Your box might be connecting to Sony's network, mine would have a rather hard time given that it's not attached to the lan and the firewall still contains rules expressly forbidding it's access to the internet from the days that it was.
I didn't pay $700 for a box I can't pull apart and put back together to whistle dixie if I so choose - I can pull apart a $200 electric projection screen controller and place a new chip in it overriding the functions of the original design and manufacture (as well as significantly increasing it's feature set - I know you ask "what more can a screen do but go up and down?"... I answer "usb & exact positioning"), why the hell can't I do the same with my $700 PS3?
If Sony wanted me to give them control over their device they should have had me lease it... or at the very least presented a contract at the time I was presenting money - not once the sale had taken place.