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Sony Files Lawsuit Against PS3 Hacker GeoHot
Kayot writes "George Hotz, or, as he is known on the internet, GeoHot, has been served court papers. Shorty after Team fail0verflow discovered faults in the PS3's TPMs, Geohot and others figured out how to extract the long sought after holy grail encryption keys. Apparently Sony is not pleased and is very keen on defending their poorly defended system with the US legal system. The basis is that GeoHot released programs that allow the signing of homebrew which can be used to make PSN-like games out of normal PS3 games. However GeoHot has never supported any form of piracy and in fact has taken a constant stance against it."
A lawsuit was pretty much inevitable; Sony needs to show its shareholders that it's doing something. To be honest, I find it hard to imagine that they won't succeed in making Mr. Hotz's life very... expensive indeed. Of course, with the cat now well and truly out of the bag on PS3 security, anything they do now can't really be more than a mixture of revenge and deterrence.
The real question for Sony (and other console developers) is how they pitch the longer term response to this. With hindsight, it now appears that the long-legendary PS3 security set-up wasn't so stellar after all. Prior to Sony's removal of OtherOS, there were only tiny cracks in the wall and Sony could reasonably have expected it to last several more years. Following the removal of OtherOS, the demolition of Sony's safeguards was swift and ruthless.
One possible inference, therefore, is that Sony's decision to grant PS3 users a "walled garden" in which they could - to some extent - do what they wanted with the system was what really provided the PS3 with its 5-year immunity from piracy. The commercially-minded piracy people, and the bored teenagers who wanted to play pirated games, just weren't good enough to break a console's security (even if major flaws did exist) and the people who were good enough; they weren't interested, as they could already do what they wanted with the system.
If I were Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft, I would now be urgently investigating the possibility of incorporating a similar "walled garden" OtherOS equivalent into my next generation hardware. Yes, the numbers who might actually use it would probably be small - and yes, said users aren't worth much commercially as they probably don't buy many games, but 5 years of no piracy on the system is a pretty big payback.
Sue that information right off the Internet! It'll work, we promise.
The naivety of this is amazing. When the mafia burning down someone's shop, it is not because they are trying to recup any losses, but rather to send a "Don't mess with us" message to OTHER shop owners.
Sony don't need to win anything from this suit, they just need to drag GeoHot through a very expensive lawsuit hell as a message "You better have a lot of money before messing with us!" to other future possible hackers.
This is the same tactic with the RIAA against filesharers (but there are simply too many to fight against), and the same tactic Adobe tried against Skylarov (sorry, maybe mispelled), and the same tactic the US govt is using against Assange. No different from any school bully, you mess with him, you got beaten by whatever means available.
Oliver.
Back in the days of Prohibition, "wine" was sold as mashed bricks/packages of grapes or grape juice.
They would come with instructions like "please be careful not to put in a jug with 2 gallons of water and leave in a dark place for 2 months lest it ferment and turn into wine."
By rights, there should have been an uprising against all this DRM crap and crappy laws. I wonder why it hasn't happened.