

Hackers Send Emails to Sony Employees - dnetesn
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/06/business/media/hackers-send-emails-to-sony-employees.html?ref=technology&_r=0

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seliopou
In case you missed it, the name of the group is Guardians of Peace, whose
initials are G.O.P. These guys are comedians, too.

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toyg
I'm a bit disappointed -- surely there must be something juicier in this trove
than bog-standard corporate bitching and admissions that their worst talent
is, uh, the worst.

To be honest, these emails actually paint a fairly good picture of Sony: they
know they're saddled with crap, they know they are not executing as well as
they should, and they're even trying to increase their original output and
reduce formulaic content. Some of the material even looks uninformed: MIB3
might not have made a profit but that's likely because of "hollywood
accounting", most of that money probably ended up at Sony subsidiaries anyway;
$600m revenue couldn't disappear even in Will Smith's deep pockets.

I'm actually more inclined to cut them some slack now, than I was when the
silly North-Korean movie was announced.

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jfmercer
Does anyone have a link to a copy of this email?

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plg
Given the revelations about the NSA,

Is it not possible to trace these emails to their source?

~~~
sbarre
Sure, it was sent from a stolen laptop in a Starbucks via a rooted AWS box and
a spam botnet.

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IAmNotACellist
In other words, the state surveillance in the US is only going to be effective
at tracking and suppressing dissent, not at fighting actual crime.

~~~
api
I thought that was obvious.

The greatest utility of these programs though isn't in suppressing dissent
_or_ busting crime or terrorism. It's in routing pork to government IT
contractors.

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userbinator
_Hackers Send Emails to Sony Employees_

I think the title of the article needs to be less generic, as my first thought
was "yes, and Sony's employees probably get a lot of other emails from non-
hackers too..." A bit clickbaity.

And of all the things to leak I think these hackers chose the most mundane and
boring info - perhaps this was deliberate? Supposing they had the access, I'd
think all the proprietary format specifications, datasheets, and other IP
would be far more interesting things to leak... to me it seems these hackers'
only purpose was to intimidate, and not to "free information" per se.

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toyg
"proprietary format specifications"? This is Sony Pictures, what sort of
"proprietary format specification" would you get from Adam Sandler movies?

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anon4
Any bets that this might be a competitor trying to shut SONY by causing people
to quit en-masse?

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ceejayoz
The risks of doing that are astronomical if caught and given the unlikelihood
of Sony being _shut down_ due to this you'd have to be a true idiot to attempt
such a tactic.

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antranigv
Not hackers god damn it, it's crackers...

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pierrec
Let's agree that this semantic debate (previously on HN [1]) is pretty much
unresolvable. A word can have multiple meanings, and the common media use is
more ancient than ours. [2]

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7838663](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7838663)

[2]: [http://imranontech.com/2008/04/01/the-origin-of-
hacker/](http://imranontech.com/2008/04/01/the-origin-of-hacker/)

~~~
nocman
"the common media use is more ancient than ours"

^ That is by _no_ means a settled debate. Even in the comments section of the
link you produce as evidence ( [http://imranontech.com/2008/04/01/the-origin-
of-hacker/](http://imranontech.com/2008/04/01/the-origin-of-hacker/) ) there
is plenty of debate on the conclusions.

You should have just ended after suggesting that hte debate is pretty much
unresolvable. :-D

And just to be up front about the whole thing -- I prefer the non-malicious
use of the term. Hollywood has a pernicious tendency to stereotype anything
and everything, and the fact that that culture is mostly responsible for
promoting the malicious use of the term means that in my book they shouldn't
get to determine its meaning.

Again, unresolvable. :D

~~~
hackertux
Around 1980, when the news media took notice of hackers, they fixated on one
narrow aspect of real hacking: the security breaking which some hackers
occasionally did. They ignored all the rest of hacking, and took the term to
mean breaking security, no more and no less. The media have since spread that
definition, disregarding our attempts to correct them. As a result, most
people have a mistaken idea of what we hackers actually do and what we think.

[http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html)

