When it is not busy installing rootkits on its customers’ computers, Sony is in an arms race with another group of its customers — aficionados of the Play Station Portable. By all accounts, the PSP is an awesome piece of hardware and I see these things everywhere I go.
The PSP has been so popular, that fans of the system have taken to posting homebrewed applications for the device that add functionality. For example, one application I was particularly interested in turns the PSP into an e-book reader, capable of displaying text files (believe it or not, this is not a feature the PSP ships with). Other applications allow the user to read Internet comics on the PSP. Another application allows for the popular MAME emulator to run on the PSP.
You’d think Sony would be happy that so many people have adopted the PSP that they go out and create such software for it — and you’d be dead wrong. In fact, Sony has repeatedly upgraded the firmware of the PSP to kill such efforts, in part due to concerns that the same backdoors the homebrew software opens up can be used to play pirated games.
There are two competing visions of technology at work here. On the one hand, is the personal computer which is open pretty much from end to end. I can mod the heck out of my computer at both the hardware and software level and do things with it that the manufacturer of the hardware and coders of the software never imagined. On the other hand are consumer electronics which are largely designed to serve a limited number of functions and actively work to prevent any unintended uses of the hardware.
Sony exemplifies that trend. It installs rootkits on computers to turn them, at least partially, into consumer electronic devices that can’t be meddled with by the user. It ships “MP3” players that first convert all your MP3s to ATRAC format which then cannot be tinkered with at all except for the relatively few options that Sony grants the user permission to do. It spends a good deal of time figuring out ways to prevent PSP owners from running e-book readers or MAME on the PSP.
Back in September, Cory Doctorow posted on his site the text of a presentation he made to HP which highlighted the problems in Trusted Computing, which is designed in part to make computers more like consumer electronics devices,
On the positive side, trusted computing allows for superior
countermeasures against spyware and other malicious software. It
contains crypto accelerators that safeguard communications integrity
and secrecy. It eases the pain of managing end-to-end crypto for
private communications.On the negative side, trusted computing can enforce policies against a
user’s wishes. Trusted computing can be used to block the use of
interoperable products (e.g., to force a user to use Internet Explorer
instead of Mozilla by allowing remote parties to reliably distinguish
among the two), and to block or complicate the backing up or migration
of user data. Additionally, trusted computing can be used as a
superior enforcement mechanism for DRM restrictions, particularly
those that seek to unilaterally renegotiate the terms under which
content is acquired.This need not be. “Owner override” is a conceptual model for modifying
trusted computing hardware to retain all of its user benefits while
eliminating the dangers posed by allowing a device to enforce policy
against its owner’s wishes.
Unfortunately, it’s not clear just how much consumers care about this and whether or not they care about the sort of lockdown on modification that Sony has imposed on the PSP.
On the one hand, some devices have clearly failed because of excessive DRM and limiting what the user can do with the device. Sony’s MP3 player that required converting all the user’s MP3s to ATRAC died a quick death, and the ridiculous copy protection built into Mini-Disc hardware was certainly part of the reason that never caught on in the U.S. market. I remember a few years ago an audiophile friend of my telling me that within a couple years everyone would ditch their CD players for SACD or DVD-Audio discs. The format war between those devices helped kill that market, but so did the onerous copy protection hardwired into the system (unauthorized SACD/DVD-Audio rippers did finally appear earlier this year).
On the other hand, clearly the proprietary nature of the devices hasn’t hurt the market for console games or portable systems like the PSP or the Nintendo Gameboy (though the Gameboy does have a nice aftermarket mod community which was a major factor in my decision to buy one).