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LEGAL BRIEF: Sony, PSN and Hackers

It’s raining Sony news!

A few days ago Sony announced the latest firmware update for the PS3, version 4.30, and it seems that one by one the features that Sony fans relied on for a solid gaming experience are slowly being whittle away. The most recent victim being Sony’s “Life With PlayStation” application and the Folding at Home application which used unused CPU cycles for science at Stanford University.

Life With PlayStation will no longer be offered to new PS3 owners as of 4.3, which means that not only is Folding at Home going away, but so is “Live Channel”, “PlayStation Network Game Trailers” and “World Heritage”, although since Sony didn’t even mention those other features of Life in their press release it makes me wonder how often they were used in the first place. The big spinning globe with news and weather information and a primitive music player was kind of cool, but it now joins memory cards, “Other OS” and PS2 backwards compatibility on the scrap heap of “former PS3 features”.

The good news is folks who have already downloaded Life With PlayStation won’t lose the option, Folding at Home is even still select-able, it just doesn’t function and sits spinning at 1%.

4.3 does have one new feature however, and that’s the ability to synch trophy information with the PlayStation Vita. This integrated trophy list is something the Vita has been able to do from day one, so it makes sense to enable it on the PS3 as well.

The 4.3 update went live on Tuesday, October 23.

This doesn’t appear to be a result of the latest PS3 custom firmware hack, which requires a PS3 running version 3.55 of the firmware in order to operate. The Bluedisk team announced CFW4.25 which allows for unlimited piracy of PS3 titles, online cheating and other “features”, most notably forwards compatibility with future firmware such as the aforementioned 4.30. The new custom firmware allows machines to access the PlayStation Network with LV0 decryption keys which means that these machines can safely ignore future security updates.

It’s not completely bullet-proof though, as stated in the official release on PSX-scene:

“Now it is not 100% good news, for one the team is using an outdated Multiman v2.08 from back when it was ‘open-source’ and has been patched to work with their CFW, so not all games run perfectly, maybe in the near future you will see actual new Multiman v4.06/.07 updated to support their Bluedisk-CFW v4.25 release.”

If all this news of missing features and hacked firmware has you concerned to the point where you’re considering a class action lawsuit, well, the precedent isn’t exactly in your favor. US District Judge Anthony Battaglia just dismissed a class action lawsuit over the PSN account breach saying “Plaintiffs do not allege that Sony was in any way involved with the Data Breach.” and that the PSN Privacy Policy indemnified Sony from action.

Whoever brought the case apparently neglected to inform the court that credit card information was held insecurely in breach of PCI Compliance. Just because PSN is a free service doesn’t mean they don’t have to safeguard your data.

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