Sony employee(s) caught editing Halo3 wikipage.. *

AlphaWolf said:
Corporations are at least somewhat responsible for the actions of their employees, especially when said actions could be seen as in the companies interest and were likely performed using their equipment.

If a Sony employee ran into my house with a Sony truck, I'd skip suing the individual and go right to the source. Someone there clearly let him have the keys.
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While everything you said is true. I don't think the issue here is that major...it's a wiki after all. :D

I think the reason why a lot of sites and people are ranting on and on is because the tactic is not unlike Sony. Sony actions of late have already put them in bad light. Just a little actions of an individual will look badly upon Sony. So some degree it's Sony fault for being in such position.

Just like if you're already in a dog house because you have already forgotten your wife's birthday last week...you don't coming home drunk expecting her to greet you with a big smile.
 
Arwin said:
Indeed. By the way, how easy is it to fake these addresses?
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I think you need to be physically in the path between the server and victim's machine to do it. Possible, but not terribly likely.

On the other hand, it wouldn't be hard to build a HTML page which would make the visitor's browser post to Wikipedia. Something like:

<body onload="document.forms.frm.submit()">
<form name="frm" action="http://www.wikipedia.org/...">
<textarea name="textbox">Halo 3...

Now you just need to get the unwitting victim to come to the page.
 
betan said:
I don't see any regularity in this issue. It seems to be a one-time edit. For all I know wireless network wasn't password protected and some guy passing by made a joke.

Don't get me wrong what ever is the case, a visitor, intern, employee, cracker doesn't matter. SCEE Liverpool is responsible for the network, but it may not be the ethical company policy issue you are talking about.
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The IP adress has a quite long editing history on Wikipedia, with topics on video games, Star Wars, football... It's quite likely more than a single case of someone using that computer to modify wiki pages.
 
Laa-Yosh said:
The IP adress has a quite long editing history on Wikipedia, with topics on video games, Star Wars, football... It's quite likely more than a single case of someone using that computer to modify wiki pages.
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I doubt the external IPs map 1:1 with internal IPs. I'm sure a ton of people edit wikis at work.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
The whole 'Sony said' thing (BTW you appear to have a dodgy keyboard that puts $ signs where S's shoud be...) is a bit iffy though, because a lot of things Sony said are in fact developers, and not all first party. It seems to me the problem is Sony exclusive developers talk, whereas devs on other platforms don't. If you're going to talk, you're going to end up saying something someone takes offense to. eg. nAo, giving his personal opinion based on reviewing the PGR4 video evidence and his technical background and stating the motion blur is too good to be realtime. That's interpreted as a Sony developer which leads onto yet another Sony faux pas. Those disclaimers in people's signatures really annoy me, because it should be obvious that a person's statements on a board like this or down the pub or whatever aren't company policy but individual opinion, and yet it seems people won't make that distinction.

What we could be seeing here is an individual commenting that Halo 2 looks like Halo 3 (which was a stupid thing to say, because it clearly doesn't!) but the correlation the masses make is that it's the parent company's doing. It does reflect badly on his employer, but it shouldn't. If someone in the street spits at you, would you then consider their whole family equally disagreeable because of their association with him?
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Great post!

It's beyond me how people can't (or perhaps in some cases, don't want to) separate individuals from the companies they work for.
 
Maybe it's to much successfulness by the companies in creating brands? Maybe people have been advertised to so much that they notice brandnames instead of people? It's like

"Mr. Mungado, working in his garden shed on weekends, developed the new everlasting fuel-free engine over a period of two years. His funding came from his job at McDonald's as a grease reclamation engineer. He hopes the engine will save all the world's problems."
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would be read as...

"Mr. Mungado, working in his garden shed on weekends, developed the new everlasting fuel-free engine over a period of two years. His funding came from his job at McDonald's as a grease reclamation engineer. He hopes the engine will save all the world's problems."
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...and the reader comes to think it was a McDonald creation through brand association. That is much of the purpose of brand association is it not? To have people make subconscious links with brands and ideas and feelings. Perhaps the general public is well trained to take any brand name and associate with whatever context?
 
TheChefO said:
Agreed.

But any employee of a company represents that company.

When Ken Kutaragi would spout off about some crazy xyz, it wasn't "Ken said xyz!", it was "Sony says xyz".

That's the way it is. People represent their companies through their actions. How descriptive one wants to be in describing their relationship to said company is up to the reporter.

Sony said
Sony employee said
Sony dev said
Sony Liverpool dev said
Sony Liverpool dev intern said
Ex Sony Liverpool dev intern said
friend of ex Sony Liverpool dev intern said
friend of ex janitor of Sony Liverpool dev said

etc.

If some guy wearing a Verizon hat clips your service to your house, your going to say Verizon did it.
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Kaz or Kutaragi or Phil spoke officially as Sony representatives in their interviews or conferences and their job or position or responsibilities are to represent Sony in such occasions and they were doing their job. Unlike an anonymous "unimportant" dev locked in a room. They did not act independedly because it was their responsibility to spoke as Sony. Unlike that "unimportant" dev locked in a room.

Similarly if someone who hates MS`s products and happens to work in MS because MS pays well, but ends up spreading bad reputation anonymously online or to his friends about their products just because he works with MS that doesnt mean he represents MS.

AlphaWolf said:
Corporations are at least somewhat responsible for the actions of their employees, especially when said actions could be seen as in the companies interest and were likely performed using their equipment.

If a Sony employee ran into my house with a Sony truck, I'd skip suing the individual and go right to the source. Someone there clearly let him have the keys.
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Ofcourse you would sue Sony. But still you wouldnt sue Sony for wanting to destroy your house.

Similarly you cant blame Sony for deliberating, wickedly, malisciously trying to harm halo's reputation through Wiki. Because this is not what happened and Sony had nothing to do with it. Only an employee who works at Sony.

Also who you sue and who you dont depends on the occasion and case.

Who you sue and who ends up held responsible to pay the price are often different, You might sue Sony because a Sony employee ruined your house but at the end you might lose the case because the court may consider this as solely the worker's fault. The worker may end up paying for the cost.
 
.Melchiah. said:
Great post!

It's beyond me how people can't (or perhaps in some cases, don't want to) separate individuals from the companies they work for.
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There is a balance here. For sure, CEO's do speak for their companies. Developer execs the same for their own company. I would be willing to say lead developers under larger umbrellas (e.g. Bungie under MS) do represent their companies. They do when they succeed, likewise when they fail. And when they say stupid stuff it does reflect on the company. This is why usually most stuff is passed through PR and there are all sorts of warning about what can and cannot be said.

So while a graphic artist or coder doesn't represent the company in a formal sense (they do represent the company in many ways though, namely in terms of integrity and class), people like Peter Moore... errr... Ken Kutaragi... errr... Shane Kim and Phil Harrison (phew!) do represent their companies. They rarely say something by mistake.

Unless it can be shown that management/marketing put the poster up to task, it is best to say "someone at Sony" or better "someone who formerly worked at Sony". This was a pretty stupid thing to do and reinforces the image of arrogance, fair or not, Sony has projected over the last 2 years.
 
Nesh said:
Similarly you cant blame Sony for deliberating, wickedly, malisciously trying to harm halo's reputation through Wiki. Because this is not what happened and Sony had nothing to do with it. Only an employee who works at Sony.
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As much as I believe that's true, you can't be 100% certain that it wasn't a Sony action in the official sense. That's why management should be careful about briefing people on what they can do that would potentially harm the company image. Maybe they did, and some dumbass decided he didn't care. Anyway, it reflects badly on the company.
 
Scott_Arm said:
As much as I believe that's true, you can't be 100% certain that it wasn't a Sony action in the official sense.
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Well, you can't be 100% certain that it wasn't MS action to discredit Sony either.
Who would have better access to Sony computers. :)
Does this make it likely? No.

I personally find it highly unlikely Sony as a company can be that stupid.
MS pays third parties to do wiki edits, I'm sure Sony is smart enough to employ a similar approach or simply tell the employees to do their bidding at home.

But in the end, if people want to believe that's an evil doing of Sony (or not), reasoning won't change much. I look at this thread and see the regular pro-Sony and anti-Sony camps.
 
Post from another forum, may or may not help decide who did it. Whoever it was, is probably laughing still.

Sounds like a prank to me. 217.18.23.2 is a class C IP Address. A large company like Sony would have Class A IP address. why? Class C only alows a maximum of 253 computers on a network. This is not practical for a large company as Sony. A class C IP ranges are given to small companies. in the past companies used public IP's in the internal network but, because of the limitations of IPv4 addressing, and security risks, i beleive everyone uses private IPs for internal. That IP came from a public IP from a normal PC user which was assigned by ISP.

Besides, with proxy's, PC bots, and IP spoofing capabilities, it's a simple task to alter the IP packet header to change source IP.
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betan said:
Well, you can't be 100% certain that it wasn't MS action to discredit Sony either.
Who would have better access to Sony computers. :)
Does this make it likely? No.

I personally find it highly unlikely Sony as a company can be that stupid.
MS pays third parties to do wiki edits, I'm sure Sony is smart enough to employ a similar approach or simply tell the employees to do their bidding at home.

But in the end, if people want to believe that's an evil doing of Sony (or not), reasoning won't change much. I look at this thread and see the regular pro-Sony and anti-Sony camps.
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I don't think it was an official move by Sony. I'm just saying the possibility is there, and that looks bad on them to some people. Hopefully Sony is educating their employees about using work computers for this type of thing.
 
Scott_Arm said:
As much as I believe that's true, you can't be 100% certain that it wasn't a Sony action in the official sense. That's why management should be careful about briefing people on what they can do that would potentially harm the company image. Maybe they did, and some dumbass decided he didn't care. Anyway, it reflects badly on the company.
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Agreed. Since things are pretty uncertain though we shouldnt jump to conclusions so soon
 
fallguy said:
Post from another forum, may or may not help decide who did it. Whoever it was, is probably laughing still.
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Well if thats the case this makes the people who wrote the article about "Sony caught red handed" even more ridiculous. Typical journalism trying to find a title that surprises the readers
 
Scott_Arm said:
I don't think it was an official move by Sony. I'm just saying the possibility is there, and that looks bad on them to some people.
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I got your point, but based on the contributers on this thread, I say it looks bad to people who already made up their mind.

It should look somewhat bad of course, not because there is a possibility of official evil doing but because it's Sony's responsibility in any case.
 
fallguy said:
Post from another forum, may or may not help decide who did it. Whoever it was, is probably laughing still.
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Whois results said:
inetnum: 217.18.23.0 - 217.18.23.255
netname: SCEE-NGS
descr: SCEE Liverpool Studios Internet Access
country: GB
admin-c: SH1434-RIPE
tech-c: SH1434-RIPE
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It came from Sony. I cannot believe the amount of hoops people will jump through to try and throw the blame elsewhere.

Modifying the TCP header works great, until you never get the SYN+ACK packet. You can't just modify the IP in the packet to some address and expect to establish a successful session. It is not 'easy' to spoof a particular IP address for an entire TCP session.

More than likely it is an outbound address assigned to a number of people. All of the quoted claims from another forum are either completely wrong or a complete stretch from reality.

The most reasonable explanation is a Sony employee did this and has a habit of doing other similiar things. IMO, if their network security is such that visitors are coming in and editing wikis, or there are multiple employees in these sorts of shenanigans, puts SCEE in a much worse light.

Like I said previously I don't see it as a big deal, it's pretty childish though, and not how I would want my employees to act online.
 
Why's it Sony's responsibility though? Do our employers have to dictate to us every action and thought? Are people not ever allowed to act without the official sanction of the CEO or board of directors? If it was an individual at Sony, and Sony don't act to weedle them out, I can accept that's irresponsible. If they don't vet their staff to be confident they can act professionally, that too is irresponsible. But a company can't vouch 100% for all it's staff, to ensure they don't do anything they shouldn't. Unless they were to monitor 24/7 every single thing every employee did with their internet access (assuming this was a Sony employee), there's no way to ensure it couldn't happen (other than banning internet access, which never goes down well). If a British citizen shoots a white rhino, is that the fault of the British Government for not ensuring it's citizens don't behave themselves? How could you ever enforce that? Tag everyone and monitor everything they do, and zap them when they don't do as you want them to...
 
If Sony monitored 24/7 its employees in everything they do that would have also had a negative impact on the company's image as being too inhumane with the employees. Both externally and internally
 
Sigh...

Nesh said:
If Sony monitored 24/7 its employees in everything they do that would have also had a negative impact on the company's image as being too inhumane with the employees. Both externally and internally
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Nevermind being harsh, it'd be very counterproductive to creativity and productivity.

Scott_Arm said:
I don't think it was an official move by Sony. I'm just saying the possibility is there, and that looks bad on them to some people. Hopefully Sony is educating their employees about using work computers for this type of thing.
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Outside of a quick managerial "don't be stupid" sidebar, what can you do? It's a waste of money and HR resources to dedicate extensive training to this. Especially when it can change so rapidly. So Wikipedia editing and blogs are the current thing. In six months it'll be something else. Like ERP said, it's the nature of the beast. What's really disturbing is that there's 3 pages discussing such an inane topic/event.
 
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