Sometimes You Just Can't Hack It

Sony as a company has had their share of interesting bumps in the road, but none quite as notable as the current security issues they’ve been having across the board. Security issues this year alone have included the over three week down time experienced by the Playstation Network, and a series of other information stealing attacks on their various other services. Sony-Ericsson recently experienced an attack levied solely by SQL-Injection (using standard SQL calls entered directly into text fields that will likely be processed into a database query). Various groups of hackers are being blamedfor the attacks, and with the speed of information being spread around the internet, the attacks are spreading, and growing in number. One of the strangest things that I’ve been reminded of by this whole affair is that this can all be pointed back to, and blamed upon Nintendo.

While Sony certainly cannot blame Nintendo for previous failures like the Betamax, which failed for a litany of reasons despite its smaller form factor, and higher video and audio quality when compared to VHS. Sony can blame their entry into the video gaming industry solely on a contract they had signed with Nintendo all the way back at the height of the Nintendo/Sega feud in the late '80s/early '90s. Nintendo signed contracts with both Phillips and Sony to develop a disc reading expansion utility for the SNES system. While to many gamers it is clear that this never came to fruition, the project with Sony was left to grow for a rather long time before it was officially cancelled. Sony had laid a great deal of the groundwork for what would become the original Playstation on Nintendo’s dime. Continuing forth from that Sony executives were staunchly against creating a game system of their own to rival Nintendo, but the lead engineer on the project persuaded (more accurately, he repeatedly goaded his bosses about how embarrassing it was that Nintendo had jilted them for a partnership with Phillips instead). Still Sony execs were against the console staunchly enough to move production to the Sony Music division.

Sony of course came out ahead in the short run, with the tremendous success of the Playstation, selling over 100million units, and the eventual success of the Playstation 2. The real trouble for Sony came in when the original Microsoft Xbox provided network support. Those of us who weren’t social enough to have friends over to play Mortal Kombat were no longer relegated to playing Diablo 2 on our PCs; we could go on Xbox live and troll games of Halo. This forced Sony’s hand in rushing their Playstation Network to market with an Ethernet adapter for the PS2. That early iteration was a poor implementation of the software, and hardly even a shell of what the current PSN is. Sony may have a huge gap in their understanding of security standards, but we wouldn’t even know it if their executives over 20 years ago weren’t so prideful as to demand they try to best Nintendo at their own game.

As a matter of complete disclosure, I own all three current generation systems, and probably play my PS3 more than the other two. I was not initially a fan of the PS3 for a number of reasons, but I did eventually cave in and buy one second hand. Sony has proved me wrong on a great number of things with this system, and I am rather pleased with my experience overall with the PS3, but I’m also not one to buy much DLC, so my credit card number wasn’t one of the many at risk. Don’t get this confused, I’m far from blaming Nintendo for Sony’s inept security, much more this is meant to demonstrate how one small action can eventually lead to monumental success, and subsequently embarrassing failure.