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by vidiviciveni 5537 days ago
If anyone is interested in some of the background of what happened:

"The Sony PS3 console was hacked, or more appropriately "jailbroken", by iPhone hacker, Geohot. He managed to reverse engineer his own PlayStation 3 to run homebrew applications on it. He then later released the method to the public through his site, geohot.com. Sony responded with a lawsuit and demanded social media sites, including YouTube,[citation needed] to hand over IP addresses of people who visited Geohot's social pages and videos.

PayPal has granted Sony access to Geohot's PayPal account,[citation needed] and the judge of the case granted Sony permission to view the IP addresses of everyone who visited geohot.com."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz#Sony_lawsuit

3 comments

The Geohot case is, as far as we know at this point, completely unrelated to the current situation.

It's possible the case served as motivation, or that they used his code, but that's only tangentially related. From the information we have, all we know is that a weakness in PSN's security was exploited to access customer information. Geohot has stated that he is not involved, and if he were, it would be a breach of his settlement contract with Sony.

... This is related to the hacking of the PSN database, not being able to run homebrew software on the PS3. It's likely that whoever hacked the PSN accounts was encouraged to do so by Sony's heavy handed crackdown on geohot, but the two are not directly related.
I definitely think these two cases are related, however I haven't seen any hard evidence yet. Have I missed something?
No, I don't think you missed anything, I haven't seen any evidence. In thinking it though, you may not be considering a case where Sony had all kinds of problems, and these things both happened independently.