I’ve got bad news for those who have checked out the website of my favourite hacker-turned-rapper, George “Geohot” Hotz, at any point between January 2009 and now: Sony has been granted the right to acquire your IP addresses.
Bluehost, the company who maintains Hotz’s website, doesn’t have much choice in the whole matter, of course:
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.”
Sony justified the subpoena by claiming that the data is necessary in proving the Hotz’s distribution of a Play Station 3 hack as well as determining which city is the proper venue for an upcoming legal battle.
I’m not entirely sure how the electronics maker managed to justify three more ridiculously broad subpoenas though:
The judge also signed off on a Google subpoena seeking the logs for Hotz’s Blogger.com blog, geohotps.3.blogspot.com.
A YouTube subpoena, also approved, seeks information connected to the “geohot” account that displayed a video of the hack being used: “Jailbroken PS3 3.55 with Homebrew.” The subpoena demands data to identify who watched the video and “documents reproducing all records or usernames and IP addresses that have posted or published comments in response to the video.”
A fourth subpoena is directed at Twitter, demanding the disclosure of all of Hotz’s tweets, and “documents sufficient to identify all names, addresses, and telephone numbers associated with the Twitter account.”
We’ll see what happens with this whole mess when the showdown moves to either a San Francisco or New Jersey courthouse, but I secretly hope that Sony will just hand Hotz’s a recording deal instead of continuing to bicker over those venue choices and the little hacking incident.
But that’s just because I love the video above. [Wired]
wsDK_II
Monday, March 7, 2011 at 4:53 PMRight, so we all must go and view those URL’s so we can make Sony’s life just a little bit harder :)
BTW i support the guy
Ross
Monday, March 7, 2011 at 5:34 PMIs it actually illegal to put your own software on the ps3? How does that become a law?
If you’re not profiting off a jailbreak it can’t be illegal can it?
I don’t see how they are making this case? Did the guy make money off it somehow???
Peter Simpson
Tuesday, March 8, 2011 at 12:51 AMThey’re arguing he did make money in donations, even though he removed the Paypal link from his site and informed anyone from the same site that if they find any Paypal links supposedly from him, they’re fake. He’s also being sued for having unauthorised access to a computer (his own PS3) and releasing the code, despite there being no way to use it on its own to do anything more than run homebrew. Others have released less prohibitive versions. The DRM for the app store still hasn’t been broken, or at least not released and Geohot has publicly spoken against piracy and offered Sony how to improve their system.
The fact that the keys are out, Sony really should re-embrace the hacker community like it did with the OtherOS feature. I’m certainly not buying anything else from them until they shape up.