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 …
Good call. I will also gladly give them my IP, dynamic and UK based as it is... In fact with a few router resets they can have a dozen IPs from me. They are then welcome to try to get my name from my ISP, good luck with that. I assume they have their own direct hotline which bypasses the call centre in India?
They are then more than welcome to send me a threatening letter telling me what I can, or can't do with something that I own... Or in my case, something that I don't.
A/C because I don't want to make it too easy. let's make them jump through maximum hoops before finding the information they have jumped for is completely useless!
BTW, it's worth a visit on your mobile phone. The UK networks have multiple outbound gateway IPs and each connection takes a different one from the pool. Even each image request to a page will come from a different IP!
That we all visit this website and download any videos and instruction documents that we can find relating to this matter.
It is important that as many people as possible learn and realise what that law requires us not to do; so let us study what George Hotz did, so that we can avoid doing it ourselves.
> what that law requires us not to do;
Remember that it is only SCEA's *allegation* that any law requires us not to do this; no court has yet upheld that view (nor rejected it).
So SCEA has been granted the right to find out the IP addresses (and thence, according to their argument, the identities) of anyone who has associated with Hotz via his website, and heard any of his ideas, which might well qualify as Free Speech in the US.
I find this ruling rather troubling...
Vic.
I find it outrageous that some judge that has no jurisdiction over me has the right to disclose to a commercial enterprise such as Sony, the fact that I visited a site belonging to someone who they have a grievance with. The kid is hacking a games console, not showing people how to make nuclear bombs! Any UK solicitors willing to take this further? I am looking for some advice on this, must be free of course :)
This is called corporate law.
It's clear that today corporations dictates what we do, how we do it and when we do what they want us to do. This goes beyond continental or country- borders. A problem worsened by the fact that most local country-side governments are ALL corrupt (and usually no-more then a local front-end for these mega-corporations).
"Blade Runner" meets "1984" meets "They Live!" :-(
This is far off from the Utopian vision that Gene Roddenberry had in "Star trek".
At this rate we'll be back in the middle ages by 2020 (or in prison). But at least we'll have our punky-sized smart-phone with holographic display showing us idiotic TV shows coupled with even more idiotic advertisement and the occasional game of 3D solitaire.
Step 1. Select a lawyer who specializes in the field you need help with.
Step 2. Write politely to lawyer making your your grievance clear.
Step 3. Wait. If the said lawyer is not rushed off his/her feet and your case looks solid, you will probably get quite a lot of good advice.
What if he just wants a decent games console and doesn't give a fuck about linux ??? Its funny when u ask one of thoes twats who were running linux on there PS3 why they installed the update that removed the linux option and they say it so they could run a new game. So u say so u did buy it as a Games Console then ??? they neva have an answer.
Do u really think the PS3 would have sold less if it had NEVER had the option the in stall linux ? And how different would your life really have been ? The ban in Europe will not effect Sony for a couple of reasons.. Reason 1. The PS3 is sold at a LOSS. So they will loose LESS. Have a good think about that one. Reason 2. I think the PS3 is near the end of its life. PS4 cant be that far off.
I visit his site few times in the last year ( I visited the site 2 times just now ;) ), and they were not PS3 related (it was for the iCrap stuff).
Everything in my house that is electronics is Sony....I was gone go and get new TV (even though my old Sony is still good but not HD) and I had already plan on what TV to get.
Darn Sony, now I need to look at the sales again to find one that is not Sony.
When they knock on my door maybe they can take the old TV with them (it's a big one and heavy)
I was gone get the new Xperia as well, HTC looks good to....
If any one from Sony is reading this, you just lost customer and revenue....hope you are happy.
Do you not think now Sony has gone too far? These bastards are really pushing it. At the moment, it's no longer about hacking a console or alleged digital rights infringement.
it's about privacy and freedom.
What's more interesting is how the legal system is allowing this to happen.
Do the right thing.
Boycott Sony.
At the very least think about it. There may be more that one can do, although not being familiar with the US legal system, I am not sure what avenues are available.
I visited his site and I own a PS3. I haven't jailbroken my PS3 yet because I haven't felt the need to, but I might just do it to spite Sony. The way they're going after the hackers who have done nothing wrong apart from figuring how to jailbreak their own legally owned hardware is outrageous.
I've usually been pretty pro-Sony, sure during the rootkit fiasco I viewed it as don't ever buy anything from Sony that will go in my pc but I was ok with their console.
So, I own a 360 and a PS3. I have two choices neither of which I like. Either pay to play online (which I absolutely detest and don't pay for out of principle) or use a console from a company that is making me hate them.
The annoying thing is the majority of my console games are on the PS3 and there isn't really a choice, I can go with the artificially hobbled unless I pay functionality of the 360 or I can go with a company that is doing everything in their power to make me hate them.
PS. I owned a Wii, great first party games. Too many crappy third party waggle games.
I guess at some point I may just sell my PS3. There are some good games coming out on the pc soon like Portal 2 and Mass Effect 3 will be on the pc when it's released. (I made the mistake of buying the 360 version of Mass Effect 2.. planet scanning... urgh)
Agree... Once upon a time, a long long time ago, my Aggro list was quite simple indeed....
1. Microsoft
2. Apple
Then, strangely enough a couple of years ago, Apple gained aggro, so then it was:
1. Apple
2. Microsoft...
Apple did a sterling job tanking till one fateful day, Sony pulled aggro.. Now it's :
1. Sony
2. Apple
3. Microsoft.
And, boy, did Sony pull..... It's almost as if they're doing it so make whatever Apple do seem more acceptable.
Fortunately, the way things work around me at the moment, it's easiest to get rid of any and all dealings at all with parties (1) and (2) than (3).
So... guess what, the top two of you? You're no longer welcome around here :P
I think I might have visited his site; I know I looked at the fail0verflow one when the news broke. And there IS a PS3 in the house that shares the same internet connections. It's my lad's, and is completely untouched. Heck, he even buys things off PSN. If Sony try and allege anything against us, I'll fight it tooth and nail!
If Sony get's these IPs and cross references them against the PS3s detected as being jailbroken, it will give them pretty good evidence of the harm that GeoHot caused without them having to do anything further than getting IP addresses.
There may be some element of trying to establish any co-accused, but I suspect this has more to do with establishing damages than anything else. To be honest, I also don't think that Sony's attorneys ever expected to get the data. I can't believe that Hots' attorneys allowed him to agree to these subpoenas even in a narrowed form.
I do have a PS3 (my 2nd, due to YLOD on my no-longer Linux capable 60GB fat one)....
I did read GH's blog a few times, as I find most stories of jailbreaking etc quite interesting. My PS3 is completely untouched, other than for a bigger hard drive (which is perfectly acceptable), and I agree that with the suspicion that Sony will engineer a way to check which PS3s are tampered with. It will however, be interesting to see if I (or anyone else) gets a letter/contact from Sony just for the fact they (or their routers IP) 'visited that site' (and therefore are obviously guilty!), as whilst DMCA etc might be valid in the US, it's not valid in other places. Alternately, I wonder if they avoid letters and just figure out PSN IDs and cut them off. In any case, I suspect mistakes would be made....
Personally, the only things I'd like to see hacked (or 'enabled') on my PS3 are somethings I don't believe can be done currently anyway - i.e. multi-region DVD playback (I have some US special edition DVDs). The other thing would have been the ability to extract/copy the data from my fat PS3 *after* it died (I failed to do a recent backup)....
Still, ION, the only devices I own which are rooted are ones for which the software/toolchains have been open-sourced anyway :P
And good luck with all those IP addresses. GeoHot hit slashdot a couple times, so that's about half the American internet then, and a goodly chunk from elsewhere. I guess we'll find out soonish that sony will take this "evidence" and start to sue outside USoA jurisdiction too. That's going to be interesting in the Chinese sense; is that "evidence" admissible elsewhere? I'd really rather not learn the hard way.
The more general problem is that while this sort of dragnet evidence gathering is becoming more popular including with law enforcement, it isn't all that useful, but it will indeed cause lots of innocents to end up on rabiate corporates and LEOs their computer storage and possibly in freshly exploded case files too.
And, hm, GeoHot probably needs to learn how to negotiate, stat. The Japanese are fiendishly good at it, so this is about the school of the hardest knocks imaginable, but he'd better catch on quick, because it appears he's not getting his money's worth.
I know I, and several others, looked at this at work, so they get the proxy server address in Germany - will they then try and serve a subpeona on an overseas company to get details of what internal employees accessed a given site a couple of months ago?
Which will fail as teh log files are purged every 30 days or so.
I would have said "outrageous", but 'Bristol Chemist got there first.
Why is the law facilitating Sony's discovery aims? Sure, help them build a case against the actual miscreant if you want, but this level of delving is just creepy as hell.
I truly have nothing to hide, so I should have nothing to fear. But I'm not so sure now. Is it safe to go anywhere anymore?
Bottom line : this judgement makes US Law subservient to corporations' commercial interests. I suppose we all suspected it for years, but now it's official. And where they go, we follow.
George Hotz is a Sony employee. Just like so called "hackers" releasing PSP jailbroken firmwares are Sony employees too. It's all marketing. But now Sony managers got so dumb that want to scare actual and potential customers.. inside Sony there are some really dumb managers that have no clue what they are doing and instead of increasing market share thru the usual trick of mod-chips like on PS1 and PS2 (and like everyone else including Apple,Microsoft,Nintendo do with their products)..now they want to start suing real people turning the marketing hacking thing from farce into nightmare for people.. when after all there is no really working hack for PS3 because if it was a real hack that Sony didn't plan it all by itself then they wouldn't have had any possible way to ban whoever used the hack. The fact is that with PS1 and PS2 they didn't really do anything legally wise against whoever bought the modchips..of course them producing those "hack tools" under Chinese names..why would they want to kill themselves? But now inside Sony there are clearly two group of managers and the end result is going to be the demise of Playstation3 market share in the not so long run.
Screw with actual and potential customers once.. you might get away with it.. screw with them again using some retarded scare tactics abusing the justice system and your business is going to collapse sooner than later.
But surely this is taking things to far as to regards to looking at everyone who has been on the website, I havnt been as I can't be bothered with things like this but im. Sure lots. Of people will. Watch just to see what is being done. It's like saying a group of people in a town have committed crime so we must get the identities of everyone who lives in that town and also the identities of those who have visited is past by.
I do own a ps3 but I have one game that I never play and occasionally use it for blu-ray but if were all honest the xbox is a far superior console. Perhaps sony should spend less time on making lawsuits and more time making better products. I seriously doubt I will. Buy anymore Sony products after this.
Paris, because she is also entitled to things she just doesn't deserve.
This post has been deleted by its author
I used it to watch stuff on both the Sky platform and the Astra 1 cluster. Given this was the days before BBC went free to air, I spent most of the time with Astra 1.
Now, we had necessary firmware updates to give radio channels a zero prefix, and along the way stopped the "Other channels" from working until the thing had valid up to date EPG data.
Likewise this, if I had a games console, I would not trust it to have any capabilities beyond those of being a games console. That it could run another operating system is...not a gaming function.
.
That said, with the "Other OS" referred to in any advertising literature, on the box, etc? If so, maybe those affected could look to launching their own action against Sony, as it shouldn't be too far beyond the realms of reality to demonstrate that the choice and purchase of the equipment was based heavily on a feature that was later arbitrarily removed. But if there was no publicity promoting the feature, let this be a lesson...
Unhappy face as what is the big deal so long as you aren't trying to cheat, rip off games, or otherwise deprive Sony of income...
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.
An IP address won't give Sony anything unless they also subpoena the ISP to identify the user, since 99% of broadband users have dynamic IP addresses. So if Sony block an IP address on its own they're a. incredibly stupid, b. incredibly stupid, but then with this case I think we've established that already.
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.
Anyone who looked will now be in the position of all the people in the file sharing predatory lawyer mess.
You went to look, but never downloaded anything. Now you get "The Letter" that lets you know that for only $5000 you can not have to appear in court with a lawyer in some distant city to try to convince a jury that has no idea what is going on and that you did nothing but observe. For some, you don't own a PS3. But maybe you were selling your knowledge to all your friends and neighbors. How will you go about proving you don't own a PS3 or will never buy one. Permanent banning of you register one at that IP? Any IP tracked to within a mile of the offending IP. Yes that is mostly silly; but it is the US system of law berift of reason.
That judge really really needs to think about this a bit harder. I would bet he has no idea what has been going on with the file share thing.
1) Make yourself up a big ol' pot of pinto beans. (I like ham hocks in mine, but YMMV)
1a) Eat hearty
2) Next morning take yourself a righteous dump.
3) Use said Letter to wipe remnants of said righteous dump
4) In another envelope, return said Letter to sender.
There. Sorted.
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. :(
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!
...which they obviously don't, they would match up the IP addresses of people who visited geohot against the IP addresses collected by the spyware built into each and every PS3.
Still, for what its worth I have added my IP to the geohot visitors list - hopefully to slow down their trawl even if only a little bit.
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?
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!
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...
... 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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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