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Sony

'Anonymous' Plans Sony Boycott On April 16 260

Here's an excerpt from PCMag: "Say you're a hacker trying to cripple a major electronics company for suing its own users: how do you launch a cyberattack without harming the people you're trying to protect? In the case of hactivist group 'Anonymous,' which has spent the week targeting Sony to retaliate against Sony's ongoing lawsuits against PlayStation 3 modifiers, you take it offline. Anonymous is staging a 24-hour, in-store boycott at Sony stores around the world on Saturday, April 16. So far over 1,000 people have RSVP'd through Facebook."
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'Anonymous' Plans Sony Boycott On April 16

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 09, 2011 @03:32PM (#35769644)
    I really need to get out more..
    • Yes, but nobody actually buys anything there: The sony stores all charge MSRP for sony devices. They're just there to show off their televisions, overpriced surround-sound systems and plastic Macbook knockoffs, so that other retailers can sell things under MSRP and look like they're giving you a deal....

  • These guys should avoid doing real life events, it will only underscore how few they are, constantly fighting fire with fire.
    • by bky1701 ( 979071 )
      Because nobody ever turned out at that Scientology stuff, right? Go back to cowering in your hole.
      • by DrXym ( 126579 )
        Are you seriously comparing the actions of a religious cult to Sony suing some cracker?
        • If you piss off Anonymous, it doesn't matter if you're a religious cult or a megacorporation. They'll break out the Guy Fawkes masks and throw a party either way.
    • Right start, but I think you missed the finish.

      "Ooh - I know this one! Let's get every member of Anonymous to show up, then we can take pictures of the participant all smiling, and post them to Facebook where we can tag them and ... uh... "

      These guys should avoid doing real life events ... because then they wouldn't be Anonymous anymore would they? In fact it shows how fragile the fight to keep anonymity is with mega-billions all pouring into tracking initiatives both gov and private ... and naive Web 2.0

  • Boycott? (Score:5, Insightful)

    Erm, don't you need to *not* show up at a store in order to boycott?

    A boycott is a form of consumer activism involving the act of voluntarily abstaining from using, buying, or dealing with a person, organization, or country as an expression of protest, usually for political reasons.

    sit-in == protest. boycott == protest. and yet, boycott != sit-in.

    • by SeaFox ( 739806 )

      Erm, don't you need to *not* show up at a store in order to boycott?

      This plan is fail at all levels.

      If you're in a store and have demonstrated you have no intention of actually buying anything, you're just loitering. The store would be completely within their right to have you removed by police for trespassing or for being a possible shoplifter. And good luck staying "anonymous" once the police start asking for identification when they get there.

    • by dmomo ( 256005 )

      Yeah. I find this an amusing "boycott" as well. Is it productive as a "protest"? I cannot say. I hope that a crowd at Sony doesn't simply draw a bigger crowd. "Ohh.. may as well pick up some headphones while I'm here!!"

      BTW, your use of "==" confuses equivalency with implication. Change "==" to "implies, and "!=" to "does not imply", and you are golden.

  • Boycotts are legal (Score:5, Interesting)

    by erroneus ( 253617 ) on Saturday April 09, 2011 @03:55PM (#35769770) Homepage

    I'm still not going to sign anything associated with "anonymous." That's just asking for trouble. But before anonymous started making headlines, I have been vehemently against Sony and its products and my history shows it. I just hope this boycott catches on. Sony needs to be taken down a notch.

    Damn you brainless consumers!! Don't you know that Sony is bad?

    • I'm not signing up but I'm boycotting. Of course, it's more of a de facto boycott, because I don't really own any SCEA products or things that use SCEA products. The closest thing I've come to owning an SCEA product is watching an LP of God of War and going with a friend of mine to buy a Ratchet and Clank game... used. I suppose I still have Playstation games for my PS1... but that is no longer functional.

  • ObFuturama (Score:2, Insightful)

    by istartedi ( 132515 )

    Bender: Hear me, hear me! Stop eating Popplers! Stop eating them with honey mustard sauce......stop eating them with tangy sweet and sour sauce. Stop eating the new fiesta Poppler salad. Stop taking advantage of the money-saving 12-pack. Stop enjoying Popplers on the patio, in the car, or on the boat. Wherever good times are had! Ow!

    • I'm not sure this is nearly as applicable. For market leaders in mature markets, publicity isn't necessarily to gain relevancy, but to stay relevant. "Any publicity is good publicity" only really applies to small companies trying to gain consumer mindshare. The Sony brand has enough consumer mindshare that I'm pretty sure the only direction left for them to go is down. And, they have sufficient competition that the competition can use the negative to promote their own products.

      For example, Nintendo or Micro

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by kobaz ( 107760 )

      The proper phrase is "For all intents and purposes"

      Don't say: For all intensive purposes | Do say: For all intents and purposes
      Comment: The younger generation is mispronouncing this phrase so intensively that it has become popular both as a mispronunciation and misspelling.
      --http://www.yourdictionary.com/library/mispron.html

  • So let me get this straight. A group whose primary strength lies in maintaining an air of mystery and anonymity on the internet is going to stage a real-life sit-in boycott.... in the stores of a company which makes and/or sells a significant amount of image and video recording equipment. Much of which is on-display and functional in said stores, or otherwise easily accessible. And they're warning them about this beforehand.

    Oooooookay...

    • Masks are certainly an option, this isn't the first action of anon in the real world, there were quite a few gatherings outside the church of scientology, most wore masks, usually also blasting Rick Astley or Fresh prince music from the outside.
  • Boycott it only on that day? Wouldn't that make them plain old hypocrites?

    Call me old-fashioned but shouldn't Sony products be avoided anyway if there's a reasonable alternative?
    Hidden stuff (e.g., LCD panels) is a different story, similar to products where Sony is involved as shareholders. But at least try to avoid Sony-branded stuff (TV, laptops, ...).

    • by PRMan ( 959735 )

      Shouldn't everyone be buying Sony products at various retailers, opening all the packaging, and then returning the complete items? This would cost Sony and their retailers a great deal of money. This erases profits on Sony merchandise and causes triggers on return rates which get Sony products booted from retailers.

      I mean, if you are going to do something, at least make it effective.

    • How do I go into a grocery store without hearing the products of Sony Music on the speaker system?
  • ...by giving graf_chokolo and geohot money. My household is free of Sony products too, and has been that way since the rootkits.
  • After the Geohot site visitor account rape-age I'm on a one decade boycott of all Sony products.

    But from RTFA, it looks like this is more of a sit-in. I guess Anonymous are all too young to know what a 'sit-in' is.

  • Sony? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Sj0 ( 472011 ) on Saturday April 09, 2011 @04:39PM (#35770096) Journal

    This may be a silly question, but who still buys Sony anyway?

    They're constantly trying to shove their expensive, non-standard shit down everyone's throat, leaving you with devices whose removable memory costs several times more than the standards everyone else uses.

    I understand that the Playstation 3 has some great games, but why support a company that's consistently more interested in building an empire than working with its customers?

    • Because the games are awesome, duh. The playstation part of sony has been pretty good to it's fans over the years, and really made up for the initial troubles with the ps3 by pushing out good games and adding some nice stuff to the firmware such as the media center functions, videostore, etc. They are no more interested in an empire then any other game maker and have in fact been more open with their console then Nintendo or MS has.
      • [Sony Computer Entertainment] have in fact been more open with their console then Nintendo or MS has.

        How? It'd be one thing if Sony had a direct counterpart to Xbox Live Indie Games, allowing anybody to make games, run them on the console, and submit them to the console's official market. But I haven't even been able to Google up the developer qualifications for the PlayStation family platforms (this press release [eventnewscenter.com] mentions two sites that are down at the moment), and I see no reason to believe they're materially different from Nintendo's [warioworld.com]: you have to have a corp or LLC with a dedicated office, and it has to

  • by gront ( 594175 ) on Saturday April 09, 2011 @04:57PM (#35770202)
    Pretty big gamble by members of the anonymous crowd: if the giant massive preplanned SHOW OUR STRENGTH RAR! sit-in ends up being 12 fat guys, 3 furries, and a couple of abhumans that finally left their parent's basement, the anon-movement will take a giant credibility hit. Kinda like when the brought down Amazon.com for a couple minutes... really showed 'em then!
  • A friend of mine has a theory that Anonymous is backed by the US government to help them gain support for further eroding our privacy. My initial reaction was "that's crazy", but then it reminded me of Operation Northwoods [wikipedia.org], which had the backing of every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
    • Okay, some really good comments here down the page, like yours.

      First, Anonymous is going to get stuck in a lexico-logical trap in that the word "Anonymous" is like trying to count on a finger - you can't even parse the results grammatically sometimes. "(Some members of) Anonymous organized the boycott, but (other members of) Anonymous disagreed."

      Above your comment, poster said that at the moment Anonymous did manage to gain just the barest bit of credibility. They've moved up that scale from "first you igno

    • No. There is no organization behind Anonymous, there is only /b/ and really bored dudes who really can't stand Tom Cruise, and these days, who watch My Little Pony every Friday.
  • Great that some are committed at going after Sony through public protests. But do such protests really work? Or are they just public spectacles that get lost in the mass-media 24/7 news cycle...

    Civil disobedience at a large enough level can be effective, such as so many people breaking the speed limit that finally the U.S. Federal mandated 55MPH limit was repealed in the mid-1990s.

    However, it seems few people really care about DRM to go out of their way to knowingly break the law, let alone do so publicly.

    N

    • Opps, should have used preview first ... wrote "Not sure what the answer is ..." twice. With that said, despite the poor grammar, that repetition emphasizes the helplessness / hopelessness many feel these days.

      Ron

    • Ask McDonalds if they are effective :)
  • Just throwing this out there, I'm not available to go do this myself, but a TV-B-Gone or similar "universal TV turner-offer" device would be useful for this action. Even if you're not visibly obviously "doing protesting", you can help Sony reduce their carbon footprints by turning off all their store display TVs for them.

  • Here in California was basically have organized crime for a state government, but, yeah, Sony is such a big menace to me and mine.

  • I had an incredibly bad customer service situation back in the early 2000's with Sony.

    I have not bought a Sony product since. It's never been a challenge to find an equivalent product or do without for a while til one became available.

    I know it's a bit irrational- but it's my money and their customer service was unhelpful and then rude. I don't need to give money to a company like that.

  • >Anonymous
    >Facebook

    lol

  • I have deliberately not purchased any Sony products since the Rootkit fiasco of 2005. Up until then, Sony was a trusted, quality brand for me and I had quite a few Sony gadgets around the place. No longer.

    So I'm going to "sit out" instead.

  • Good luck [blogspot.com].

  • Yeah! Stick it to the Man, Anonymous! Show those Sony bastards that--

    Ooh, 10% off and a free t-shirt if I pre-order Infamous 2. Done and done!

  • I have made a vow to not buy any more Sony products for the rest of my life. I get fooled now and then by a movie I rent, but my intention is clear. Too bad there aren't a million people who feel just like I do about them
  • I've not knowingly bought anything with Sony's mark on is since the rootkit incident in 2005 (or there abouts). Of course it has had no effect on Sony, but it has had no effect on my life either. It helps that their hardware, while once great quality, is these days as cheap and unreliable as the next guy, their insistence on releasing products that don't properly support the de-facto standard formats & access methods and with other features missing from competing products that are cheaper.

    I may have
  • by BatGnat ( 1568391 )
    But does not affording to anyway, count?

Economists state their GNP growth projections to the nearest tenth of a percentage point to prove they have a sense of humor. -- Edgar R. Fiedler

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