Dear Sony…

via http://wololo.net/wagic/2012/03/25/dear-sony/

Dear Sony, it has come to my attention that one of the PSP games available on the playstation Vita has a vulnerability that could lead to the execution of external code by some malicious users. Therefore I am writing this blog post so that you can patch the game or remove it from the PSN store as soon as possible. Preferably, I suggest you take the money from your clients first, and prevent them from downloading the game afterwards, just like you did with Motorstorm Arctic Edge, 3 weeks ago. This way it will be a win-win situation for you, and you can always blame it on the hackers later on.



As a matter of fact, I have discovered that some “hackers” (I prefer to call them terrorists) have already prepared a tool wich, using this vulnerability, could allow people to run software that would be extremely dangerous for your business, such as 20 year-old 8 bit games and 154 different versions of pong.

I think this puts your business at risk, and I’ve tried to stop those vilains by all means necessary, but sadly it seems they are not breaking any law. Hopefully, giving you the name of the game will help you to take some efficient action. Those people are clearly wrong in their mind to try to play crappy open source software, when they could enjoy a great game such as Ridge Racer for less than 10$ a track, (which is clearly not a ripoff compared to the price one would have to pay in the real world to drive cars that completely defy the laws of physics. Although on that subject I woud like if you could help me, as my version of the game seems to be blocked in “demo mode” for some reason. All the 5 cars have exactly the same specs, so surely there’s something I’ve done wrong somewhere.)

I digress. The name of the game is Everybody’s Tennis. It is also known as Minna no tennis in Japan. Thankfully the game is not available on the US Vita store, so this should limit the problems on your end. I heard however that these hackers have prepared a US version of the hack just in case that version is being sold somewhere such as the HK store. I also heard people can buy the UK version from the US if they buy some PSN cards from resellers on ebay and other sites. If I may give some advice, I think this is not secure enough. True, you did a good job in preventing people from buying games outside of the country they live in (and being a French living in Japan, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the fact that I can’t buy any game on the French PSN, this is exactly how globalization should work, and it helps me sparing lots of money by not buying any game), but I think in order to avoid future hacks, you should simply prevent everyone from buying games on the PSN, which will guarantee you a complete control of the market.



The hackers also announced they would release their hack a few hours or days after they announce the name of the game being used. They claim this only allows people to run “homebrew” games and that in no way it allows people to play pirated PSP or vita games, but I think this is not an excuse to hack.

I realize it is saturday evening for your teams in Europe, and Sunday morning in Japan. I hope you will not have to wake some people in the middle of the night just to take action, I would have chosen a better time, but I myself have very little time to blog outside of weekends.

Hoping that working together we will be able to stop hackers. I seem to be one of the few people on Earth who understand that the real enemies of the Vita are not your poor marketing techniques, the terrible software such as the “back to the 90′s” netfront browser, the bad launch lineup, the delays on the playstation suite, the recent downgrade from 5 to 2 allowed copies of any given psn game, and the increasing competition of smartphones that all have better CPUs than the Vita. No, the real enemies are those people playing Lamecraft, who are clearly killing the videogame market, so let’s destroy them together.

Please pay extra attention to the dev known as wth, who apparently is behind this whole thing, as well as Teck4 who apparently helped him for the Japanese version of the hack. I also heard that somes guys named mamosuke and msparky83 were involved in the testing. It would be good if you have a way to maybe track these guys’ phones or something. Or maybe you can simply sue them, I heard it’s something you do very well.