Speaking as someone who had to wipe several computers and reinstall the operating system because the Sony/BMG rootkit disabled the DVD drive, I need to say I am deriving some satisfaction from this: Lulzsec has hit Sony. Again. For like the, what, 10th incident in the last couple months? I’m not an anarchist and I am not cool with the vast majority of espionage, credit card fraud, hacking, and defacement that goes on. I pretty consistently come down on the other side of the fence on all that stuff. In fact I spend most of my time trying to teach people how to protect themselves from those intrusions. But just this once – and I am not too proud to admit it – I have this total case of schadenfreude going. And not just because Sony intentionally wrote and distributed malware to their customers – it’s for all the bad business practices they have engaged in. Like trying to stop the secondary market from reselling video games. It’s for spending huge amounts of engineering efforts to discourage customers from customizing PlayStations. It’s for watermarking that deteriorated video and audio quality. It’s for the CD: not the CD medium co-developed with Phillips, but telling us it sounded better than anything else. It’s for telling us Trinitron was better – and charging more for it – when it offered inferior picture quality. It’s for deteriorating the quality of their products while pushing prices higher. It’s for trying to make ‘ripping’ illegal. Sony has been fabulously successful financially, not by striving to make customers happy, but by identifying lucrative markets and owning them in a monopoly or bust model – think Betamax, Blu-ray, PlayStation, Walkman, etc.

So while it may sound harsh, I find it incredibly ironic that a company which tries to control its customer experience to the nth degree has completely lost control of its own systems. It’s wrong, I know, but it’s making me chuckle every time I hear of another breach.

Before I forget: Rich and I will be in San Jose all next week for the Cloud Security Alliance Certification course. Things are pretty hectic but I am sure we could meet up at least one night while we are there. Ping us if you are interested!

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