Sony files for restraining order against Geohot+fail0verflow

[Velotix von Skruviktorrius]

[i don't know the difference between a retail unit and a dev kit.]

Let me be blunt. Recently, as part of my Games Tech course, I have had the pleasure of being given access to PS3 devkit technology. The real thing.

To even LOOK at anything to do with the devkit or discuss it with anyone in the same room I had to sign an NDA.

If I remove any devkit code from the lab I lose my right to access the technology and promptly fail the relevant unit.

If I say a word about what I have access to other than the fact that I have access to it, see above.

In fact I probably shouldn't have even mentioned that I have access to the kits, but that one's not legally binding.

Naturally, anyone who legitimately has access to developer technology has also signed this NDA. Anyone who tries to dodge this NDA will get the offending hardware bricked and more besides. It is not publicly released hardware.

Sony are talking about bricking retail units; publicly released technology. The situations do not compare in the slightest.

As for the Nintendo issue, Tornado addressed that nicely so I'll leave that there.

[Detective Shadzter]

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/288611/news/fudge-packers-ps3-hacker-geohot-taunts-sony-with-hip-hop-outburst/

The guy thinks he's a bad ass rapper now

[Carbo]

That's honest to god probably the sickest fires I've ever seen. I want his babies.

Also supreme judge shot down Sony's demands. Hopefully now they wont waste so much fucking time and instead try working on fixing the bigger picture.

Edited February 13, 2011 by Carbo

[Badnik Mechanic]

*puts on a voice of someone living in the ghetto*

What shall I do today!? Go hang out in the Tesco carpark!? Go sit on the Boots disabled ramp!? Noooooo I'll make a rap and post it on YOUTUBE!!!!! KOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLL

lol someone neg repped this... right. Makes a lot of sense.

Edited February 13, 2011 by Hogfather

[Velotix von Skruviktorrius]

As much as I still expect Sony to get blown to smithereens in court - assuming the judge is not grossly ignorant - I have to admit, Geohot is a douchebag.

[Tornado]

I'm not sure if that was ever in question in the first place.

Mario, Luigi and Yoshi trek across ice and snow to stop the shelled ones' schemes. But Bowser's slick; in one last trick, he takes the dearest thing of all. Now Tornado is Missing!!

[eXtaticus]

Wow, Sony - despite being thoroughly useless at making consoles, video games and the like - could be great rulers of places like, say, Russia or China.

Oh, and I'd love to take this opportunity to bring up what happened last time Sony tried to take on homebrewers; 2000's sextet of Bleem! lawsuits ended in tears for one of the two organisations involved in them - and the other went on to release a series of emulator applications which allowed PSOne versions of Metal Gear Solid, Gran Turismo 2 and Tekken 3 to be played on an unmodified Dreamcast with enhanced graphics.

I bet GeoHot is quaking in his little boots - what a pathetic, straw-clutching shambles of an organisation Sony is...

[Shaddix Leto Croft]

I guess this is related to this topic so I'll post it in here since it's about the hacks done to the PS3

http://blog.us.plays...tatement_021611

Today, Sony Computer Entertainment released the following statement:

What this means to you

Circumvention devices and game piracy damage our industry and can potentially injure the online experience for you, our loyal PlayStation customers, via hacks and cheats.

Many PlayStation.Blog readers have asked how we intend to deal with these incidents that they have been reading about in the gaming press, and this is our initial response.

By identifying PlayStation 3 systems that breach our guidelines and terminating their ability to connect to PlayStation Network, we are protecting our business and preserving the honest gameplay experiences that you expect and deserve.

Rest assured, this message does not apply to the overwhelming majority of our users who enjoy the world of entertainment PlayStation 3 has to offer without breaching the guidelines detailed above, and we urge you to continue doing so without fear.

Edited February 16, 2011 by Shaddix Croft

[Carbo]

I don't see anything coming out of it apart from "hey guys this shit's illegal and we'll ban you if you do it", something most of us probably figured out years ago.

I can see this hindering the online hacks for some time but I don't see the homebrew community being affected by this, nor piracy.

Edited February 16, 2011 by Carbo

[Velotix von Skruviktorrius]

Nothing out of the ordinary there.

Note though that "banning you from PSN" is miles away from "bricking your console", and I suspect users hacking their PS3s to install homebrew (rather than pirate and/or be a cheating asshole online) don't give two shits about the PSN system.

Win/win.

Now I just wait for Geohot to kick Sony's ass black and blue in court so no company tries to pull this shit again.

[Tornado]

This just means that Sony has finally decided to drop the banhammer on people (which actually is somewhat surprising, because they never did it on the PSP). Though currently they only seem to be doing it to those who have been faking certificates to get onto PSN. Sony was telling the truth about that: They've haven't appeared to be doing anything to anyone else so long as they delete their homebrew and update their consoles. The current ban wave isn't a permaban either, so Sony are being very nice about it, I must say.

Reports of my return have been greatly exaggerated.

Edited February 16, 2011 by Tornado

[Carbo]

Phishing is absolutely viable.

Prologue

Due our objective research of the SONY PlayStation Network, we decrypted nearly 100% of the traf?c transferred over

proxies, http and https to and from the PSN. Just out of curiosity, not to harm anyone or anything and not like SONY may

want people to see it.

As SONY calls the scene hackers "evil", we surely do not address pirates and skiddies, we wondered how SONY is treating

the users' privacy and rights (remember the Music CD/DVD and USB stick rootkits). After we noticed a few badass functions

they have built into the PSN/PS3 functionality, we just call it the "Call of Privacy: Modern Spyware" case.

Below we list and explain a few of the shady PSN functions and data mining stuff. And remember: EVERYONE has a right to

know about YOUR OWN PRIVATE data being transferred over the networks !

Sensitive data

Even if a connection is SSL encrypted, companies are aware of the big risk behind custom CA files and it's possibilities.

SONY seems not to care about those known vulnerabilities. It is a big company and a HUGE network. With huge we mean a

magnitude of hundreds and even thousands: the PSN utilizes thousands of servers, handled by a very small group of

administrators and quality assurance people. The IP ranges and domains of these servers are retrievable by anyone, cause

this is how the Internet works ! It is all public data and information !

An example is the credit card information and the login authentification itself. Take a look at the traffic:

creditCard.paymentMethodId=CC_COMPANY&

creditCard.holderName=EXAMPLENAME&

creditCard.cardNumber=1234567890123456&

creditCard.expireYear=2012&creditCard.expireMonth=2&

creditCard.securityCode=123&

creditCard.address.address1=EXAMPLESTREET%2024%20&creditCard.address.city=E XAMPLECITY%20&

creditCard.address.province=EXAMPLEREGION%20&

creditCard.address.postalCode=12345%20

The credit card information should ALWAYS be encrypted. In ANY case. At least the security code. SONY is only relying on

it's https connection. With all those CFWs spreading around, this is not secure anymore.

Same goes for the user details:

serviceid=IV0001-NPXS01001_00&

loginid=example@mail.com&

password=examplepassword&

first=true&

consoleid=EXAMPLEID123

Such sensitive data can now be captured by anyone who builds his own custom firmware with custom certificates. There

are enough n00b-friendly tools by now. Means, little scriptkiddies can spread their little CFWs and phish user data.

Apparently this only concerns people using CFW. This makes for an interesting double incentive for ditching CFW cause you got both the new security system and the potential breaching of it to worry about.

Edited February 17, 2011 by Carbo

[Phos]

If homebrewers were really happy with just having OtherOS in the first place, they wouldn't have tried to find security holes and force Sony to remove the functionality either.

[Scar]

That enabled use of the PS3's GPU while in OtherOS mode, which still wouldn't have allowed people to run games. They still only had partial access to the GPU's capabilities. The PS3 probably wouldn't have been hacked if they hadn't removed OtherOS.

Also, the airforce was using PS3's in a supercomputer, though now it would probably make more sense to port whatever they were doing to CUDA and run it on a bunch of Teslas, that is provided that whatever task they were doing could be handled by CUDA.

[Candescence]

Quoted from Sonic Retro:

So Sony updated their new PSN Terms of Service & User Agreement.

Copypasta from someone else, not sure if it's correct:

Also, it turns out it's possible to unban your PS3 and ban someone elses from using PSN.

And of course, we have that little tidbit from "Call of Privacy: Modern Spyware" to top everything off.

What the fuck. Is there any hope left in the future for the CONSUMER these days?

Yeeeeeaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh, The very first point would've been enough of a turn-off in itself. Fuck off, Sony.

Edited February 18, 2011 by Masaru Daimon

[Ekaje]

Alright, according to this thread and SKFU's blog (is he big in the PS3 hacking ordeal? I haven't kept up with this), they've found a way to unban users who have been banned for hacking form PSN, which seems like a predictable development.

Oh, and it's theoretically possible to use this method to ban legit users at will.

Fuck.

Though you will need the the console ID of the PS3 in question, so there won't be screaming teenagers banning people for beating them in CoD. Hopefully.

EDIT: Also, is there any significant benefit at all from hacking your PS3 other than cheating and pirating? For example, Homebrew on the Wii allows you to circumvent region codes, and add custom textures/levels/music to certain games.

Edited February 18, 2011 by Ekaje

[PaddyFancy]

So its come to this then. Sony scaremongering, snooping in your PS3? I think I'm safe as my PS3 has been clean since I bought it. I don't need homebrew shit or whathaveyou, don't think I can make it work anyway, but if by some stroke of fate I'm affected, these persistant hackers are damned to hell!

[Scar]

Quoted from Sonic Retro:

Yeeeeeaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh, The very first point would've been enough of a turn-off in itself. Fuck off, Sony.

This is bullshit.

Not updating my PS3.

To think this all happened because some fool decided to hack the PS3.

Looks like the PS4 will be a still birth if these regulations are enforced from the start, and Sony better prepare for massive annoyance from consumers.

I'll have to wait and see what happens, but I don't think half of this shit flies legally in many Countries.

Sony, you may not be the most evil organisation in the world, but damn you sure are trying....

Edited February 18, 2011 by Scar

[Chooch]

I don't get why you guys are so angry.

[Velotix von Skruviktorrius]

Y'know those old sci-fi shows where corporations take over the world and have powers equaling or exceeding nation states? Bullshit like that new PSN licensing agreement smack loudly of the first signs of something like that developing in our lifetime and it has a hell of a lot of people on edge, including me.

Also, continued lulz @ people not understanding why people hack in the first place. The giant gulf between people who understand technology and people who don't really shouldn't take me this much by surprise anymore. :/

More to the point, the average consumer won't notice any of this until there's decades of gradually intensifying precedent shitting all over their human and consumer rights and they finally cross a much more obvious line with all the legal precedent to justify it with no-one spotting it in time and doing something.

Blech.

Edited February 19, 2011 by Velotix Lexovetikan

[Badnik Mechanic]

Also, continued lulz @ people not understanding why people hack in the first place. The giant gulf between people who understand technology and people who don't really shouldn't take me this much by surprise anymore. :/

Thats your answer to this question?

EDIT: Also, is there any significant benefit at all from hacking your PS3 other than cheating and pirating? For example, Homebrew on the Wii allows you to circumvent region codes, and add custom textures/levels/music to certain games.

Anyway, I agree this is an absolute outrage, who would have thought that PS3 News (who seem to support CFW's and hacking) would be against this how dare they spy on me like Kinect also aparently does.

More to the point, the average consumer won't notice any of this until there's decades of gradually intensifying precedent shitting all over their human and consumer rights and they finally cross a much more obvious line with all the legal precedent to justify it with no-one spotting it in time and doing something.

... ... Right... yes, thats what the Daily Mail is likely to say, the fact is all products fall under the law of whatever country they're for sale in so it really won't take much to challenge whatever a company says or whatever hysteria pops up this week.

[Tornado]

I don't get why you guys are so angry.

I don't really get it either.

Don't get me wrong: there is some stuff to be outraged about. However, that particular stuff is so hilariously illegal in nearly every country in the world where you would conceivably buy a PS3 or PSP that there really isn't anything to worry about. And almost all of it was already in the American ToS anyways. Seriously, 95% of the Version 8 ToS is identical to the Version 7 ToS from way back in June. Even the bits being highlighted all over the internets about how "You agree that you will not use any unauthorized hardware" is copy-pasted from Version 7.

In fact, in addition to it being copied word-for-word from the Version 7 ToS, those who are outraged specifically about the California bit clearly have absolutely no idea how business contracts work. Jurisdiction for legal disputes has to be established somewhere in advance. Why wouldn't SCEA elect to have it where they are headquartered?

That being said:

how dare they spy on me like Kinect also aparently does.

Not really the same thing. Microsoft's revised ToS for Kinect functionality said that it could monitor you and could send back information if you agree to the ToS (and, hell, it very well may). Sony does monitor, and your PS3 does send back information; and they do it regardless of whether you agree to the PSN ToS or not.

On the other hand, that isn't anything new either. It is just that now it has been brought to the attention of people outside of the scene.

Reports of my return have been greatly exaggerated.

Edited February 19, 2011 by Tornado

[Remynaka]

Wow..... I apparently found out what everyone was pissed about. I was wondering why I had to sign a NEW TOS agreement. And here I was thinking the PS3 was hack proof.... NOT. Wonder how long people will hold out from updating. I don't care as much as my PS3 is CLEAN. Now ... for some MVC2.

[Velotix von Skruviktorrius]

I'm not saying it'll happen next week. I'm certainly not saying it's not really, really easy to prevent. Essentially my concern is that no-one will object or notice until the time to do something about the situation has long passed. Having rights and freedoms protected by law is great, so long as they're actually enforced. This is my chief concern. I don't trust the modern legal system of any country.

It'll take decades - a good 50 years minimum - for this issue to hit a breaking point that the general public will take notice of. It'll be our grandkids, if anyone, dealing with this issue personally, and this is only if no-one successfully shoots down any businesses acting outside their bounds of authority in that time (the recent blatant shutdown of Sony's request to farm internet details they had no rights to in the first place was a nice surprise). It's very easy to stop before it starts, but the general public (and gaming community) attitude to this topic leaves me concerned. I don't take issue with Sony trying to protect their interests and their products but I do greatly object to the incredibly heavy-handed way they're handling it and if anything it's reinforced my views of them as a company. Worse, I am deeply concerned by how everyone seems to not mind at all. This is the same company who infected music CDs of all things with malware and illegally used GPL code in said malware - I have every right to distrust the business ethic of a company who resorts to breaking copyright law to defend their own copyrights, and Sony is consistently demonstrating an attitude implying a continued willingness to be this underhanded. It makes me wonder what exactly hasn't been caught out yet. Hopefully nothing.

It also should be self-evident at this point that I have absolutely no confidence in the ability of existing (or future) governments to keep slapping down a major corporation having a loud hissy fit over an extended period of time when said corporation can just take the slow road and chip away at the issue piece by piece until they eventually get their way.

If Sony eventually sorts their shit out and makes amends in the future like a certain other company has in recent years (*cough*Microsoft*cough*) then hooray, let bygones be bygones. But that's not happened yet.

("But wait? How has Microsoft made amends for past mistakes?" Microsoft have explicitly come out and stated legally that they will not sue people for making open-source implementations of their critical developer technologies. This is so out-of-character for Microsoft that many people still don't believe it, but there it is in black and white. Hell, you can sell your open-source code. Bravo, MS.)

Thats your answer to this question?

Yup, but if that's not enough, I'll elaborate fully. I'll assume for the purpose of this explanation that people are fully uninformed as to the history of this issue, so I apologise if it sounds patronising at all:

Understanding the details of how hardware is designed and functions is critical to developing any code for it. Additionally, developing additional hardware to add functionality also requires this knowledge. A certain famous company, Apple, refused to release these important details as far back as the 70s with their Apple II, and eventually this disagreement became severe enough that an alternative with fully customisable hardware was developed. You're using a version of it right now, probably. It was originally developed by IBM and was known as the IBM-Clone for a long time. Eventually it just became this thing called a "PC".

This same philosophical debate eventually spread to software as well - closed-source software being considered a private trade secret and being dependent on the licensed developers to maintain and update it for any faults that may arise over time, contrasted with open-source software, considered an ongoing public project that anyone can modify provided they release the modifications to the public; the idea being that the code improves relatively quickly in both the short- and long-term. Neither philosophy is perfect as both are equally prone to the plague of abandoned product support, but that's outside the scope of this issue.

Purely from the standpoint of the technology industry, the games industry is lagging behind by about a decade in terms of adequate public hardware documentation and developer support for their hardware and software. Each console manufacturer is repeating Apple's ancient mistake (i.e. Nintendo being bewildered by struggling third-party developers trying to code for their systems). This being a battle that was fought before and won, this will likely repeat itself all over again and an open-hardware console will show up before the decade is out. In the meantime, without the appropriate documentation, people have to find out through trial-and-error how to develop for specific hardware. Even licensed developers are thrown to the wolves in this regard which has long since ceased to be a concern for PC development despite closed-sourced GPU technology: enough technical information is released to make developing comfortable and efficient without endangering a company's valued trade secrets.

Cue homebrew. If the first-party system developers won't release sufficient technological information for their hardware to develop for the system properly, enthusiastic hobbyists have no option but to apply trial and error to get the system to behave itself. Indeed there still exists a sizeable GBA homebrew community precisely because of this problem and in fact for the first semester of this year I was instructed to develop a homebrew GBA title to pass the unit. I'll touch more on that point later.

Though homebrew development potentially enables piracy may terrify the first- and third- parties and many consumers, it's incidental to the other issue at hand which has far wider implications than those that relate specifically to gaming: fighting so-called unauthorised implementations of a development environment in court implicitly implies that the hardware in question is both property of the company and not the consumer, and more importantly it explicitly denies the right of the user to discover the fine details of their personal hardware and contribute to its developer pool. This chokes the capability of developers, large and especially small, to contribute to the well-being of the platform, despite the side-effect of barring more malicious users to pirate or cheat and ruin peoples' days. Critically though, it artifically inflates the cost of development due to having to pay licensing fees to access the development tools. This bars even more potential developers from entering the industry.

Specifically, by denying developers a transparent development kit, platform development is choked. This has and will continue to have negative implications for the industry although it's gotten better in recent years (XBLA, PSNS, DSiWare, WiiWare, etc.) and further limits the potential applications of the hardware product. The more worrying aspect is that this paranoid attitude to console development makes it phenomenally difficult for students to research the platforms in question and gain valuable industry-relevant experience during their study period. This has and will continue to have unfortunate consequences for the quality of the developer workforce until this issue is resolved.

Simply put then, the PS3 was hacked for the reason that Sony were (and are) too paranoid to release sufficient information and access to their hardware technology to the public. OtherOS was not a sufficient implementation either as it denied access to the PS3's GPU, crippling the technology. The jailbroken technology gives total access to the PS3's technology, which should have been possible from release in the first place.

The very unfortunate situation with online cheating and people trying to pirate absolutely gives Sony cause for concern and the right to protect the integrity of their product and their consumers' experience. It does not give them a right to set a legal precedent to generate an elitist and prohibitively expensive development culture for the entire spectrum of technology industries, which is what Geohot losing in court will permit. The wider implications of this lawsuit appear to have been overlooked by almost everybody, to Sony's clear benefit. Sony are exploiting the situation even to the detriment of their own business partners.

If they win, it's going to have very unpleasant knock-on effects elsewhere. It shouldn't win, and it can't win, or the wider technological environment is going to suffer.

Quickly returning to the issue of piracy and online hacking, Sony should have had the foresight to implement a more robust anti-cheating system not dependent on hardware security in the first place. Cutting corners in business-critical areas is not wise. Banning cheaters from their private network is perfectly acceptable, and if we assume that the definition of pirated software is accurate (I am not touching that one in this thread, don't even start please) then banning pirates is also perfectly acceptable. Spying on your customers is not.

*whew*

Hopefully my points weren't lost in the flood there.

[Ekaje]

Sorry to give a short reply after your detailed post, but yes, I do understand why people create homebrew, to allow features and developments not allowed by the hardware and information given normally. I was just wondering if anything has actually been done with the cracking of the PS3 other that the cheating and pirating yet, as that is what most site/forums have been focusing on.