Ethics Assignment #1

    The Sony PlayStation incident started by Hotz posted a copy of the root keys of the PlayStation 3 on his website on January 2, 2011. After the root keys of the console were published, Sony initiated litigation against George Hotz and predecessor PlayStation 3 hacking group known as fail0verflow. Sony in turn has demanded social media sites, including YouTube, to hand over IP addresses of people who visited Geohot's social pages and videos; the latter being the case only for those who "watched the video and 'documents reproducing all records or usernames and IP addresses that have posted or published comments in response to the video. PayPal has granted Sony access to Geohot's PayPal account, and the judge of the case granted Sony permission to view the IP addresses of everyone who visited geohot.com. Because Sony was granted it successfully, the hacker group, Anonymous, was angry by this behavior. Also Hotz had settled the lawsuit out of court in April 2011, on the condition that Hotz would never again resume any hacking work on Sony products. Therefore, Anonymous announced fight with Sony. They said knowledge is Free, and they wanted to fight for Internet freedom of speech. At the end of April 2011, an anonymous hacker broke into the PlayStation Network and stole personal information of some 77 million users. After their action, PSN service completely stop a month. SCE President /SONY vice president publicly apologized.

     I agree with Anonymous fought with Sony using hacking skills. This action fight for that knowledge was free. We spent a lot of money to buy their devices, so we should have right to do anything on these devices. Sony Company was a Japanese company, and they may do not know America hacking culture well. Your device was crack, so it meant your company still did not really well. Sometime, cracking also raise our security knowledge. Sony should not check the IP address that who had geohot.com. They had a vulnerability, they had to solve this problem. Why they blamed other people first? However, anonymous stole personal information of some 77 million users. I think this action was wrong. If they could hack other stuff, it would be better. Anonymous was a big hacking group. This group could include any kind of people. If you was one of that 77 million users, you would feel so nervous. You had no idea who was going to use your information to do something bad. Anonymous’ target should be Sony Company not PSN users whose were not relate to this case. In my opinion, it was not fighting for network freedom, and it just gave criminals a good opportunity to make crime directly. After this attacked, I hope Sony can improve their service security. If they could not do well in that, why users should pay a lot of money to support them.