Sony caught bashing Microsoft’s Halo 3 on Wikipedia

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By Stevie Smith Sep 6, 2007, 16:28 GMT

Following on from the recent discovery of illicit content alterations being made to specific Wikipedia pages by certain high profile sources, Japanese consumer electronics giant Sony Corporation has this week been caught with its hand in the online encyclopaedia’s information cookie jar.Though not as substantial as Wikipedia edits made by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee that labelled right-wing radio talk show host and political commentator Rush Limbaugh as a "bigot" and "racist", Sony’s actions once again highlight just how low some are prepared to stoop when it comes to competitive brinkmanship. In this particular case, reported by MaxConsole, edits made to the Wikipedia page of Halo 3, the imminent final chapter of Microsoft’s flagship videogame property, openly took swipes at the product’s level of quality, or lack thereof.The underhand and dismissive edits in question were executed from the IP address 217.18.23.2 and included bitter and unsubstantiated claims that Halo 3 "won’t look any better than Halo 2," when it arrives in the United States on September 25 – completely ignoring that 2004’s Halo 2 was built on the original Xbox platform while Halo 3 is exclusive to the next-generation Xbox 360 console.The alterations to Halo 3’s page were quickly sourced by the boffins at Wikipedia thanks to the new WikiScanner tool, with the IP address 217.18.23.2 being swiftly traced back to none other than Sony Computer Entertainment’s very own videogame studio in Liverpool, England. Sony has offered no official comment on the story. The offending game page has subsequently been corrected by Wikipedia and had its edit function blocked.In other related news, Sony Computer Entertainment boss Kaz Hirai has been accused of applying liberal amounts of corporate spin to rumours that the PlayStation 3 videogames console is notoriously hard to develop for and, as a result, game studios are struggling to squeeze the hardware’s true potential."The power that we've packed into PS3 will really manifest itself in software titles that come up four, five or six years down the line," commented Hirai by way of explanation.The Guardian reports that one disgruntled PS3 owner duly voiced their disapproval at Hirai’s spin by exclaiming on Evil Avatar that: "So all of the stories that have come out lately about how hard the PS3 is to develop for - including inferior PS3 ports, massive delays and even cancellations - that's all good news."To add to Sony’s poor week, the company is also currently working towards a solution for yet another potentially PC-damaging hacker-friendly rootkit vulnerability that has this time emerged via its MicroVault USB memory sticks.

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a humanSep 6th, 2007 - 18:09:13

Wow, this shows that Sony is getting desperate. They know they are losing the console war and got careless enough to do something stupid like this.

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TomSep 6th, 2007 - 20:52:47

Ha Sony's explanation to this is that 4 or 5 years down the line they will start creating great games... really? 4 or 5 years? I think xbox 720 will be out by then...

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MacMar 6th, 2008 - 17:49:38

Halo 3 kick the shit out of any sony game.

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Mark SMay 6th, 2009 - 15:36:35

Let me tell you my opinion on what happened.

The IP in question 217.18.23.2 may belong to the scee.com server but I seriously doubt that it was someone from that company that did that on purpose. My theory is either a server of the company was compromised or someone has manage to infiltrate a system there.

This is because I see the same IP on my server logs and the HTTP headers indicate a bot not a regular browser. And my site has nothing to do with any of the products or services or information related to Sony. It happened to google the particular IP after I saw it in my logs and here we are. And is not at all strange the company offered no explanation on the matter.

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