Recent content by Genny

Consoles have no margin. It takes years to be profitable off a console. That said, you'd be surprised how much of the market Sony has in some of the areas you listed. For example, you listed Samsung and Panasonic as the inferred 'high end' that people go for (granted, only Vizio is really...

Honestly, they make a lot of great stuff these days. Their primary problem is branding and marketing, in my opinion. Case in point, they more or less have price parity with Samsung across the board (often slightly cheaper), but the perception is that Sony is significantly more expensive.

Mobile posted such a large loss due to some legacy costs associated with the purchase of Ericsson. The phones sell very poorly in the US to be clear, but it's also not a market Sony really invests in. The devices are much more popular in Europe and South America. Sell off Sony Pictures? You...

I've written my share of process flows for point of sale systems and I can tell you that it's very rare that these companies are actually retaining the data in an unencrypted format. Instead, what's happening is they're behind the times a bit and the malware is scraping the memory for plaintext...

Definitely true

People look at it through the lens of the US, which is a pretty minimal focus for Sony right now. The company is quite a bit more popular outside the states, even in regard to mobile phones, but not popular enough to be popular it seems. The US is an extremely expensive market to compete in from...

The PS4 is a very small part of Sony's global business. It's funny people keep throwing that around. As for the recommendations for Sony to engage in a price war--they did and it didn't work. Exchange rates, when looking at Korea vs Japan, aren't favorable for Sony. Sony also can't afford to...

A lot of them don't store the information. The card number isn't encrypted at the hardware level (pinpad) and is being scraped from memory.

Hardware tokenization accomplishes the same thing without needing to retain actual card data. I have a token associated with your past transactions--when you swipe your card for me, the pinpad converts the card number into that token, which is sent to my register. I can then match the token to...

It's such an easy attack to prevent though...really boggles my mind that these companies would take so long to invest in preventative measures. Target's hardware was ancient. If you've been in there in the last few months, all the pinpads have been replaced with Verifone MX950s and presumably...

That was my thought as well. I was surprised how little they are paid. 80-100k isn't even enough to get you what many would consider a 'good' apartment in many of these cities.

That's actually how it goes down. No joke. Granted, POS software and hardware runs in the many, many millions of dollars and can take years in development and implementation. Unfortunately, it's not as simple as saying "let's just do some pen testing!" and be done with it. I do agree with you...

But did he get his Xbox? It never said. :(

While I am no way excusing the storage of credit cards, this statement isn't exactly true. From a business perspective, there are several reasons a retailer may want to store credit cards. Storage of credit cards, whether encrypted/tokenized/whatever, are pretty much a must for asset...

This is true, but in such a situation it would mean the credit processor would have been compromised and not necessarily Target.