PS3 Hacker Raised All the Legal Funds Needed to Beat Sony in a Weekend

I'm surprised it took that long. Sony seem to have a magical Streisand effect button somewhere that gets triggered for insane reasons. Remember the BMI rootkit scandal, and the subsequent reaction? The AIBO case referenced is another example of Sony's auto-Streisand function in the legal team.<p>The best part of all of this is that Sony's legal team have very clearly not properly considered the implications of him <i>winning</i> the case. They thought they could just bully him out of it by making it cost too much to defend. If the case is settled in his favour then there are massive ramifications for jailbreaks across the board.

I am so glad to be present for the early stages of this kind of emergent support network. Recent examples from Reddit (who often choose to support people with no "internet standing"), job offers here at HN, and the intense support people like myself have received over at MetaFilter are almost totally unprecedented. And I'm not even going to bring up Anonymous.<p>Now that I'm in a decent employment situation, I plan to share that $ecurity with people like GeoHot whenever possible. Cheers to everyone involved, this is great news in a sea of awful.

Here's a direct link to geohot's blog posting: <a href="http://geohotgotsued.blogspot.com/2011/02/first-round-of-donations-is-closed.html" rel="nofollow">http://geohotgotsued.blogspot.com/2011/02/first-round-of-don...</a>

I'm complaining about escapistmagazine, not the poster. I am interseted in the update. But...<p>Headline:<p>PS3 Hacker Raised All the Legal Funds Needed to Beat Sony in a Weekend<p>Less than one paragraph away.<p>... as he received enough money for the first phase of defense in about 18 hours.

Meanwhile, back in Redmond, Microsoft (!) has opened the Kinect to 3rd party developers.<p>I doubt this was done to deliberately underscore the galactic idiocy of their chief rival. Still, the contrast between the two approaches is pretty astonishing.

Excellent, I was wondering how his fund raising was doing. Geohot has given a lot of himself to the community and it's heartwarming to see the community respond with support in his time of need.

If Sony did not take a loss on every console sold, I wonder how much of an issue this would be. Ff they sold a PS3 that was 50% more expensive but with the feature "install whatever you want and don't worry about getting banned from PSN" could they could solve that problem?<p>Of course, the content folks at Sony (who thought the rootkit was OK) would probably never allow for it. Not that I'll ever buy another Sony product unless they can prove a changed heart and a commitment to bring back the quality that put them where they are.

This is great news. I really hope he gets a very good defense.