re:This is Sony (Score:4, Informative)
For the record, it was a rootkit, not a virus. The terms are already muddy as all getout, but there IS a difference.
Re:This is Sony (Score:4, Informative)
Well, I would not trust Sony with anything that has a processor and might need a firmware update at some point.
They have, however, made some pretty decent analog equipment in the past. I still have an old set of walkman headphones that works fine and sounds good after 20 years. The only thing I had to replace at some point were the ear pads.
Re:This is Sony (Score:5, Informative)
The OtherOS is actually a perfect example.
In this community we heard about it non-stop for what feels like years. Outside this community, no one really cared. Yes Sony lost some business, but even if everyone who could explain in a sentence what the OtherOS thing was about stopped buying Sony, it would probably be a tiny blip on the profit statement.
Same with the geohotz thing. Huge deal to us, non-issue for most. The rootkit thing is the closest Sony ever came to doing something that actually pissed of a large chunk of their users with an issue (outside the PSN thing, but again, people were upset for the wrong reason).. and even that most people wern't mad enough to swear of Sony products forever.. it was more of an amused "well that was naughty of them" response from the vast majority of people.