Submitted by Well, it would appear that Sony isn’t particularly pleased with the fact that their console has been hacked into oblivion. It has officially filed suit against the fail0verflow hacker group and Geohot, after filing a temporary restraining order yesterday to try and remove the jailbreak information from the web (how cute).
Sony started with the temporary restraining order yesterday, in which they ask for all information to be removed from the web (yeah, good luck with that). They also want the involved people’s computers and possible storage media be impounded. This temporary restraining order wasn’t an actual lawsuit, but Geohot decided to take his page offline nonetheless. Not that it matters – mirrors are popping up all over the place already.
The official lawsuit came today, and it’s a typical case of throwing a whole load of complaints against the wall, hoping at least one thing will stick. It’s all in there – DMCA, US federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (and its state counterpart), contributory copyright infringement (because they aid others in breaking the PS3), and a few other things which aren’t particularly strong arguments (like Playstation Network ToS violations and such).
“Working individually and in concert with one another, the defendants recently bypassed effective technological protection measures employed by Sony,” the company states in the filing, “Through the internet, defendants are distributing software, tools and instructions that circumvent the [protection measures] and facilitate the counterfeiting of video games. Already, pirate video games are being packaged and distributed with these circumvention devices.”
Geohot is not worried about the lawsuit. “I am a firm believer in digital rights,” he told the BBC, “I would expect a company that prides itself on intellectual property to be well versed in the provisions of the law, so I am disappointed in Sony’s current action. I have spoken with legal counsel and I feel comfortable that Sony’s action against me doesn’t have any basis.”
Fail0verflow reiterates they do not condone piracy, and have never distributed any Sony code. “We have never condoned, supported, approved of or encouraged videogame piracy,” their website read, “We have not published any encryption or signing keys. We have not published any Sony code, or code derived from Sony’s code.”
It will be interesting to see where this will go. Jailbreaking mobile phones has recently been added as a DMCA exemption in the US, and it could be that this will work in the hackers’, favour. Common sense would have this case tossed out at the first go, but sadly, common sense is not something that generally prevails in the courts.
There’s no way to remove this info from the Web. Even if you could possibly remove it from all of the mirror sites, it would still be freely available in countless torrents.
I think Sony just felt like they had to do *something*. After all they are going after people who really don’t care or condone piracy; the kind of people that are good role models to have in the community as opposed to those that will pick up and go straight to piracy.
The funny thing is that there was real piracy game with those usb dongles but with these exploits someone has to do some work to get the game signing keys.
Unfortunately suing these people means that only people interested in piracy will carry on as opposed to those that want to do interesting and useful things with the ps3.
Master key crack performed by these people (what was later freely released by geohot) is not required for “free linux” and directly intended for piracy. Piracy is not only problem. Online gaming and throphy system integrity is also under attack.
They’re trying to cause pain and send a message, not actually take things offline.
You think the MPAA / RIAA really cares about the money it wins in lawsuits and settlements? They just like being in the press sending a message to others.
I wonder how much Sony will spend on this suit. All the lawyers and legal fees (and maybe the defendant’s if they lose) Plus the appeals…
Yet how many people had implemented this hack and are using pirate games?
You need to be Well beyond ‘general public’ competency to implement it so the spread and therefore the lost revenue would surely be minimal.
i didn’t know that fucking-up the encryption still results in effective protection
You are reading the law as if it were English. It’s not. It’s Lawyerese. “Effective” does not mean what you think it means.
So in legalese, “effective” means “we have effectively done something, albeit totally ineffective” ?
“Effective” means (roughly) “in the course of normal operation of $device, $copy_prevention is in effect”. So yes, it essentially boils down to “we have done something.”
Why is it everytime Sony has a choice between doing what’s right for consumers and being total fucktards they chose the latter?
There was a time when I very nearly bought a PS3 but then reminded myself ****s they are to their own customers. I’m so glad I hadn’t now as the “killer” feature was for me (OtherOS support) was then removed a couple of months later.
I don’t know, Sony and Playstation seem to be a magnet for bad business decisions in this generation of consoles. Take the cell processor: It’s highly unusual and started with little documentation or working programs. IBM also stopped making cells about a year ago, so when the PS4 comes out it will probably be even harder for it to have backwards compatibility with whatever chip it uses. 256MB main memory versus the 360’s 512MB and PC’s many GBs. With the unusual processor and limited memory we see things like Bioshock Infinite saying they’re working on the PS3 version first to make it best on all platforms, but reading between the lines it seems PS3 is the least common denominator because of it’s memory and processor. The only game out there that truly seems to use the PS3s capabilities seems to be Final Fantasy 13, and unfortunately it seems to be a case where they spent all their money on the game engine and forgot to make the game fun (pretty much all games these days seem to fall into some sort of trap where they spend money on game engines or online multi-player instead of the game being “fun” though).
Then one the reasons the PS2 had better games was their 3rd party support, but now Microsoft probably took that specialty away as business should be able to use visual studio and other Microsoft tools to speed up game development a lot for xbox.
Business decision wise Sony seems to be screwing up pretty badly these days. I dare say if the PS3 would have been their first console released on the Market, it would have failed by now.
Also note on that otherOS feature: the only real reason it was removed seems to be so they could save money by taking the hypervisor chip out of the slim and then disabling it on the old consoles so they only had to release one firmware update for all the consoles.
Edit: It’s probably like the days of walkman CD players that were $100USD while every other player on the market was $30-40 and had the same features. Sony wanted to put out one superior thing and milk it for as much money for as long as possible, and in the console industry that’s still possible for now.
Edited 2011-01-13 00:47 UTC
Wasnt one of the things discovered while they were making the hack that there was no technical reason the other os feature cant work on the slim? It was in the video describing what they did. So that hypervisor chip must still be there, right?
No there’s no technical reason, their official response was not wanting to maintain drivers compatible with the hypervisor: http://www.taranfx.com/why-no-linux-install-support-for-ps3-slim-th…
Of course, I’m sure piracy had something to do with it to. Then they would also hate something like what’s happened to jailbreaked iphones to happen to their console and have to compete. Once again, bad business decisions to ensure they get all the money they can.
Didn’t Sony pull the OtherOS feature after someone couldn’t take being behind the hypervisor anymore and found a way to by passed it to get direct hardware access?
So they pull OtherOS after the hypervisor hack. This causes the first hack to restore OtherOS. So they patch the firmware to prevent this. This causes the USB hack to restore OtherOS. So they patch the firmware to prevent this. This causes the whole signing system to be hacked to restore OtherOS. They now have no where to go but the legal route.
The only game out there that truly seems to use the PS3s capabilities seems to be Final Fantasy 13, and unfortunately it seems to be a case where they spent all their money on the game engine and forgot to make the game fun (pretty much all games these days seem to fall into some sort of trap where they spend money on game engines or online multi-player instead of the game being “fun” though).
You should try Uncharted 2, it’s just something I’ve never experienced in my whole (ex) hardcore gamer life since the first time I was dead impressed by The Shadow of the Beast on the Amiga or the first time I ran Unreal on my 3dfx.
Seriously, if you can just test this game, certain levels are just pure art. It’s the first game that gives the feeling of playing in the best adventure movie ever.
Okay, so one out of 2 titles that fully utilize the console don’t suck. It’s what, 4 years into the consoles estimated 10 year life cycle and there are only 2, 3, 4 games that utilize it well? That sounds like the kind of news that gets executives fired.
Woaw, nice argument…
Who said the other non exclusive titles were bad because they didn’t exploit all the ps3 power ?
At the very least, all of them that run on xbox, work just the same on PS3 (except lame ports) and some would say better but those fanboys…
one of two? LOL
There are lot of titles what utilize PS3 well.
GOW3, Killzone2/3, LBP, most of exclusives.
PS3 GPU is much weaker than 360 and SPUs are used to cover the gap in multiplatform titles.
I dont think thats necesarily the case.
If i am not mistaken, xbox upscales resolutions.
While the ps3 actually runs at hd resolutions.
Kinda like buying a 52″ lcd screen that support 1080 but has native resolution of 1024by768.
You are mistaken. Both consoles can output at 1080p (I emphasise the use of the word “output” as opposed to the phrase “practically render a commercial game using a native framebuffer”). Just as with the Xbox 360, the majority of games render to a framebuffer at 1280×720 (720p) and, frequently, lower:
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t46241
Of the 225 brick and mortar titles listed for PS3 there, 169 are reported to render at true 720p and merely 13 at 1080p. The Xbox 360 fares similarly. With the vast majority of titles, being connected to a 1080p display is only going to mean that either the console or the TV (depending on the display settings chosen on the console) has an additional workload in terms of upscaling. And, when it comes to upscaling, the PS3 is at a disadvantage as has, by now, been widely reported. The Xbox 360 has a dedicated hardware scaler which is fairly flexible and performs well given the low cost of the SKU. It may not be in the same league as a dedicated (expensive) scaler unit such as those manufactured by DVDO but it’s there. On the other hand, the PS3 is subject to various limitations, as noted in the above thread.
Also, it’s not unusual for multiplatform titles to render at a higher resolution on the Xbox 360. For example, Call of Duty: Black Ops renders at 1040×608 on Xbox, and 960×544 on PS3. Neither are exactly what I’d call high-def (and neither are a true 16:9 aspect ratio so – strictly speaking – they’re anamorphic and it’s impossible to scale in a linear fashion). In short, high-def has a been a much vaunted buzzword this generation but it doesn’t equate with the reality.
The grandparent post is generally correct to suggest that the PS3 GPU is weaker but to cover the nuances of that would require a much longer post and the information is already out there. Titles such as Uncharted 2 look great because they also leverage the Cell to the maximum extent possible, even performing some tasks that would normally be delegated to a GPU. Saboteur is a particularly interesting example as it looks better in stills than the Xbox 360 version due to the MLAA anti-aliasing technique performed by … the Cell (pity about the frame rate though).
lol, Uncharted 2 is really not the game that could be say it was improved.
Visually it is absolutely stunning, I agree. Gameplay wise? I’d say try Uncharted 1. Much, much better game and not so bad graphics wise either. Not to say how they slashed the brutality of Crushing from UC1. UC2 Crushing is pure random, nothing else.
Meh, screw that. Try Pacman Championship DX on PSN
Strange that a little downloadable title like that can be better than 95% of the crap they’re spending millions of dollars to create and pumping out at full retail prices.
Just some minor corrections as you seem interested in this kind of stuff…
xbox has 512 gddr3 shared between GPU and CPU. Ps3 has 256 gddr3 for the GPU and 256 XDR(reaaaally fast) main memory.
you seem to forget Uncharted2 (arguably the best looking game this generation). They shoved a ton of code utilising the SPUs to very good effect. The SPUs are hard to use, but in capable hands they seem to have their uses.
The hypervisor is built into Cell and was designed by IBM (who didn’t design it as an anti-piracy barrier in the first place). There is no difference architecturally between the PS3 fat and slim. They removed OtherOS because they got paranoid and stupidly thought that people would shrug it off.
Sorry, but this is nonsense. There is no hypervisor chip, instead they’re using one of the SPUs which runs as a supervisor [1]. So they can’t really remove the hypervisor.
Quote:
“The Cell Broadband Engine has 8 SPEs. PS3 Linux has 6. One is reserved by the hypervisor.”
Also, fail0verflow has shown that Linux perfectly boots on a PS3 slim, so there was no technical reason to remove it.
Adrian
[1] http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-linux-ps3-1/
CELL was perfectly documented, tens of megabytes of pdf and numerous tutorials, explanations.
CELL architecture pioneering heterogenous multicore solutions and was well-designed and well-implemented (there are some problems, but they relate to slow PPC core).
For those with head over shoulders, CELL is ultimate weapon. For me it is most enjoyable chip ever.
PS3 has 256 system + 256 video = 512mb
So it is the same as 360, but requires some balancing though
Edited 2011-01-13 09:14 UTC
You should try more indie games. World of Goo, Machinarium, and Trine especially were really worth every dollar I spent for them, and they cost less than those boring blockbuster games which would require me to buy a new PC before I can play them.
Even among more mainstream games, according to a friend who has a PS3, Uncharted 2 and Heavy Rain are really worth the price.
Edited 2011-01-13 09:39 UTC
BioWare. One of the few companies remaining treating storytelling as an integral part of the game. By far the world’s best game studio. Valve is obviously another mainstream studio that makes games that far outclass its competition. Half-Life, Portal, and Left 4 Dead are all polished to perfection. I’m also a fan of Ubisoft and their Assassin’s Creed series – while execution has not been perfect yet, they’re at least trying something new, with a unique setting and unique gameplay. Bethesda manages to pull off immersion very well, but their games are usually so incredibly buggy it would make even the world’s leading entomologist uncomfortable.
For the rest, it’s generally more of the same – which isn’t to say bad; just bland. Uncharted is an overrated piece of crap (Indiana Jones-ahoy, with a terrible lead character), and while God of War is made of pure awesome, it’s anything but groundbreaking. Heavy Rain fascinates me, but I haven’t been able to ‘play’ it yet (insofar you actually ‘play’ Heavy Rain).
In the “fun” area, there’s also Epic. Sure, you won’t find a sophisticated scenario or something, but the whole point of their games is to have an absurdly violent and fun multiplayer FPS at hand when you want to spend some times slaughtering friends.
I mean… when I played the first Gears of War, I was really skeptical about shooters being playable on a video game console. And then I discovered the circular saw under the basic machine gun and stopped using anything else ^^ The UTs are generally quite good too (dismembering people with a Manta, yum yum), but they really don’t fit as well on a console in my opinion (I’ve only played UT3 on xbox 360, and it was not nearly as enjoyable as my previous experience of UT2004 on PC).
Edited 2011-01-13 10:27 UTC
I own UT3 myself and I have to agree; those games are helluva lot of fun on PC, but they simply aren’t tuned for console enjoyment. Not that I really mind though, it’s good to have games aimed for PC and separate games for consoles instead of games that try to be everything for everyone.
Bioware, well… I find it sad that they began to make corridor-based games so that they work better on a console. Sure, the story still made Kotor enjoyable, but I miss my childhood days of exploring BG2’s gigantic levels (and NWN’s, to some extent). Another bad part of Kotor is that they simplified role play. I can understand simplifying gameplay so that a game works with a gamepad, but when discussing the game with a friend, I realized that we took nearly the same path in the various quests. Analyzing the thing together we realized that there’s no true choice with the options available, one path always obviously benefits you more than the others.
In the realm of RPGs, I’d rather recommend The Witcher. Heavy on resources, but a really fun game overall. They obviously took a lot of time to work on the story, enjoyable things for player to do, discussions, and choices. If you want to be an absolute jerk with NPCs or go fighting monsters when so drunk that you can’t walk straight, you really can. Also, some choices have long-term consequences on the game instead of just being there for 5-minutes fun, it shows again so much care they put when writing the story. And finally, there are some cases where you really don’t know what to do — and that’s the whole point of a role-playing game imo.
Edited 2011-01-13 10:38 UTC
I’d rather recommend The Witcher. Heavy on resources, but a really fun game overall. They obviously took a lot of time to work on the story, enjoyable things for player to do, discussions, and choices. If you want to be an absolute jerk with guys or go fighting monsters when so drunk that you can’t walk straight, you can. Also, some choices have long-term consequences on the game instead of just being there for 5-minutes fun
Indeed, Witcher is a great game and I wait for the second installment in excitement
And what you said about fighting monsters when drunk.. well, they even made that a viable alternative as there’s plenty of talents that work only when intoxicated! I don’t like playing a drunken monkey myself, but there’s bound to be someone who enjoys it 
Half life one was something else at its time.
But part two is very nice in the graphics department. I have never seen a game scale so good, even a freaking pentium 3 laptop. Heck my cousin experienced it with an integrated intel and a pentium m.
But as far as polished and fun to play, well you pass them once finish. Even quake is more fun single player, dont even mention online.
Sure they added a gravity gun and vehicles that actually work good. But you still feel half life original in the game all over.
Fear was more fun than half life 2.
Frozen sand the makers of urban terror describe the source engine as unusable for online play, something about the hitboxes moving around like crazy.
Frozen sand the makers of urban terror describe the source engine as unusable for online play, something about the hitboxes moving around like crazy.
The sheer mass of people playing CS:S, Team Fortress 2 and L4D disagree with that notion. Yes, they’re all Source-games and the most played ones.
At the moment there are players in:
14,706 Counter-Strike: Source
11,376 Team Fortress 2
6,291 Left 4 Dead 2
And it’s night in the US now. During the day the peak is at:
74,126 Counter-Strike: Source
20,713 Team Fortress 2
14,422 Left 4 Dead 2
Yeah, about 100,000 gamers online playing Source-games. I quite consider that a success.
Yes, that’s a crazy notion. I’ve been playing Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 online basically non-stop since part one came out. It ranks among my top 5 of best games ever made (I generally combine games from the same series into one), and I’ve had so many great and memorable moments playing L4D 1/2…
Source engine not for multipleyer – lolwut? Must be crazy week, what, with all the pro-MPEG-LA nonsense going around.
Yeah…good luck with that….
I also got into contact with them. We have written a software library which allows to use Sony’s NetMD and Hi-MD Walkman with free software. Originally, one needed a proprietary (and really crappy) software called “SonicStage” to synchronize the MiniDisc Walkman with the computer.
Since both NetMD and Hi-MD use some kind of encryption to transfer (NetMD/Hi-MD) or store (Hi-MD) the music to/on the MiniDisc, we had to reverse engineer the Windows software and the DRM system OpenMG. At some point, we eventually succeeded doing that and retrieved the necessary root keys to be able to decrypt content stored on Hi-MDs (Sidenote: All content is encrypted on Hi-MDs, even the recordings you’re making yourself).
Since we knew that we actually cannot simply use (and since it’s FOSS, publish) the keys without Sony’s permission, we kindly asked them for their courtesy and explained in very details why we would like to leverage the keys on Linux.
Well, what Sony eventually did was telling us to f*ck off and just reminding us that they’re actually the owner of these keys and everything is protected by the EULA (which isn’t actually valid in my former country of residence).
So, to make a long story short: Sony is not really interested in the needs of their customers and the community. So people actually have a point breaking into these various DRM and encryption systems imposed by the content industry, essentially just to be able to use their own hardware with their software of choice.
Adrian
PS: If someone is interested, I can actually upload Sony’s verbatim mail from the legal department.
I’m not sure they can legally “own” a number (which a key ultimately is)… they can however make an argument that your software along with the key provides a mechanism to circumvent their copy protection – which under U.S. DMCA law seems to be the enabler which these corporations use to abuse consumers.
The more often this lunacy gets tested in court, the sooner lawmakers and the judicial system will realize the monster that has been created here and hopefully start taking steps to remove it.
I think everyone who has used sony products knows this.
I am typing this from a sony viao that has visualization in the processor, but is disabled in the bios with no option.
Of course i had to find a workaround, but im still trying to enable ahci.
The reason for all this is that sony didnt make enough money from this laptop, so they wanted me to buy a more expensive model that already has it unlocked.
Punishments and sues appear when someone (read Sony) cannot fight using his brain and needs to use his force instead.
I’m guessing this really doesn’t have much to do with the hackers. It likely has everything to do with the publishers.
Sony doesn’t make money directly from game sales, it makes money from the publishers and their sales.
With the PS3 totally hacked, the publishers knew immediately. Knowing how businessmen are, the first thing that will happen is that the publishers are going to try to use this “hack” to gain a bargaining edge over sony. “We were considering developing title XXX for your system. However now that your system has been totally compromised we’re reconsidering. What will YOU do about it sony?”
I can’t seriously think of any other reasons why sony would make absolutely certain the whole world knows the ps3 has been hacked by filing such a silly and broad lawsuit, also likely knowing the huge amount of backlash that would from the community that “owned” them technologically.
lol, sony doesn’t make from games? that is a new one. do you know how many games sony publishes?
but then again, ps3 is my last sony… well… anything.
sega dreamcast.
I skimmed through the comments here as I am still waking up and can’t be arsed to read all of them, but I didn’t notice anyone mentioning the case where the judge ruled that it is indeed perfectly legal to jailbreak iPhones and similar devices. The court order is out there and it’s perfectly reasonable: you are allowed to jailbreak your own device — not that of others’ — to gain features that the manufacturer hadn’t seen fit to implement.
Now, since there is a real, tangible court order on this I think Geohot and folks can use it as a precedent. That’s a dangerous step for Sony and if they have thought this through they will not take this that far because the judge could very well declare consoles jailbreakable similarly to mobile phones due to an existing precedent.
The likely outcome of all this is just that Sony blows off some hot air, tries to scare developers and hackers to stay away from PS3, and drops the whole thing like a hot potato before it actually goes to court.
If I’m not mistaken this was more related to being able to unlock your phone rather than just being able to jailbreak it for the sake of jailbreaking the device. Because the PS3 does quote a bit, especially with media it may fall under a different category because if the encryption.
If I’m not mistaken this was more related to being able to unlock your phone rather than just being able to jailbreak it for the sake of jailbreaking the device. Because the PS3 does quote a bit, especially with media it may fall under a different category because if the encryption.
Not really. iPhone is classified as a smartphone and it boasts more or less all the capabilities of PS3 and actually more than that. And iPhone also has protective systems in place. Not to mention that a phone can be used for much more nefarious purposes than a simple gaming console. Yet it still was ruled that breaking the protection on a device you yourself own with the meaning of getting more functionality out of it was legal.
Well, let’s think about Geohot: he has all this time been against piracy, he apparently started hacking PS3 to gain access to the hardware acceleration for 3D programming purposes, and thus his actions could also well be thought of as simply trying to get more functionality out of his PS3. His hacking didn’t even have anything to do with PSN, only the local system, so even that angle is covered.
Sony somehow manages be even more paranoid and bigger control freaks than Apple. Sony even goes to more trouble than Apple to make unique and incompatible hardware.
After an afternoon of GT5 at a friends, I’ve been seriously thinking about a PS3. Thank you Sony. After your latest actions, I’ve remembered why I own so little of your product. You, the GT publishers and Logitech all lost a sale on this one.
Same thing for rooting phones.
They need to maintain the integrity of their network.
While I’m sure they’re concerned about piracy as well, I think they’re concerned with the hacks and cheats.
When their system wasn’t hacked they didn’t have to do any kind of integrity checking. Now I’m sure they’ll have to do something.
Think how big of a pain in the ass it in for PC games. I have been out of it for a while but I remember in Counter Strike you had to have another process running alongside your game checking up on things, looking for other processes, etc. Now that anything can be signed their system could be as bad as PC gaming currently is.
Sony is a fat fuck. At the hacker’s presentation one of them showed a chart demonstrating that PS3 was the only console not hacked immediately after release. But once PS3 was closed to Linux, it was hacked in the same amount of time as every other console. Meaning Sony brought this upon themselves by removing a feature some smart people rightfully bought. Enjoy
I purchased a PS3 because it supported Linux out of the box, not because of the games it played. Granted, I liked some of the games on the PS3, but I wanted to play with the Cell a bit.
Sony’s other-os feature was crippled. The spu hypervisor was locked down, and no access to the other video memory or RSX chip functionality. Still, it was perfectly fine for me, because there was no other device that allowed you to become familiar with power architecture at that price-point.
Now Sony arbitrarily decides to axe a function that the console was sold with. People argue “You have a choice!” and it is a bad one – either give up new video games or give up Linux and having the ability to learn on the Cell. Obviously I chose keeping Linux, which costs Sony my continued purchasing of games and any future products.
Because if they can arbitrarily take away a function of a console, they can arbitrarily take away the function of any of their other devices if it doesn’t suit their marketing scheme at the time. You may have noticed that the future is coming… right now most TVs, digital players, high end audio systems – pretty much everything in the AV spectrum, is internet enabled. IE, you can plug an Ethernet cable into the back of your device and receive a firmware update. Soon this will be extended to all household appliances – refrigerators, coffee machines, washer/dryer sets… toasters… pretty soon everything that plugs into a wall will have some functionality to connect to the internet, receive instructions, and firmware updates. Firmware updates that can add features… or can take them away. That’s what these lawsuits are testing… the power of the corporation to take away the right of the end-user to control the hardware they have purchased. Rights that were designed to protect the consumer from these very same corporate practices.
Of course, it would be virtual suicide for a single company to say: “In order to watch your tv in color you need to pay $10 a month for this function…” But that wouldn’t stop Sony from putting code into their blu-rays and tv programs to make them look better while the TV downgrades the experience for the programs that don’t have this encoding. So if a producer wants their show to look good on Sony TVs, then they have to pay to have this piece of code inserted into their programming. How long till Samsung and others start doing this? All controlled through firmware updates.
Again, the above is an EXTREME example, but a reason why people must be wary of companies when they challenge accepted rules and laws using the change in technology to justify them. I bought a PS3 that had linux support. Its one thing to just leave it alone without changing that support, its another to take it away from me and use the threat of not being able to run new games as the hammer. Because someone might visit and UPDATE my machine without my permission, in which case I lose everything. At which point my only solution is to use the Hack to get my linux back. My objection about sony isn’t that they want to protect their investment – my objection is that they want to take away functionality that I purchased from hardware I own.
Remind me, did anyone ever sue Sony over the removal of advertised features?
Yes. http://ps3movies.ign.com/ps3/document/article/108/1086720/gov.uscou…
http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/news/2262289/sony-faces-legal-challenge
I feel that if I buy a car, I should be able to put a different carb on it. It should make no difference to the seller what happens after the sale. Sony seems to forget that this is a product and not a license to use. This case is not about hacking code to steal but using a product one purchased. I agree that Sony claims one might use this to then later steal but I’d like to run linux on the box legally!!
I agree that Sony claims one might use this to then later steal
There are actually very, very few products that could not be used for illegal purposes after purchase so PS3 is no different in that regard. Even something as simple as a single brick could be used for entering someone else’s property and thus facilitate theft, or even used as a weapon to murder someone by smacking them in the head with a strong enough a blow.
Though, MAFIAA has managed to convince courts that copyright infringement and even the threat of such is a much bigger issue than possible murder or loss of actual physical property.
Mmm. Should a car company be allowed to reduce the power output on your engine because you got one more speeding ticket? Theres an idea! Wait a minute… some cars can do this…
Its all about money and greed!
Sony must be thinking “Just how much can we screw out of Joe Public and get away with?”
They are trying to protect their bottom line guys, and if a few of your rights get in the way – so be it. They just dont care, there are too many brainless people with money in their pockets…so what if they lose a few customers?
Sony will only change their ‘policy’ when the law requires them to do so, or no-one buys their console and games.
I think I’ll set fire to my Playstation. Lets see if they can put that out with some firmware. Lol!
or maybe they could burn my house down in revenge for hacking it! Ha ha ha! 
May be to late for my question…
Where are they suing them? And where are they from (or live)?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/14/no_playstation_hacker_order…
this part is funny: