Sony Hires Former Homeland Security Infrastructure Protection Chief 68
jmobley6030 writes with a bit in Gamer Gaia about Sony pulling out the big guns for their security infrastructure. Quoting: "Months after the great PlayStation network attack things are starting to get back to normal around the gaming world. While it doesn't seem like another hack attempt will take place anytime soon Sony is fearful that it could happen again. Sony announced today via their corporate news feed that they have hired Philip R. Reitinger, a former Homeland security official, as Chief Information Security Officer at Sony."
Re:great (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly the wrong guy. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sony is picking the sort of guy who wont know what hes doing, who seems to have no ties to the hacker community, who graduated from Yale so he's going to seem like another elitist. If you look at who he has worked for, he's connected to governments and law enforcement which goes to show what Sony's priorities are.
Sony should be hiring from within the hacker community. Hiring this guy wont accomplish a damn thing, while this guy might know about the community from the big brother pro government perspective it's very unlikely he will actually understand the community from the perspective of someone who was actually a part of it.
Sony and companies in this position need to start hiring some of these hackers. Look at the situation, you have thousands of young talented hackers. As the unemployment rate rises, they'll be easily recruited or much more likely to join organizations like Anonymous.
The best thing Sony could do is hire some of these people, the policy of arresting hackers is dumb. It's like arresting amateur scientists, or arresting mathematicians. The fact that they selected this guy shows me they are focused on arresting them and are going to treat it as a low enforcement problem rather than as a technical and cultural problem.
Sony's problems are technical and cultural. Technical because they design their products in a way so they can only make money with absolute control over how the products are used but then they don't even know how to maintain that control technologically, and second they typically take stances which go against the wishes of millions of people in the hacker community, the gaming community, etc. They simply don't care at all about the customer, the fan, the hacker, the people who buy their products. This lack of respect for the culture of those who buy the product is the main part of the problem.
And this new guy they hired does not seem to come from the sort of backround that most gamers, hackers, or fans come from. He's a hyper connected lawyer who happens to know computer science. When they should have found someone who knows computer science and who happens to understand the law, with connections to the hacker community as well as to the government. This guy is going to be seen as an outsider, a government suit and the hackers are going to attack Sony harder.
Come on, perfect fit! (Score:5, Insightful)
A movie company hiring the chief of Security Theater. What's wrong with having a merger of two largee entertainment forces?