yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[EVO 4G General] knowledge561:
Read this over on modmyi.com Do you think this is fair?http://modmyi.com/forums/mac-news/754963-sony-granted-access-two-years-geohots-paypal-records.html

On March 5th, we reported that Federal Magistrate Joseph Spero officially authorized Sony to subpoena Geohot's web provider to secure the official log of IP addresses that visited GeoHot.com between January 2009 and early 2011. In addition to Sony being given access to this information, the PS3 maker is about to delve even deeper into Geohot's personal records. This week Sony was also granted access rights to all of Geohot's PayPal records for 2009, 2010, and even January of 2011.

The reason Sony was given access to Geohot's personal PayPal log is the same reason the company was similarly handed all of the other data it requested. According to Sony, the information will help determine whether the company should sue George "Geohot" Hotz in New Jersey or San Francisco. NJ is Geohot's home state, but San Francisco is where his jailbreak files were allegedly most downloaded (plus, San Francisco is also close to Sony headquarters and a trial close to home would be nice).

If you're scratching your head on this one, you're not alone. After all, Sony is looking into more than 24 months of PayPal records even though the primary hack they're upset about is only a few months old. Nonetheless, even on the heels of Sony's latest over-the-top effort to publicly embarrass Geohot in front of the entire jailbreaking community, few are expressing outrage over Sony's ability to acquire this relatively sensitive information all for the sake of "making an example" out of a lone 21-year-old hacker.
[EVO 4G General] Rippley05:
All I know is that the hacks he apparently opened the gates for have ruined games like Modern Warfare 2 for me.. they have killed some games and I don't agree with that at all. I don't support anyone who made hacking the online play of the ps3 possible.

Rooting my phone is much different because I am not ruining the user experience for countless other people, when you hack and cheat ps3 games online.. you are.
[EVO 4G General] kainepaine:
+1 Damn Right.
[EVO 4G General] knowledge561:
I dont believe he necessarily opened up hacks in games. He's known for jailbreaking the ps3 so u can burn games and make your console backwards compatible with ps and ps2 games, and also jailbreaking the iphone/ipod. If you buy something, ITS YOURS! Do what you want with the damn thing, void the warranty, explore options. Why get sued for doing what you want to do with your item?
[EVO 4G General] aimbdd:
Sure you should be able to do what you want with your ps3, but only if it doesn't affect others. aka hacks in game which arent possible without a jail broken counsel if i understand it correctly.
[EVO 4G General] rugedraw:
I didn't know that was possible. How can you hack online play to benefit the gamer?

Edit: Let me rephrase that. Not how do I hack it in the sense of I want to do it, but what benefits or advantages can you get from this? I thought it was just to burn games and for reverse compatibility with older PS games.
[EVO 4G General] Rippley05:
From the link you posted.

"Geohot's hack just allowed a bypass of the system to stop checking for official Sony signed programs which allows you to fully use the system to run your own code and such which really opens the door to homebrew applications."

He may or may not have wrote any hacks or cheats, who knows. He did make it possible for others to do it for the sake of "homebrew" apps.

The problem with your argument of "it's yours do what you want" is this... Your ps3 is yours and you paid for it, my ps3 is mine and I paid for it. When you start doing things to yours that completely ruin my experience when playing.. then it's an issue. If people only hacked the game that didn't involve online play, nobody would say anything. The fact that some powerful hacks/mods that I won't even get into here made it's way to the online play is what the major problem here is.

Besides, you bought your ps3 so you do own the system.. you do NOT own the OS it runs. If you want to develop and code your own version to play on your own network.. then you can do anything you want. Just because you bought a ps3 doesn't mean you own any portion of their OS or the PSN.. so no, you can't do anything you want.
[EVO 4G General] Rippley05:
In games like modern warfare 2 there were wall hacks, aimbot hacks, god mode hacks.. I mean you name it, they had it. It was a joke.

Hack YOUR game all you want, but stick to the part of it that isn't online. When you code things to work on the PSN and ruin it for me and thousands of other people... there is a problem with that. I didn't pay for my ps3 and my games just to go online and get cheated by some 12 year old watching tutorials on youtube on how to enable godmode.

Go check out the callofduty.com forums sometime, the ps3 section. Granted it is full of kids who are crying about everything in the game.. but it also full of people who have been banned for jailbreaking their ps3.
[EVO 4G General] knowledge561:
Well played sir!
[EVO 4G General] Kstarz:
Get over it, its a game its not the end of the world. There have been cheats for games since day one and there always will be if you don't like it don't play them or complain to Sony for creating a system that can get hacked by a lone 21 year old that in my opinion they should employ to help make the ps3 more unexploitable.

Sent from my HTC Desire
[EVO 4G General] Rippley05:
And anyone caught cheating or modding will be banned, just go check out some of the forums and you will see. There will definitely be cheats, only now there are ways to report these cheats and people are being console banned. Keep cheating, eventually you'll get tired of buying a new ps3 everytime you get console banned... that helps me "get over it"

You don't have to agree with me, doesn't really matter if you don't. Sony is taking big steps to cut out hacking.. and you don't have to like that either.. but I guess you'll just have to "get over it".
[EVO 4G General] knowledge561:
Pretty much true. They should have hired his ass. I heard that Sony tried to interview the creator of Clockwork Mod Recovery also but he denied. Sticking it to the man...
[EVO 4G General] halorin:
Sounds like someone needs to cheat to be competitive.
[EVO 4G General] Rippley05:
At any given time you can go online in Call of Duty:Black Ops and have anywhere from 300,00 to 700,00 people playing. Sometimes more than that.. so well over a million people play this game online.

IF I have to explain how hiring a guy who made it possible to, at the very least, "piss off" the majority of these people would be a bad business move.. then I won't even try.
[EVO 4G General] knowledge561:
He wasnt really creating it to be a entry to online cheating. He just wanted a backwards compatible console with 3rd party and homebrew apps. Why not share that with the online community who want to customize their system? Theres been cheating on ps3 way before he jailbroke it. Im pretty sure of that.
[EVO 4G General] dirkyd3rk:
Yeah he did open doors for homebrew code; I can remember playing mw2 and people had wall hacks(could see enemy thru walls) ,getting nukes in 4 kill care package killstreaks(nuke is 25 kills without dying lol) ,so much hacking it was just insane. Black ops team does a find job with Modding, you mod/hack you get the banhammer in less than 24 hours. That kid is a freaking genius though.
[EVO 4G General] Kstarz:
Fyi I don't own a PlayStation so yes call me a cheater all day long but lol at you and I also do not care if anybody agrees with me but are Sony turning into apple ? money grabbing at every opportunity even skanking a 21 year old.

Sent from my HTC Desire
[EVO 4G General] Rippley05:
Come on, Geo is a smart guy. He's smart enough to know what he was enabling. I'm not saying the guy should be set on fire.. but something needed to be done to stop it.

Anyone who wants to play old ps2 games that bad, go get a friggin ps2, they are dirt cheap these days. The ps3 security was pretty solid before this jailbreak, I won't say it was hack free, but not the overwhelming mess it was the last few months. Go youtube some hacked lobbies on modern warefare2, it was a disaster and I'm not joking.
[EVO 4G General] knowledge561:
But still. I mean c'mon. They are suing the crap out of this guy for bs. Okay he found a way to penetrate your walls, fix the damn walls completely and stop pushing crappy weekly updates that do nothing. Since they have money, they trying to set the hacking community straight and scare us.

Sent from Darth Stewies' Evolution aboard the Death Star!
[EVO 4G General] Rippley05:
Why shouldn't they set them straight? If every game you've ever bought online was hacked into things that were just "silly", then eventually people would just stop buying them at all.

They need to tighten up their "walls" but if they don't lay the smackdown on people who "penetrate the walls" then fixing them will not be enough. There will always be people trying to hack the ever loving crap out of it unless they start coming down hard on those people.

Geo is still young and I agree that he's a damn genius when it comes to this stuff. If he starts using his talents for something useful, then he will be perfectly fine..

**edit** Another thing here.. we aren't talking about a random hacker here and there. No, not at all. Geo made it pretty simple for people to hack/mod the ps3. Some games, like mw2, were completely overrun with hackers... completely. It was only a matter of time before it made it's way to every online game out there, unless it was taken care of early on.. like they are trying to do.
[EVO 4G General] rugedraw:
lol@the YouTube videos. Now that I hear more about it from you guys, I do remember this being an issue. Godmode and all that does sound familiar, as well. I'd be pissed as hell if I ended up in one of those lobbies. I must have gotten lucky to not end up in one of those lobbies or maybe just didn't notice.
[EVO 4G General] Rippley05:
It got worse and worse.

Like I said in my edit of another post... we aren't talking about a random hacker here and there. No, games like mw2 became completely overrun with it, blacks ops was starting to have issues... it would have been just a matter of time before every ps3 online game was infested if they didn't do something about it.
[EVO 4G General] rugedraw:
I had a couple of instances when I first started playing Black Ops that left me super pissed. I'd empty a clip into another player's torso and he would still be able to turn around and kill me with one shot. Then at the end, I'd see them with 30 kills and 2 deaths or something ridiculous like that. I think I may have been a "victim" of this and not even noticed. lol
[EVO 4G General] Rippley05:
The most common one in Black Ops was the 15th prestige hack. That didn't really hurt anyone but if it was possible, then obviously other things would be possible too. They have done a really good job cleaning it up tho..

I'm not a anti-hacker person, I wish I had the ability to work code. There is just some places that it has no place, and online gaming is one of them.
[EVO 4G General] superm3:
I don't hack ps3 to cheat online..I want a game shark or built in game cheat with unlimited everything..I want to breeze thru the game with ease....games now these days are too hard and they constantly kick my asss..I don't buy games anymore..I hack ps3 to play old school games with gamesharks.
[EVO 4G General] comprog2000:
Thanks for giving me one more reason to not buy the PS3. Its sad to see Sony use fear to hold back the mod community. Instead they could have allowed mods that enhanced gameplay while still doing what they are now, banning the wall hackers and such.
[EVO 4G General] Rippley05:
Haha. "enhance gameplay" by allowing people to use wall hacks, godmode, lag switches, care package hacks, killstreak hacks, etc etc etc against people who are playing without all that stuff? Thats enhanced gameplay?

lol get the eff outta here with that lame stuff
[EVO 4G General] Papa Smurf151:
thats why i love my xbox
[EVO 4G General] BrianDigital:
So glad im not a console gamer. Want a mod go ahead use it, indie games all over the place steam sales are crazy. Oh whats that cheating oh theres a perm ban from.the admin.
[EVO 4G General] slimsuse:
if you read his official declaration, he states that he NEVER HAD A PSN ACCOUNT. i do not believe that the hack enables people to cheat via PSN, sony has protections for that on their servers, he did a work around for people to play games NOT on PSN.... he never created a PSN account, so therefore he is NOT bound by its terms and conditions... so the CONSOLE itself, is HIS... i think thats the point he is trying to make...
[EVO 4G General] xHausx:
I have a hard time caring after playing black ops the other night. It's ridiculous, sony and treyarch were completely unprepared for all of the cheaters and it is much worse than anything ive ever saw on pc.

Unless he was one of the people who made the cheats I don't blame him, but at the same time all the fgs who have to cheat ruin the game for everyone else.
[EVO 4G General] :
Dude I have the first Gen ps3 its backwards compatible that's a feature that should of never left and Sony wants us to really buy again the games I already have to play on the newer model. He was simply making a back ups of games why should I have to buy things again if the CD broke I already paid for it.
[EVO 4G General] KB112:
Sony is playing dirty.
[EVO 4G General] :
In the end of 2009, Hotz announced his efforts to hack the Sony PlayStation 3,[17] a console widely regarded as being the only fully locked and secure system of the seventh generation era. Hotz opened a blog to document his progress, and five weeks later, on January 22, 2010, he announced that he had successfully hacked the machine by enabling himself read and write access to the machine's system memory and having hypervisor level access to the machine's processor.[18][19] Hotz also detailed the many things his work could allow, such as homebrew and PlayStation 2 emulation (a feature removed by Sony in newer revisions of the console to tackle production costs).

Geohot was basically giving us back what we lost. If you own the ps3 slim you know that it is not backwards compatible like the original ps3 that was released(I own that one). Also to be allowed to play homebrew games gives us a chance to play games like the original duck hunt and minecraft on our systems. He was not alone in this work. When it comes down to hackers in call of duty, ive seen people hacking it WAY before this was exploit was released. Xbox gets hacked. The Wii is hackable. Geohot is not to blame for your horrific online experience, "tryhards" who want a 75.30k/d ratio are to blame. Sony just doesnt want to admit that their system is hackable. My psn was hacked once and I explained to them how it was hacked and they denied that their network has leaks. I left the guy in awe when I told him the damn process. Sony knows they lost this one so they want to punish us and sue the **** out of geohot because he did what they couldnt.
[EVO 4G General] Rippley05:
Sorry guys. It does suck that you lost the ability to play ps2 games.. but that doesn't justify hacking the sony OS to get it back.

Again, you can say whatever you want about the ps3 having cheats before this. Nobody will dispute that. This jailbreak just made it easy for them and it resulted in tons of hacks being created... each one had tons of tutorials so every 12 year old did it. You obviously didn't play any of the games that were infested with these players...

Don't try the "Geo did what they couldn't" They friggin coded and developed the entire PSN and the OS your ps3 runs on. Geo didn't, he just hacked it. Sony owns it, you don't, Geo doesn't.

Defend the guy all you want, it won't change what has happened and will happen to him. Sony isn't gonna change their minds. Geo knew damn well what he was doing or he wouldn't have released his info and the process on how to hack your system'

This proves it

" Hotz also detailed the many things his work could allow"

Again, you obviously didn't play mw2 when it was infested all to hell.. or you were one of the guys that helped ruin it for everyone else.
[EVO 4G General] :
lol I played mw2 when it was ****ed alright. Now it's patched. But what if HTC decided to sue the guys who figured out how to root our phones and give us all of these lovely capabilities? Would we just sit back and say its cool that he did it, but he shouldnt have?
[EVO 4G General] Rippley05:
Rooting/jailbreaking your phone is in no way ruining the user experience for thousands of other people. I can do absolutely nothing with my rooted phone to bother you and your phone in any way that I couldn't do with an unrooted phone.

I said I'm not against hackers at all... there are just some places that it does not belong... and online gaming is one of them.
[EVO 4G General] :
Did you know that the jailbroken iphone way back when had an app that allowed you to bypass security cameras by showing you what they are seeing? Now what if you could reroute it to show whats happening at your local bank? Not only could you control the angle and rate that they move, but you stage one hell of robbery and showdown. BUT i guess jailbreaking doesn't ruin anything for others...
[EVO 4G General] xHausx:
ROFL

Scary, we better hope hackers don't figure out laptops come with admin/root access by default and can do much more.
[EVO 4G General] Rippley05:
Care to post some proof of that app? If someone was smart enough to make a jailbroken iphone run an app like that.. then they can use something other than an iphone to serve the same purpose. If that app is so readily available, where is it?

Once an app liek that is on everyones phone because someone posted on youtube how to do it, and people started robbing banks. Then I'm sure steps would be taken against jail breaking your iphone. Right now it isn't even illegal to jailbreak/root your phone.

You can try to defend the guy all you want. Truth is, what you or I say doesn't matter. It is a free country, if your hero wants to develop his own network like PSN and write his own code for an OS and put it on his own hardware, then he can do anything he wants on his network. He broke the EULA by hacking Sonys. That's why he is being sued.

He could have done it and kept the process all to himself, closed source style. Instead, he made it available to anyone.
[EVO 4G General] :
Remember I said "way back when" in the iPhone 3G days. I believe it's been removed from cydia for all purposes. All I'm saying is Sony is taking it too far for something like that. You can punish the guy, but ****ing his life up is uncalled for.
[EVO 4G General] xHausx:
You all are way off the mark.

Sony is going after him because he broke their encryption and reverse engineered their software; which happens to be proprietary. It never has been, and never will be, illegal to jailbreak/root/hack, BUT, it is illegal to reverse engineer software and make a profit from others code.

What he did is the equivalent of someone figuring out how htc signs their updates & pc36imgs. And then, according to Sony, making a profit off their methods.
[EVO 4G General] Rippley05:
They are coming down hard on him right now, that's the whole point, they have to. He is responsible for a huge mess that had some serious potential to hurt Sony as a business.

Whatever happens to him, he can definitely recover from it. He is only 21? Obviously a really smart and talented guy too. He can develop his set of skills and get a job making some serious cash doing something useful rather than hacking PS3s just for the "lulz".
[EVO 4G General] Rippley05:
Well I guess that's the legal side of it. That's likely where all the paypal records are coming into play then..

I wasn't really off the mark, just didn't know the details off the actual lawsuit. I do know what he is responsible for.. and the PSN will be much better without the crap it's been infested with due to his jailbreak.
[EVO 4G General] xHausx:
+1

I hate him for ruining gaming on the ps3 but still got mad respect for him. He's good and Sony is doing him a favor by bringing all this attention his way. Uncle Sam hires a lot of people like him.
[EVO 4G General] thedarknsin:
My own thoughts on this are '

I see where sony is coming from, anyone who has followed sony over the past 10 years knows that they really keep getting the low end of the stick. That battery lawsuit they had to eat years ago destroyed their stock prices. PSP sells were no where what they had hoped and guess what, few weeks later, you could get any game you wanted, for free, with little more than a youtube video. Now Geohot has opened up one of their few remaining stock holding items. I'm sure some of you have heard that Sony is also going to start releasing CD keys with all of their games to help maintain part of this mayhem going on. Who here buys used PS3 games from Gamestop? Not anymore.

On Geohot, got to love him or hate him. I much don't care what the kid does with his free time. He has explained to many people, publicly, many times. "I want my PS3 to do what it says it should do on the box, nothing more" He also says that "I personally believe that all things should be free and open to the public" < not a bad point of view, I'm glad it didn't cost me a dime to root my Evo. Now the people who made all of this get out of hand where 3rd party devs to the matter.

All this comes down to is the smart guy always gets the **** end of the stick. If anyone remembers when the original jailbreak came out, companies sold the usb sticks for over $100. Who here wants to bet Geo didn't get a penny from that. Give the kid a break.
[EVO 4G General] jtjames003:
Well, I think people are looking over the true point is the fact he is selling what he did. So nowhere making a profit as well. I didn't read the whole post before I wrote this, but I'm sure Sonys biggest issue is he's making money from the exploits.
[EVO 4G General] Rippley05:
Great so now I can't buy used games? And I'm supposed to have sympathy for the kid who is the reason for it?

Sent from the batcave thanks to the xda "premUim" app!
[EVO 4G General] jtjames003:
Well, you also talk about Sony

Owning there code the other difference is HTC don't own open source code. so It's a Totally diferent thing here on our phones.

Plus most of the things were doing with our phone is generally locked out by the different phone company's not HTC or Google
[EVO 4G General] omnikam:
Sony won't stop the hacking of there devices by taking geohot down, in fact he will become a marter to future hackers. The only thing I see happening is that instead of taking glory, the new smart hacker will do it anonymously for the sheer fun of sticking an untracable middle finger to sony, and I for one will be privately thanking them. Those whinning about there online gaming experience being affected, remember this, Geohot didn't create the cheats, he did open up the games system for good homebrew and wankers cheating and even piracy, but that has always been the price of freedom. Sonys console was like a dictator and now it's been democrasized.....

I think the only mistake he made was to put his name to it, just imagine if luke skywalker had gone around bragging about destroying the deathstar? He would have had every bounty hunter out for his head... oh that's right he did have.. maybe geohots dad will turn out to be the CEO of sony lol
[EVO 4G General] ramiss:
So what reality do you live in? This isn't about the game experience. It is about damaging a product that many people worked hard on and are trying to make a living from the proceeds.

How would you like it if the product you make in your job suddenly became unusable or broken? This is beyond "props to teh leet hack3r", this time he did real damage to real people.

Not only did he damage potential sales of several gaming and one console company, he also made a profit at the same time. Of course they are going after his a$$!

Sent from my device.