Don't have a PS3 ...
.... will gladly add my IP address to your data trawl though.
A federal magistrate has awarded Sony a subpoena allowing the company to obtain the IP addresses of everyone who visited the personal website of PlayStation 3 jailbreaker George Hotz for the past 26 months. Magistrate Judge Joseph C. Spero of San Francisco also granted Sony's request for subpoenas on Google, Twitter, and …
Good call. I will also gladly give them my IP, dynamic and UK based as it is... In fact with a few router resets they can have a dozen IPs from me. They are then welcome to try to get my name from my ISP, good luck with that. I assume they have their own direct hotline which bypasses the call centre in India?
They are then more than welcome to send me a threatening letter telling me what I can, or can't do with something that I own... Or in my case, something that I don't.
A/C because I don't want to make it too easy. let's make them jump through maximum hoops before finding the information they have jumped for is completely useless!
BTW, it's worth a visit on your mobile phone. The UK networks have multiple outbound gateway IPs and each connection takes a different one from the pool. Even each image request to a page will come from a different IP!
That we all visit this website and download any videos and instruction documents that we can find relating to this matter.
It is important that as many people as possible learn and realise what that law requires us not to do; so let us study what George Hotz did, so that we can avoid doing it ourselves.
> what that law requires us not to do;
Remember that it is only SCEA's *allegation* that any law requires us not to do this; no court has yet upheld that view (nor rejected it).
So SCEA has been granted the right to find out the IP addresses (and thence, according to their argument, the identities) of anyone who has associated with Hotz via his website, and heard any of his ideas, which might well qualify as Free Speech in the US.
I find this ruling rather troubling...
Vic.
I find it outrageous that some judge that has no jurisdiction over me has the right to disclose to a commercial enterprise such as Sony, the fact that I visited a site belonging to someone who they have a grievance with. The kid is hacking a games console, not showing people how to make nuclear bombs! Any UK solicitors willing to take this further? I am looking for some advice on this, must be free of course :)
This is called corporate law.
It's clear that today corporations dictates what we do, how we do it and when we do what they want us to do. This goes beyond continental or country- borders. A problem worsened by the fact that most local country-side governments are ALL corrupt (and usually no-more then a local front-end for these mega-corporations).
"Blade Runner" meets "1984" meets "They Live!" :-(
This is far off from the Utopian vision that Gene Roddenberry had in "Star trek".
At this rate we'll be back in the middle ages by 2020 (or in prison). But at least we'll have our punky-sized smart-phone with holographic display showing us idiotic TV shows coupled with even more idiotic advertisement and the occasional game of 3D solitaire.
Step 1. Select a lawyer who specializes in the field you need help with.
Step 2. Write politely to lawyer making your your grievance clear.
Step 3. Wait. If the said lawyer is not rushed off his/her feet and your case looks solid, you will probably get quite a lot of good advice.
What if he just wants a decent games console and doesn't give a fuck about linux ??? Its funny when u ask one of thoes twats who were running linux on there PS3 why they installed the update that removed the linux option and they say it so they could run a new game. So u say so u did buy it as a Games Console then ??? they neva have an answer.
Do u really think the PS3 would have sold less if it had NEVER had the option the in stall linux ? And how different would your life really have been ? The ban in Europe will not effect Sony for a couple of reasons.. Reason 1. The PS3 is sold at a LOSS. So they will loose LESS. Have a good think about that one. Reason 2. I think the PS3 is near the end of its life. PS4 cant be that far off.
I visit his site few times in the last year ( I visited the site 2 times just now ;) ), and they were not PS3 related (it was for the iCrap stuff).
Everything in my house that is electronics is Sony....I was gone go and get new TV (even though my old Sony is still good but not HD) and I had already plan on what TV to get.
Darn Sony, now I need to look at the sales again to find one that is not Sony.
When they knock on my door maybe they can take the old TV with them (it's a big one and heavy)
I was gone get the new Xperia as well, HTC looks good to....
If any one from Sony is reading this, you just lost customer and revenue....hope you are happy.
Do you not think now Sony has gone too far? These bastards are really pushing it. At the moment, it's no longer about hacking a console or alleged digital rights infringement.
it's about privacy and freedom.
What's more interesting is how the legal system is allowing this to happen.
Do the right thing.
Boycott Sony.
At the very least think about it. There may be more that one can do, although not being familiar with the US legal system, I am not sure what avenues are available.
I visited his site and I own a PS3. I haven't jailbroken my PS3 yet because I haven't felt the need to, but I might just do it to spite Sony. The way they're going after the hackers who have done nothing wrong apart from figuring how to jailbreak their own legally owned hardware is outrageous.
I've usually been pretty pro-Sony, sure during the rootkit fiasco I viewed it as don't ever buy anything from Sony that will go in my pc but I was ok with their console.
So, I own a 360 and a PS3. I have two choices neither of which I like. Either pay to play online (which I absolutely detest and don't pay for out of principle) or use a console from a company that is making me hate them.
The annoying thing is the majority of my console games are on the PS3 and there isn't really a choice, I can go with the artificially hobbled unless I pay functionality of the 360 or I can go with a company that is doing everything in their power to make me hate them.
PS. I owned a Wii, great first party games. Too many crappy third party waggle games.
I guess at some point I may just sell my PS3. There are some good games coming out on the pc soon like Portal 2 and Mass Effect 3 will be on the pc when it's released. (I made the mistake of buying the 360 version of Mass Effect 2.. planet scanning... urgh)
Agree... Once upon a time, a long long time ago, my Aggro list was quite simple indeed....
1. Microsoft
2. Apple
Then, strangely enough a couple of years ago, Apple gained aggro, so then it was:
1. Apple
2. Microsoft...
Apple did a sterling job tanking till one fateful day, Sony pulled aggro.. Now it's :
1. Sony
2. Apple
3. Microsoft.
And, boy, did Sony pull..... It's almost as if they're doing it so make whatever Apple do seem more acceptable.
Fortunately, the way things work around me at the moment, it's easiest to get rid of any and all dealings at all with parties (1) and (2) than (3).
So... guess what, the top two of you? You're no longer welcome around here :P
I think I might have visited his site; I know I looked at the fail0verflow one when the news broke. And there IS a PS3 in the house that shares the same internet connections. It's my lad's, and is completely untouched. Heck, he even buys things off PSN. If Sony try and allege anything against us, I'll fight it tooth and nail!
If Sony get's these IPs and cross references them against the PS3s detected as being jailbroken, it will give them pretty good evidence of the harm that GeoHot caused without them having to do anything further than getting IP addresses.
There may be some element of trying to establish any co-accused, but I suspect this has more to do with establishing damages than anything else. To be honest, I also don't think that Sony's attorneys ever expected to get the data. I can't believe that Hots' attorneys allowed him to agree to these subpoenas even in a narrowed form.
I do have a PS3 (my 2nd, due to YLOD on my no-longer Linux capable 60GB fat one)....
I did read GH's blog a few times, as I find most stories of jailbreaking etc quite interesting. My PS3 is completely untouched, other than for a bigger hard drive (which is perfectly acceptable), and I agree that with the suspicion that Sony will engineer a way to check which PS3s are tampered with. It will however, be interesting to see if I (or anyone else) gets a letter/contact from Sony just for the fact they (or their routers IP) 'visited that site' (and therefore are obviously guilty!), as whilst DMCA etc might be valid in the US, it's not valid in other places. Alternately, I wonder if they avoid letters and just figure out PSN IDs and cut them off. In any case, I suspect mistakes would be made....
Personally, the only things I'd like to see hacked (or 'enabled') on my PS3 are somethings I don't believe can be done currently anyway - i.e. multi-region DVD playback (I have some US special edition DVDs). The other thing would have been the ability to extract/copy the data from my fat PS3 *after* it died (I failed to do a recent backup)....
Still, ION, the only devices I own which are rooted are ones for which the software/toolchains have been open-sourced anyway :P
And good luck with all those IP addresses. GeoHot hit slashdot a couple times, so that's about half the American internet then, and a goodly chunk from elsewhere. I guess we'll find out soonish that sony will take this "evidence" and start to sue outside USoA jurisdiction too. That's going to be interesting in the Chinese sense; is that "evidence" admissible elsewhere? I'd really rather not learn the hard way.
The more general problem is that while this sort of dragnet evidence gathering is becoming more popular including with law enforcement, it isn't all that useful, but it will indeed cause lots of innocents to end up on rabiate corporates and LEOs their computer storage and possibly in freshly exploded case files too.
And, hm, GeoHot probably needs to learn how to negotiate, stat. The Japanese are fiendishly good at it, so this is about the school of the hardest knocks imaginable, but he'd better catch on quick, because it appears he's not getting his money's worth.
I know I, and several others, looked at this at work, so they get the proxy server address in Germany - will they then try and serve a subpeona on an overseas company to get details of what internal employees accessed a given site a couple of months ago?
Which will fail as teh log files are purged every 30 days or so.
I would have said "outrageous", but 'Bristol Chemist got there first.
Why is the law facilitating Sony's discovery aims? Sure, help them build a case against the actual miscreant if you want, but this level of delving is just creepy as hell.
I truly have nothing to hide, so I should have nothing to fear. But I'm not so sure now. Is it safe to go anywhere anymore?
Bottom line : this judgement makes US Law subservient to corporations' commercial interests. I suppose we all suspected it for years, but now it's official. And where they go, we follow.
George Hotz is a Sony employee. Just like so called "hackers" releasing PSP jailbroken firmwares are Sony employees too. It's all marketing. But now Sony managers got so dumb that want to scare actual and potential customers.. inside Sony there are some really dumb managers that have no clue what they are doing and instead of increasing market share thru the usual trick of mod-chips like on PS1 and PS2 (and like everyone else including Apple,Microsoft,Nintendo do with their products)..now they want to start suing real people turning the marketing hacking thing from farce into nightmare for people.. when after all there is no really working hack for PS3 because if it was a real hack that Sony didn't plan it all by itself then they wouldn't have had any possible way to ban whoever used the hack. The fact is that with PS1 and PS2 they didn't really do anything legally wise against whoever bought the modchips..of course them producing those "hack tools" under Chinese names..why would they want to kill themselves? But now inside Sony there are clearly two group of managers and the end result is going to be the demise of Playstation3 market share in the not so long run.
Screw with actual and potential customers once.. you might get away with it.. screw with them again using some retarded scare tactics abusing the justice system and your business is going to collapse sooner than later.
But surely this is taking things to far as to regards to looking at everyone who has been on the website, I havnt been as I can't be bothered with things like this but im. Sure lots. Of people will. Watch just to see what is being done. It's like saying a group of people in a town have committed crime so we must get the identities of everyone who lives in that town and also the identities of those who have visited is past by.
I do own a ps3 but I have one game that I never play and occasionally use it for blu-ray but if were all honest the xbox is a far superior console. Perhaps sony should spend less time on making lawsuits and more time making better products. I seriously doubt I will. Buy anymore Sony products after this.
Paris, because she is also entitled to things she just doesn't deserve.
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I used it to watch stuff on both the Sky platform and the Astra 1 cluster. Given this was the days before BBC went free to air, I spent most of the time with Astra 1.
Now, we had necessary firmware updates to give radio channels a zero prefix, and along the way stopped the "Other channels" from working until the thing had valid up to date EPG data.
Likewise this, if I had a games console, I would not trust it to have any capabilities beyond those of being a games console. That it could run another operating system is...not a gaming function.
.
That said, with the "Other OS" referred to in any advertising literature, on the box, etc? If so, maybe those affected could look to launching their own action against Sony, as it shouldn't be too far beyond the realms of reality to demonstrate that the choice and purchase of the equipment was based heavily on a feature that was later arbitrarily removed. But if there was no publicity promoting the feature, let this be a lesson...
Unhappy face as what is the big deal so long as you aren't trying to cheat, rip off games, or otherwise deprive Sony of income...
Have the other commenters actually read the article? I'll summarize: Sony is just looking for number of users that accessed this in California in order to prosecute Geohot. They don't (or at least seem) to care about you, it doesn't really matter that you access his site.
They also do care about who are the select few that had access to the private video published by Geohot. If you are on that list I'd be thinking about where to get a lawyer.
Hope this doesn't read as like I'm trying to help or condone Sony in any way. These actions are still despicable and someone like EFF should really get on their case, Sony has really gone beyond evil in almost everything they have done in recent years.