Hackers Send Emails to Sony Employees | Hacker News Reader

Hackers Send Emails to Sony Employees

nytimes.com

36 pointsdnetesn20 comments

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.

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.

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

Given the revelations about the NSA,

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

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

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.

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.

Given the revelations by the person who hacked Gamma, they aren't omniscient

I'm sure they are on it, but Tor isn't a secret anymore, it is posible to obfuscate the source pretty well if you know what you are doing.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I understand the objection, but a word is defined by its usage, not its origin. We're vastly outnumbered in a general audience, and this battle was won a couple decades ago. The NY Times is not going to print "crackers" because the word would not be understood, and a word already in use would work fine. (Even the small niche that objects to its use here has no problem knowing what was meant.) Not to mention that "crackers" already has a meaning when applied to a group of people in the US.

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

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

"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/ ) 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

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

No, in the security community, crackers are those who defeat software protection. Hackers hack into computers.

This is absolutely correct.

"Cracker" is a very specific term that relates to those who hack static files, by breaking encryption, etc. A cracker might discover a back-door, but if they exploit it to access a running server, that's not cracking, that's hacking.

Hacker is a general term which can apply to white-hat hackers and black-hat hackers alike. It means anyone that breaks things apart to see how they work, then puts them back together in a way that does something they weren't designed to do. That could mean getting Mario to run on a Ti-83+, or getting root on someone else's server.

Unfortunately, while we have the words cracker and phreaker for particular subsets of hacking, the subset that tends to get itself a lot of negative publicity by hacking into computers doesn't have any special name associated with it.

As a hacker (in the HN sense), I don't have a problem with this. The meaning is always pretty clear from the context. All it means is if you say "I'm a hacker" to someone, you better be prepared to explain what you mean. But if you say that, you're setting yourself up for a pretty geeky conversation anyway, which many won't appreciate.

Hackers that hack into computers aren't necessarily all black hat either. It's perhaps less common nowadays, but a lot of hackers just do it to see if they can, or to see what they can find on networks, simply out of curiosity. The latter is the defining characteristic of all hackers.

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