Ethics Assignment #2

 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. Problem is that do you think anonymous hacker broke into the PlayStation Network and stole personal information of some 77 million users was right or wrong?

I think anonymous should not break into the PlayStation Network and stole personal information of some 77 million users. Their action was wrong. First of all, they broke into the PlayStation Network, so is cause PSN service completely stop for a month. It gave PSN users so much trouble. It was so inconvenient for PSN user. One function of PSN service was that user could bough a game online and download it. Therefore, if a user wanted, he could just got a game immediately online. When PSN service was close, PSN users had no way to get a new game immediately. It also could cause some game company lost a lot of money because they could not sale their game online. On the other hand, anonymous also stole personal information of some 77 million users. This action was completely wrong. Their target should be Sony company not users. The users did not relate to Sony’s case. However, users had to lose their information to pay for that something not relate to them. It made too much inconvenient stuff for them. For example, users had to change their email, account, and PayPal account’s password. Then if some users’ credit card was used by hackers, they had to go to the bank to ban the credit card. For this process, they spent too much time to solve it. The motive of anonymous broke Sony company was that they wanted to fight for internet freedom. Essentially, internet freedom related to that people could free to use online source. That was convenient. On the other hand, why did Hotz posted a copy of the root keys of the PlayStation 3? The root keys of the PlayStation 3 could make people use their PlayStation 3 more easily and got their favorite game more easily. That was convenient. The principle of anonymous broke Sony company’s motive should be that fighting for people’s convenient life. Obviously, anonymous made a lot of people get in the trouble. A lot of people had to due with some inconvenient stuff. As the result, anonymous’ action was wrong in this time.