Judge Lets Sony Unmask Visitors to PS3-Jailbreaking Site
By David Kravets, March 4, 2011
A federal magistrate is granting Sony the right to acquire the internet IP addresses of anybody who has visited PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz’s website from January of 2009 to the present.
Thursday’s decision by Magistrate Joseph Spero to allow Sony to subpoena Hotz’s web provider (.pdf) raises a host of web-privacy concerns.
Respected for his iPhone hacks and now the PlayStation 3 jailbreak, Hotz is accused of breaching the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other laws after he published an encryption key and software tools on his website that allow Playstation owners to gain complete control of their consoles from the firmware on up.
Sony also won subpoenas (.pdf) for data from YouTube and Google, as part of its lawsuit against the 21-year-old New Jersey hacker, as well as Twitter account data linked to Hotz, who goes by the handle GeoHot.
Bluehost maintains Hotz’s geohot.com site. The approved subpoena requires the company to turn over “documents reproducing all server logs, IP address logs, account information, account access records and application or registration forms” tied to Hotz’s hosting. The Bluehost subpoena also demands “any other identifying information corresponding to persons or computers who have accessed or downloaded files hosted using your service and associated” with the www.geohot.com website, including but not limited to the “geohot.com/jailbreak.zip file.”
(...)
The DMCA prohibits the trafficking of so-called “circumvention devices” designed to crack copy-protection schemes. The law does not require Sony to prove that Hotz received payment for the hack, which was designed to allow PlayStation 3 owners the ability to run home-brewed software or alternative operating systems like Linux. It builds on a series of earlier jailbreaks that unlocked less protected levels of the PlayStation’s authentication process.
I'd state some naive rhetorical questions but I know that people will still flock to Sony products, throw money at Sony, and enjoy their rootkits in return, despite the repeated PR and privacy protection fiasco's on Sony's part. <img src='http://mm-bbs.org/public/style_emoticon ... pengin.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':pengin:' />
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ #whereisyui #ゆいちゃん ~breathe your last and fall into my eternal embrace~
Sony is definitely over-reacting here, especially when the PS3 has a natural anti-piracy aspect: the size of the damn games. That said, one of the major outcries from the PS3 community is that online gaming has become riddled with hackers (apparently moreso than before...?) and that the updating steps they've taken have helped a bit. This whole suing thing has gotten out of hand, but I'd be upset if I was in their shoes. At this point, the crack is out there. It may hurt software sales a bit, but the opposite point that developers will immediately flee the platform is ridiculous.
I've visited GeoHot's website and the YouTube video they collected info from, but they aren't going to be able to anything with it. It's stupid and just a waste of time.
Sony is definitely over-reacting here, especially when the PS3 has a natural anti-piracy aspect: the size of the damn games. That said, one of the major outcries from the PS3 community is that online gaming has become riddled with hackers (apparently moreso than before...?) and that the updating steps they've taken have helped a bit. This whole suing thing has gotten out of hand, but I'd be upset if I was in their shoes. At this point, the crack is out there. It may hurt software sales a bit, but the opposite point that developers will immediately flee the platform is ridiculous.
I've visited GeoHot's website and the YouTube video they collected info from, but they aren't going to be able to anything with it. It's stupid and just a waste of time.
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25GB (the maximum of a one-layered BR) is pretty much downloadable today I'd say.
You do get the game for free, so some people might just think "I'll just pay the 2€/$ electricity for having my netbook download for a whole day" or something like that I guess.
I don't have a PS3 (yet), but I think you can just load the isos anyway, so there's no need to burn them to BRs. Which would make the process a lot more time and money consuming.
Microsoft's mini-pc got a hack (easy DVD drive flash) pretty early in it's life afaik. I'm pretty sure that helped it's sales quite a bit actually.
Piracy on consoles is always a mixed blessing. It helped systems like PS2 sell a looot, but on the other hand there are quite a few people that simply would never buy games, even if they like them, when they can get them for free.
I'd say this has changed with the online market however. Before this generation you had to fear no kind of punishment for installing a modchip or anything, but now you can get banned from online gaming.
I do agree completely with you that Sony is over-reacting with the IPs. Imho they have no right to get any of the IPs and I have no fucking clue how that judge thing it's legit to give the IPs to Sony. Was that a judge from the USA... ?
Last edited by Ap2000 on Wed Mar 09, 2011 12:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Sony is definitely over-reacting here, especially when the PS3 has a natural anti-piracy aspect: the size of the damn games. That said, one of the major outcries from the PS3 community is that online gaming has become riddled with hackers (apparently moreso than before...?) and that the updating steps they've taken have helped a bit. This whole suing thing has gotten out of hand, but I'd be upset if I was in their shoes. At this point, the crack is out there. It may hurt software sales a bit, but the opposite point that developers will immediately flee the platform is ridiculous.
I've visited GeoHot's website and the YouTube video they collected info from, but they aren't going to be able to anything with it. It's stupid and just a waste of time.
[/quote]
25GB (the maximum of a one-layered BR) is pretty much downloadable today I'd say.
You do get the game for free, so some people might just think "I'll just pay the 2€/$ electricity for having my netbook download for a whole day" or something like that I guess.
I don't have a PS3 (yet), but I think you can just load the isos anyway, so there's no need to burn them to BRs. Which would make the process a lot more time and money consuming.
Microsoft's mini-pc got a hack (easy DVD drive flash) pretty early in it's life afaik. I'm pretty sure that helped it's sales quite a bit actually.
Piracy on consoles is always a mixed blessing. It helped systems like PS2 sell a looot, but on the other hand there are quite a few people that simply would never buy games, even if they like them, when they can get them for free.
I'd say this has changed with the online market however. Before this generation you had to fear no kind of punishment for installing a modchip or anything, but now you can get banned from online gaming.
I do agree completely with you that Sony is over-reacting with the IPs. Imho they have no right to get any of the IPs and I have no fucking clue how that judge thing it's legit to give the IPs to Sony. Was that a judge from the USA... ?
[/quote]
Yeah, I think it was a California judge?
25GB isn't too bad, but it's still a lot of data just to handle.
Actually, ISO loading has been a possibility for a long time now, but it's been pretty tough. It was like PSP hacking; not too difficult, but complicated and probably out of the realm of do-ability for general gamers. That said, Geohotz homebrew tool has been much easier to do and the big thing in this is the hacking/discovery of the master authentication code. PS2 definitely had a nice chunk of piracy sales, though probably not as big as the PSP/DS's. It certainly wasn't as easy as it is on the handhelds.
