German police raids PS3 hacker's home

Maybe hackers can unban themselves from the PlayStation Network, but they can’t surely get themselves out of prison. That’s right, Sony is taking drastic measures in order to stop PS3 hacking, so if you’re a PS3 hacker, you might have to deal with the police like this person did.



Since banning from PlayStation Network could not stop hackers, Sony decided to involve the police, and recently, Sony sent police officers to a hacker’s home at Germany, and that hacker is now in custody. The German police arrested infamous PS3 hacking contributor, Graf_chokolo a few days ago. Police stormed his home, and they took everything related to the console hacking as evidence against him. This hacker released the Hypervisor Bible which essentially is a set of tools that allows everyone to reverse updates and hack their PS3, so it’s obvious why he was a thorn in Sony’s eye.


Sony is quite serious when it comes to jailbraking of their PlayStation 3 console, we can only wonder what their next course of action might be.

Source

To follow up on this story, SCEE is now suing Graf_Chokolo for One Million Euros in damages for uploading his HV Bible.



via PCWorld
http://www.pcworld.com/article/220740/police_raid_ps3_hackers_home_hacker_retaliates_sony_sues.html

Sony is pretty annoyed with those hooligans hacking its beloved PlayStation 3. So annoyed, in fact, that they've involved law enforcement: On February 23, PS3 and Linux hacker graf_chokolo said the local police and a Sony representative raided his house.

There's not a lot of information on what, exactly, went down, as all we have to go on at the moment is a comment graf_chokolo left on his blog, PS3 Linux and Hypervisor Reverse Engineering Blog:

"Guys, SONY was today at my home with police and got all my stuff and accounts. So be careful from now on."

Sony--who is doing everything it can to keep hackers out of its PS3, including working on a "hack-proof" system--underestimated the abilities of a hacker scorned. Graf, real name Alexander Egorenkov, responded to the raid by uploading his databases to the Internet, and encouraging people to "upload it everywhere" so that Sony wouldn't be able to easily remove it.

Of course, Sony responded to that little shenanigan with a much bigger threat: a legal notice from Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) lawyers demanding that he remove the links and, oh yeah, pay a sum of one million euros. Yeah, you read that right. Graf left another comment on his blog explaining the situation (after he removed the links to comply with the SCEE notice).

I'm not going to choose sides, but I think that it's perhaps time for Sony to try another method. This whole alpha-dog scare tactic method isn't really working out for them.

As PS3Crunch mentions, maybe Sony should just hire these hackers, instead of pissing them off?


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Link to court document.
http://ps3crunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Legal-Notice-Amir-Ariff2.pdf

If you can't beat em, join em..err.. have them join you?

if they choose to look for everyone who is hacking and put them in jail, youll see a lot of teens invading the jails like a BIG WAVE

You: What you in for?
Cellmate: Killing my ex's boyfriend. You?
You: Hacking my PlayStation 3 & releasing information on how, to the world via the internet.


Starting to look like the above may eventually happen if things get worse for the guy.

TitusF wrote:You: What you in for?
Cellmate: Killing my ex's boyfriend. You?
You: Hacking my PlayStation 3 & releasing information on how, to the world via the internet.


Starting to look like the above may eventually happen if things get worse for the guy.

lol Titus! Sony's definitely cracking down using force. It's a good and bad thing- it's a good thing because they're specifically targeting parties responsible for the actual creation of the hacks. The bad thing is, that although they can confiscate a hacker's equipment and imprison these people, who's to say how fast the hacks have spread to other fellow hackers? It's a huge network and it's like wild fire. They can lock up these guys all they want but there's always going to be someone else carrying on and continuing afterward.

Locking up people for hacking their owned PS3's is downright insane. The way they have it with the PS3 is that you only own the shell of the PS3 (hardware) & not the software in it.

Let's say I know how to program my PS3 from these hacks. I completely remove the restrictions Sony put in place so that I can install, run, & use the PS3 however I see fit since I, by law, own this piece of hardware. I'm not using it in ways to cheat, steal, or pirate games, movies, etc. I tell people how to do it, and Sony sicks the hounds on me for doing such.

They then, in turn, place accusations of piracy, copyright infringement, & any damages that they claim I have done to them in releasing how to hack your PS3. This is exactly what's happening with Graf_Chokolo & egohot.

They make it seem like the hackers who found out how to break their built in security measures are malicious in general; Specifically stating in their court documents that it puts Sony's consumer base in harms way if they were to decide to hack their PS3's to do aforementioned things to their PS3.

Sony does not have any right to bully their consumers on what they can & can't do with property that it's consumers purchased from them. If the consumer does hack their console and they have agreed to PSN's online agreement, then fine, Sony has every right to ban the person for breaking the ToS that they have agreed to when signing up for a PSN account to access online assets.

They're not suing egohot or geohot for piracy. If you look at the court documents, there's nowhere mentioned of such offense. Piracy is inevitable on some devices. It's the users who decide to use such device to perform piracy & cheating who should be solely responsible for their own actions and face any repercussions from it.