Sony wins subpoenas revealing visitors to PS3 jailbreaker site
A federal magistrate has awarded Sony a subpoena allowing the company to obtain the IP addresses of everyone who visited the personal website of PlayStation 3 jailbreaker George Hotz for the past 26 months. Magistrate Judge Joseph C. Spero of San Francisco also granted Sony's request for subpoenas on Google, Twitter, and …
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Neverming adding your own IP
Get a pile of proxies and fill their list.
WTF!?
It doesn't even look like it matters if I own a PS3, because simply the act of visiting these sites is enough to then suffer the Sony Thought Police also coming after me as well! Yet they act simply on the premise that I could have learned something from that web site and so from that moment on, at least in Sony's mind, I then become a risk to them of telling other people. What kind of world are we allowing, if Sony are allowed to do this?!
Have Sony totally lost the plot! ... do they think we are living in some kind of Sony(tm) Police State?!
Are they trying to make us fearful of ever daring to learn the deep dark secrets within a Sony product ever again?! ... WTF! ... don't dare learn what is inside or Sony's Thought Police will come after you to punish you. WTF!?
This Sony witch hunt is going way beyond what should be allowed in any society, so to find it is being allowed is deeply shocking and very troubling. What kind of world are we allowing where corporations are allowed to bully and punish people like this! This insidious insane slide towards corporations policing us is a very bad sign for the future. :(
Darnit!
Read article. Visited site. Read comments. Felt depressingly un-unique (= ique?). Posted comment stating so. Now feel heartened that all reg readers are obstreperous gits also, Ho hum ;)
Title
If Sony sell each PS3 at a loss, maybe that's why they want to put people off buying one so much?
When they initially released the PS3 I was vaguely tempted. It was the cheapest BluRay player around at that point.
Then they got rid of PS2 compatibility so that was the end for me, before it had even started. And removing OtherOS? Definitely a no!
I was one of the few people who bothered with those PS2 Linux kits that Sony made and it was actually pretty decent.
Also there's not been any decent arcade-style first person shooters (Quake / Timesplitters etc) released that I'm aware of. All the FPS I've seen appear to be more of the war simulation style. Though please suggest some if there's any I've missed!
Finaly.....
I see they have finally stopped pretending we live in a free and fair society under the rule of law and admitted that the state is merely a means of maintaining the status quo for the benefit of our corporate masters.
Just visited the site
I want in on the cash payout when Sony gets sued for invasion of privacy. Looking forward to my 'Golden Ticket'.
Better than the lottery and no entry fee. Well done Sony.
Not about you
Have the other commenters actually read the article? I'll summarize: Sony is just looking for number of users that accessed this in California in order to prosecute Geohot. They don't (or at least seem) to care about you, it doesn't really matter that you access his site.
They also do care about who are the select few that had access to the private video published by Geohot. If you are on that list I'd be thinking about where to get a lawyer.
Hope this doesn't read as like I'm trying to help or condone Sony in any way. These actions are still despicable and someone like EFF should really get on their case, Sony has really gone beyond evil in almost everything they have done in recent years.
And why would Sony be rational?
I was going to respond to your point of view; fortunately your own last sentence covers that.
Or
Everybody stop buying Sony products until they remember the customer is king
I visited that website and I didn't have a PS3
What can they sue me for?
How can you make a mockery of justice when it isn't justice that's being served?
Pretense. Freedom. Justice. No longer seeking to maintain an image of. Etcetera.
You know, I didn't use to be such a bitter jaded asshole, especially in regards to my homeland. Then, in only slightly less time than it takes to read the actual DMCA, the US government has done just about every single thing it can think of to (1) curtail our right to privacy and (2) our right to a fair and just judicial system.
What is especially appalling is that no matter how far and how often Congress and the President are willing to go to show that they have big businesses' (and not ours) best interests at heart the judiciary finds new and ever so inventive ways at displaying just how little the other two branches of government know about being truly corrupt.
Did you read the upcoming PREDATOR bill?
H.R. 666, a.k.a. 'Patriots Redeeming Escaped Data for America To Operate Retroactively', as drafted by Sony's lawyers, is all set to be applauded through Congress just as soon as the usual checks clear ~ yayy! it's the democracy, stuupids!
Keeping logs isn't mandatory, y'know...
Come on, server admins. Show some common sense. If you're hosting something so obviously dodgy as instuctions on how to hack a multi-billion dollar companies prime piece of kit, why are you not logging to /dev/null?
What happens whenthey start rickrolling?
Obvious answer - any time a site is threatened by this, the people involved will plant fake links that redirect to that site. It should be pretty easy for them to get many thousands of people who have no connection to that site whatever to visit it.
And just what are Sony intending to do with all those addresses anyway? The company that planted rootkits on their legitimate customers' machines is hardly one that should be trusted with this sort of information - what was that magistrate thinking?
In other news
This really has the bad odour of SCO-like behaviour and their attempt to bully anyone who installed a Linux-based O/S into paying up. Maybe it will end up biting Sony in the arse just as badly.
Wait a minute...
Is this the same Sony that installed rootkits surreptitiously on people's computers and ripped off code for an mp3 codec which they then sold? -Pot meet kettle.
I don't own a game console, but I sometimes enjoy reading hacking/modding sites for various devices. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Can we then sue Sony for gathering unauthorized personal information? (Because if they don't put names and addresses to those IP addresses it's pointless.)
Sony is a four letter word. They've been on my boycott list for years.
-Fire icon, for something Sony can go die in...
I've a bad feeling in my water ...
... that GeoHotz will live to regret consenting to such subpoena orders, whereas no cogent legal reason can be advanced as to why they should be granted ~ apart from needlessly compromising the privacy of himself and those who follow him online, this goes against the first principle of not inviting the enemy to dig though your home trawling for dirty laundry they may then, after a theatrical donning of rubber gloves in court, triumphantly wave in the judge's face by way of substitute for any sound argument.
Broken promises
Didn't their adds say that you could run Linux on these machines? First they sell it to you and then unilaterally change their policy.
I would like to see a nice class-action suit against Sony for this.
The judge handling the case against Hotz seems like he doesn't absolutely know what has happened, also failing to realize that the damage has already been done and there is no way to hide the code that was revealed.
To bad for Sony, they really deserved this!
Love
I would love to visit that site. Also I hope that tens of millions of others would do the same. That would give those blood sucking attorneys a bit to do. I would never purchase a Sony product.
IP addresses??
We don't got to show you no stinkin' IP addresses.
But if you want some, here they are:
127.0.0.1
192.168.0.1
10.0.0.1
172.16.0.1
Feel free to give these to Sony.
Looking at both sides - rock and hard place.
Losing Linux was wrong, I can understand trying to put it back.
But any hacking attempt to restore it was spoiled by the pirates.
As someone who hates to see the copied games hurting the writers I can understand the games companies coming down hard to stop them.
I can also understand the hurt when the owners lost their Linux.
I never went down that route as 40GB was too small, but was wary about the update to remove Linux as I would not have minded trying, but the children had already updated it so tough.
A YLOD has forced a Slim puchase, but I will be getting the 40GB leaded reballed (first paid for repair 4 months) second DIY repair long enough to transfer game saves, and I wouldn't mind trying Linux on it but I have no intention what so ever to pirate a game.
I want the likes of Naughty Dog, Guerilla, Insomniac, Evolution, Media Molecule and all to carry on producing brilliant games, they provide hours of entertainment at a good price, 7p an hour for a game is excellent.
To Sony - please come down on the copied game crowd like a ton of bricks, on the Linux restorers - offer them a job, they may be the best people to combat the piracy! Clever thinking here!
You don't seem to understand
People are doing this to hardware they own. Their are no two sides to this story. They own it. They can do what they want with it. End of story.
They own the hardware but software is licenced.
Usual legal rubbish but they are within their rights.
The problem is that the firmware mods are allowing copied games to run, this is very bad for the developers.
As above I feel sorry for the Linux people, but it was never on the slim.
I'll try but I can't promise you anything
I agree that the courts overstepped the mark by allowing Sony to harvest this info, but lets get something straight. Sony aren't collecting the IP addresses to track down and take action against those people. They're collecting the IPs to geolocate them and prove that a "significant" amount of people in California were involved/subjected/made aware of (whether they used the info or not) the info and therefore making their case in that land legit.
WTF..?
How do you know what Sony will do with the info? 4 months ago nobody would have said Sony would sue anyone. Plus have you read their latest t&ca?
They want you to give them permission to scan your harddrive and anything connected to the PS3 (your home network) for stuff that Sony don't like. Also they will ban/sue you for attaching ANYTHING not Sony approved.
So carry on defending Sony. I just hope hope they turn their sights on you. It's thinking like that that allowed Hitler to dominate.
He knows because he researched it.
A subpoena includes not only the request for information, but also the reason for the request. In this case, Sony has to establish that a people within the jurisdiction of the court viewed the information GeoHot published in order to allow the court to maintain jurisdiction.
I would imagine that they would also like to quantify the likely losses or damages and knowing how many people could have used the published information is necessary to make that determination.
Fail
And no doubt ACS Law will be firing out letters to all of these people they have the IP address for and threatening them as usual?
Its only IP addresses
As far i can tell they are just asking for a list of IP addresses so they can see how many people accessed the video who came from California. Would be a relative easy script to just go through the IP address list and match it against known IP ranges from ISPs bases in California.
Would be very difficult to prove that anyone who visited the website actually used the information on there to actually jailbreak their console, and AFAIK simply knowing the information is not a crime. well not yet anyway
Re: Its only IP addresses
Well given the sweeping actions of both MS and Sony regarding their games consoles I wouldn't put it past them to simply add those IPs to the PSN blacklist. So suddenly everyone who visitied that video is now unable to assed the PSN or play online.
Even if that's 2,000 people I can't see sony caring too much (see sweeping actions above) though they might worry about hitting an exist node or something where the number might be 20,000 but that's easy to check and most any network admin would.
Ok, you can bypass it by switching ISP to get a new IP but what if they also made the link from your IP to your PSN login and disabled that ?
There's been some mention of consoles been remotely disabled or having their MAC addresses blocked too.
So it's only an IP but the worst case scenario is new ISP, new PS3 and new PSN login.
It's their network, they so do what they like with it (MS do and that's paid access).
MS have come down hard before
And there were few complaints then.
Avoiding Sony - not easy.
Well I do avoid one division - the music, nothing I like there, and I detest all the XCraptor stuff.
But I keep coming back to them for other things.
TV is Sony but I have never had a duff Sony TV, I did look around when I went HD but apart from a very expensive Pioneer plasma I saw nothing as good for the money as the W series LCDs.
I have had good service from them in the past, my old Wega had a visit to upgrade the digital tuner and a few posted cards to update the software.
They repaired a 5 year old video camera for free.
You remember good service.
Wiretap Law
Getting information on what web sites a person visits - as opposed to what they post on the web to be visible to all and sundry - should require meeting the same standard as that for authorizing a wiretap.
Either this will be demanded through the political process - which I fear is unlikely - or the Supreme Court will need to do it.
Hooray!!!!
For democracy! Oh and by democracy I mean the right to buy anything evin if it includes the right to others personal details...?
Rootkit
I have never, and will never, forgive Sony for the rootkit episode.
Who do they think they are / we are ?
BMG & Columbia
The newishly aquired American parts rather than the Japanese electronics side.
Who actually instigated this?
I don't like that division.
It was a pretty horrible thing but other companies have been similarly evil. I have on multiple occasions returned unplayable CDs, I was able to rip to PC then burn a red book CD-DA which worked.
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