April 29, 2005

DOH! Sony does it again...

I had written earlier about Sony and how they really commit stupid marketing blunders when it comes to fundamental software. The example I quoted was their failure to include the most basic of music encoding protocols MP3 into their Walkman products, going instead with a proprietary and locked standard. Now, according to Ars Technica, they are doing it again:
Sony drops the ball on the PSP's wireless security
Now here's a major technical fumble of the kind you don't see every day: Sony launches the PSP worldwide, touting its 802.11b support, and only includes WEP support! As you know if you read our Wi-Fi blackpaper (or if you've been paying any attention at all to wireless news for the past few years), WEP is garbage. Someone clever commented in a Sony message board thread about this issue that WEP is so insecure and fast WEP-cracking utils are so widespread and easy to use, that it's almost like there's a Ron Popeil product out that'll do it for you.

Not being a PSP owner (*sniff*), I wasn't aware of this issue until I ran across this outraged ZDNET blog post from George Ou. Ou isn't the first person to be mystified by Sony's decision—some googling turned up this blog post from earlier in the month—but he's the first I've seen with a big soapbox. Ou is calling for Sony to stop producing PSPs without WPA support, and if possible to ship a firmware upgrade that'll put WPA support on all existing PSPs.
Sony does great on hardware -- their WEGA Televisions, the Trinitron was king of the hill for monitors for a long long time (still using mine) and their replacement for the DVD -- the BluRay -- is by far the better of several contenders. Now if they could just get a clue over to their software department... Posted by DaveH at April 29, 2005 5:49 PM
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