The Cloud Has Us All In A Fog

Ever heard of Dropship ? It's an open-source project that "enables arbitrary, anonymous transfers of files between Dropbox accounts." Dropbox hopes you haven't; they tried to squelch it this week, and even accidentally reported that it was subject to a DMCA takedown notice, with predictably futile results. I'm mostly sympathetic: I'm a huge fan of their service, Dropship was a clear violation of their terms, and for obvious reasons they don't want to turn into an anonymous peer-to-peer file-sharing service. Unfortunately, they accidentally built a system which enabled just that. How about Sony's PlayStation Network? Of course you have. It was so thoroughly hacked this week that Sony had to shut it down indefinitely . Did you also know that Sony's PS3 firmware is effectively wide open, because they made a hilariously stupid security mistake ? Did you know that that's probably how PSN got hacked , and that it raised the spectre of the hacker(s) taking over every connected PlayStation 3 in the world and turning them into by far the biggest botnet in history? That probably wasn't what Sony had in mind, but they accidentally built a system which enabled just that.