I didn't say it's ok to do ;) Besides, they fixed it. If you reset your password, the issue goes away. I don't really see what more you want.

This is the solution Amazon will give you if you contact them about it. (The reasons this situation arose are, of course, historical. It's the sort of thing that can happen if you want to improve the way you store passwords, but don't want to prevent existing customers from logging in.)

This issue only affects people who have not changed their account password for something like five years.

I'm seeing the same thing in Chrome on Win7...

They don't, unless that customer trumpets their use of the service in that manner to the world...

As I understand it, OtherOS had already been disabled in slim PS3s (though the firmware still contained the code), and that's what Geohot was attempting to reenable. Sony's reaction was to remove OtherOS from existing fat PS3s. I may be remembering it wrong, though.

In other words, Sony decided to remove OtherOS from slim PS3 models (that is, they shipped without the option), despite the fact that the hardware can handle it without issues, a decision which certainly appears arbitrary. It looks to me like they no longer wanted to sell consoles with OtherOS enabled, and they took the first opportunity they could to disable it in the older PS3s as well (perhaps so they wouldn't have to maintain multiple sets of firmware). I would suggest that Geohot's difficult-to-execute hack was simply a convenient scapegoat for a decision Sony had already wanted to make (for whatever reason).

That's all speculation, of course.

All *fail0verflow* did was try to get the functionality back, and Sony named them in the motion as well, so we're sort of stuck defending both them and Geohot since Sony named them together. (I do agree that the relative size of each party has nothing to do with who is right and who is wrong.)

Whether or not Geohot was wrong to publish the key, one thing is certain: the bulk of Sony's claims in the motion are ridiculous, and that reflects poorly on them.

You mean they wouldn't have disabled OtherOS on the fat PS3s if he hadn't said he intended to enable OtherOS on the slim PS3s (which he wanted since slim PS3s are capable of it and the decision to remove the menu option was arbitrary and pointless)? Yeah, geohot is totally the bad guy here. *eyeroll*

In the motion for TRO against geohot and fail0verflow, Sony states in a footnote that they have filed (or intend to file, I forget the exact words used) a separate suit against them for damages and attorney fees.

Sony filed a separate suit for damages and attorney fees.

Yes there is. See 1201 (f) (1), for example; circumvention for the purpose of software interoperability is explicitly permitted. Circumventing measures on the device in order to run Linux on that device falls quite neatly under this exception.

Blizzard can show that the EULA was agreed to by those users. Can Sony show Geohot agreed to the EULA? They didn't say either way, in their motion.

I bought my PS3 used, and have never updated the firmware or connected to PSN; I don't remember ever seeing or agreeing to an EULA. (Sony would probably argue that the previous owner agreed to it and that that agreement magically transferred to me when I bought the device from him, but that argument would be relatively easy to counter.)

If I now perform exactly the same hack Geohot and fail0verflow have performed, those EULA and PSN ToS provisions cannot conceivably apply to me, and therefore the bulk of Sony's claims would not be applicable. I don't know whether they can show that Geohot agreed to either the EULA or the PSN ToS, but I would hope that because those are so trivially avoided, they will not be given much weight.

At any rate, the PSN's ToS does not, or at least should not (I haven't read it, as I mentioned), give Sony the right to sue users for violating the ToS; as I understand it, the worst possible consequence of violating the ToS would be getting banned from connecting to PSN. Can anyone clarify?

The complaint also says that because Geohot has a Paypal account (and accepts donations through it), and Paypal is headquartered in California, he has a financial interest in California, and therefore he can be sued there. It's the sort of convoluted not-quite-logic that one should expect from lawyers, I guess...

I haven't seen any comment from Geohot saying he wanted Sony to hire him. What he said was that if any of the console makers want their next console to be secure, they should get in touch with him, and that he thinks it would be interesting to "be on the other side". None of those things are a request for a job -- a job is only *one* of the ways Sony could use to "get in touch" with Geohot about the security of their next console. The first time I read the comment, I read it as sarcasm; the second time I read the comment, I read it as an offer to help. It is not necessary for him to be on Sony's payroll before you can say he is on their side.

But even if he *was* implying that he wanted a job, it's not remotely illegal to ask a company for a job, regardless of whether he had just hacked one of their toys. Their accusations of extortion are absurd. There is no threat in his comment -- he did not say "If you don't hire me, I will destroy your next console's security", for example. Instead he said, "I can help you improve your next console's security, if you want." There is a world of difference between what he actually said and what Sony claims he meant.

Same here. I've also never connected to PSN or updated the firmware, so I've never accepted those ToS either.

1201 (f) (1) hasn't been removed, as far as I'm aware, and it's one of the exception clauses that geohot could use in his defense. It explicitly permits circumvention necessary to obtain software interoperability (in this case, installing Linux).