So justice prevails but Superman turns out to be a loudmouthed dick. I'm glad he has attorney's fees this makes the legal fight about, you know, whether what he did was legal or not (it was) and not whether Sony can bury the dude.

I guess you can think whatever you want, but my priority is legal precedent, not whatever kind of precedent you're talking about. I hope he wins. No one is making me listen to his Youtube videos. If you want to lose several civil suits, sure.

George Hotz should win, if he does, I'm going to crack open a beer.
I'm curious why everyone who hates listening to the guy actually does. You never have to watch a Youtube video of him, read an interview he's given, etc. The worst you're likely to see is a news story about him come across whatever your favorite news site is. You can ignore that too if it really bothers you.

The PS3 hardware was sold to buyers, we can do whatever the hell we want with it. I don't care if I can connect to PSN, Sony can take that back since it's their service. But they cannot come into my house and tell me what the hell I can do with my hardware anymore than Ford can tell me what to do with my car.

Sony has made about every wrong move a company can make even back during the rootkit fiasco and before. Fuck them, seriously. I don't care if some walled garden got a few more wallhackers added to it. People who bought those systems are now learning what happens when you lose your LAN play and private server options.

Okay, done ranting. I don't understand people attacking this kid. He's a jerk off KID. If he's still acting that way at 40, let me know.

Summary of what happened, not doing the timeline thing because I'm too lazy to check the dates:
1) GeoHot (George Hotz) cracks the PS3 hypervisor with a not very useful hack.
2) Sony overreacts and decides to remove OtherOS, others call GeoHot a poseur and are unimpressed with his work. Some accuse him of taking credit for others' work.
3) 12 months after OtherOS is removed a team named fail0verflow dumps Sony's keys and demonstrates how to penetrate every security mechanism the PS3 has in place. They also poke fun at the various mistakes Sony made during development, including using the same random number to generate all their signing keys (a big no no, it makes the encryption very breakable). People ask them about the last key they didn't dump, fail0verflow says, "Yes you can use our technique to dump it and among other things it would enable piracy."
4) A week or so later GeoHot publishes a working exploit using the newly dumped, missing key.

Note, hardware jailbreaks had been available up until this point, but this is new, it's all software and it allows you to literally override any firmware Sony sends down the pipe.

In that case, this geohot isnt that really who should be getting all the attention but the fail0verflow group, since they made the ps3 exploits.

However, most of that group is located outside the US, so Sony can't use the bullshit IP laws we have here against them.

What? :D

Yeah they're mostly European and their governments already told Sony to go F themselves.

No EULA (or any other contract for that matter) holds up if it breaks the law, and plenty of them do. It doesn't matter what you agree to, if something in there is illegal in your country, the entire thing is null and void.

If you have a problem with the EULA and don't abide by it then, yes, they can take their PSN network and go home. They can't tell you what to do with your PS3, regardless.

The point is that the updates are a condition of continued access to the PSN and if you agree to the conditions and install them then you get whatever is in the update even if its removing stuff

Both OtherOS and PSN were advertised features that people were promised to get them to buy Sony's product. Insisting on taking one of those away after already taking people's money is theft or fraud.

I'm not saying its a good thing, in fact I think its shit but if they want to restrict the psn to the latest updated console and you agree to the conditions which include removing features, you have to weigh the losses to decide if you want to keep it connected to the net

Yes, in the same way that if someone pulls a knife on me and demands my money I have to weigh the losses and decide whether or not to hand over my wallet. Are you really ready to give Sony a pass just because they obfuscate the nature of their behavior a bit?

And I was always told that the customer is king. In the end it turns out that the customer is the servant instead who is allowed to buy products for the specific purpose which somebody else decides.

Maybe we should go back to a philosophy where buying something meant that you can actually are free to use it in a lot of different ways and not that you bind your soul and whatelse to a legal contract that may or may not bring doom to you every possible moment.

On the other hand, I would be perfectly happy with a clause that makes you loosing guarantee or support if you fiddle with hardware.