Sony Service Manual

How Sony's Antipiracy Approach Made It a Hacker Target

On Friday, 10 June, Spanish police announced the arrest of three hackers for allegedly targeting banks, Middle Eastern governments, MasterCard and, most important perhaps, Sony.

Why Sony? Because over the past year, a high-profile international war has been waged by hackers against the consumer electronics giant. There have been denial-of-service attacks and data breaches . The arrest was meant to send a message that the war was being won by the authorities.

But in the short history of gaming, disruption regularly comes from the computer underground, leading to some of the greatest achievements in the medium’s relatively short history. The recent battles highlight a recurring question for the industry: Are hackers good or bad for gaming?

Sony’s problems stem from a single hacker: George Hotz, a young programmer from New Jersey. He managed to gain full access to the PlayStation 3 and shared his hack with the world. Sony was worried that such an intrusion would encourage piracy and aggressively moved to silence Hotz.

The game industry has had a long and unique love/hate relationship with hackers. Many of the earliest gaming pioneers and developers began their careers as hackers. They were the MIT students who created Spacewar! , has built his business on the hacker ethic. "I think [hacking] is good for the evolution of like knowledge in general," he once told me. "You work on top of the results of other people, and you can’t do that when you’ve got these black boxes."