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Comment by christoph | Hacker News Reader

I personally don't think this is a good move from Sony. Apple seem to have the right stance with their hardware being compromised - pretty much just ignore it.

Bringing a legal action like this just raises the public awareness to the hack (not good for Sony). It pisses more hackers off (not good for Sony) and it doesn't fix what seems to be an unfixable problem for Sony.

I'm sure the courts will be made aware that Sony removed a "key" feature/selling point of a console and left consumers with little choice about how to re-enable that feature.

Anyway, Geohot shouldn't have been such an egomaniac, the keys/tools could have been leaked online anonymously and he wouldn't be in legal trouble. Still, I can see an out of court settlement of some kind on the horizon...

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Apple makes their money from hardware -- software sales are just icing on the cake. Sony, however, has to take piracy threats (since even well-intentioned cracking will lead to piracy) very seriously because they make all of their money from software sales.

Sony's ineffectual attempts to lock down the PSP (starting with the last-minute homebrew policy reversal) probably contributed to the firmware hacking community's fervor. However, after the rampant piracy on the PSP platform, I think Sony is going to take any firmware hacks very seriously. Gamers have proven to be perfectly willing to pirate games if given the opportunity.

Sonys problem is that they make the most expensive games console hardware, but make a loss selling it.

If I were them I'd fix that first. And get rid of the ridiculous and outdated blu-ray crap. Spinny disc things? In this day and age?

I remember when Nintendo said that. You'll note that the spinny disc camp slaughtered them. Spinny discs are little sheets of polycarbonate. They're ridiculously cheap to make.

Apple sues Wired over netbook hackintosh video: http://tinyurl.com/4d2f4rv

Apple sues clone maker Psystar: http://tinyurl.com/6r7jad

I.e. they are only quite as long as people keep buying their hardware, and got nothing to do with "pissing hackers off".

I wouldn't say Apple ignores jailbreakers; while they haven't tried to sue anyone making the software (as far as I know), they did try to block the DMCA exemption for jailbreaking: http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/02/apple-says-jailbreaking...

(Honestly I don't see how geohot did anything, here, really: he used one exploit to apply the work of fail0verflow, who presented at CCC, to a new part of the PS3. All the important parts, like the private key calculation, were already presented before he posted anything.)

While I agree that he is being somewhat of an egomaniac, it does give Sony a big target to shoot at, therefore allowing the court case that may set a good precedent.

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