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Comment by bandushrew | Hacker News Reader

If I had taken the possessions of thousands of people, and promised to keep them safe in my house, and then a burglar broke in and stole everything.

I deserve to be condemned.

sure, the burglar should be punished for the simple crime of theft that he committed.

but I took the possessions of thousands of people and failed to make them secure, despite promising to do so.

Especially if I took all those possessions and then used a 5 dollar lock from the local shop, instead of investing in something that may actually make secure the possessions I promised to keep safe.

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That is a terrible analogy. It's as if you were given peoples' posessions but you had someone working around the clock to find a way into your home to deface you. You're condemning Sony's engineers for missing something, even if it was a "simple" something. This LulzSec guy, however, did act in malice. He's the one who leaked information, after all.

it is a terrible analogy, I agree. I didn't choose it.

anyway, lets keep beating on it.

If I were to agree to keep the possessions of thousands of people safe under my roof, I would expect to have someone working around the clock to find a way into my home.

I am not condemning Sony's engineers at all, I dont know any of them, but even so it is my absolute belief that they knew damn well how broken the system was, and that they told their management repeatedly that it needed to be fixed or customer data could be at risk.

I am condemning Sony, if they agree to take my possessions and to keep them secure, they had better damn well expect to have a continuous stream of people deliberately attempting to break in.

He's, allegedly, the one who made the leak public. Yes. But that data was leaking for a long time and we have no way of knowing who else collected it.

If I had thought Sony was secure I'd actually be better off now, with my card visibly leaked, than before where only the bad guys had access to it. If my card was fraudulently used I'd have been in a bad position before the leak was known - I'd be assumed to be a criminal until I proved that I didn't make the purchases. After the leak became public I'd be more likely to get reasonable treatment from my credit card company.

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