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Police Raid PS3 Hacker's House, Hacker Releases PS3 'Hypervisor Bible'
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from PSGroove.com:
"Graf_chokolo, who has contributed countless things to the PS3 scene, had his private home raided by police this morning. They confiscated all of his 'accounts' and anything related to PS3 hacking. Some of you may remember that graf_chokolo promised if he was pushed, that he would release all of his PS3 hypervisor knowledge to the world. He kept good on this promise, releasing what is being dubbed as the Hypervisor Bible. 'The uploaded files contains his database, which is a series of tools for the PS3's Hypervisor and Hypervisor processes. It will help other devs to reverse engineer the hypervisor of PS3 further.'"
Something may need to be done, but does that "something" preclude people from using a product that they purchased by busting down their door and stealing all their equipment? Remember back in the old days when people would take things apart just to learn how they worked? Old toasters, microwaves, circuitry sets, etc. It really seems like we're forgetting that whole aspect of learning.
DONT buy sony. dont let anyone around you, buy sony.
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I don't agree with the way Sony is doing it, but at least they are doing something. Some of the multiplayer games are completely unplayable as cheating is rampant. Something needs to be done as they're ruining the games for honest players.
Server-side checks: You don't have to Like Blizzard's "got-to-be-online-to-play" for Starcraft II, but notice: no cheating, with 1000000+ connected users and a easy to hack platform (PC+Mac).
If your game uses p2p connections and no gameplay server, some care in designing the protocol will make it much harder to cheat. Deterministic sync'hing with input passing, for example, will provide you a no-cheating solution. There's many other options.
Problem with cheating is that about no one in the industry cares about quality. Don't go justifying Sony's action on gamer's cheating. Find something better.
The entire fiasco with people getting arrested for modifying their own property is due to the DMCA's circumvention clause. Because the DMCA casts doubt on basic ownership rights I think that the base law is flawed.
If I want to buy a cheap super-computer or mod my Xbox 360 into a media center that should be a given-right: I bought the hardware so go to hell without my Freedom to Tinker.
Shh.
>>>However, they can still refuse to offer you PSN services.
Yep.
I'm okay with that. Still that doesn't mean I should be arrested for modding MY console. If Sony ever tries, and my life is ruined because of it (like what RIAA did to Jammie Thomas and other victims), the CEO might as well consider himself equivalent to Mubarak (i.e. a liberty-suppressing tyrant).
Oh and I'm not sure why people think I'm "trolling" or anti-sony??? The PS1 and 2 were my favorite consoles. 10 years of great gameplaying (1995-2005) so I'm hardly anti-sony.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
This is the entirety of the original source material for this story:
"SONY was today at my home"? That's not how raids work. In the US, Sony had to go through some rather extensive legal action to be able to get a TRO on geohot, and now they've convinced the German police to raid some random hacker's house out of nowhere? He's also not even one of the more prominent people involved, and had very little to do both with the core hacks and with subsequent piracy tools - he mostly worked on his own on hypervisor reverse engineering and there's just about nothing they could charge him with. This would also be the first action taken by SCEE regarding this entire issue. And you'd expect someone other than graf_chokolo to notice, publish, or somehow independently report the raid. Not to mention that if you're raided, the first thing you do is talk to an attorney, not post a care package online (as "proof"?). None of this makes any sense.
He did mention that if he ever got a takedown notice from Sony or something along those lines, he'd release his hypervisor disassembler database. I think it's more likely that he got tired of waiting and just made up an excuse.
What's amazing to me is the different way that the police forces are treating these hardware tinkerers with Sony itself, which instigated and distributed a massive campaign of installing rootkits on people's computers. Utterly illegal, and yet the Sony CEO or whoever didn't get his door battered in at 6am.
One law for the serfs and a different, more lenient set of 'rules' for the our lords and masters.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce