What are the ethics of PS3's potential security crack?*

I can see the victory dance over at SCEA... for probably 10000 billed hours in legal fees they managed to shut up one guy... what an achievement. They didn't do anything to solidify their legal standing... they got a gag agreement... on ONE GUY.

 

The idea of solidfying a legal standing seems to be one of those railing against Sony. Legal precedients are weak at best especially in a civil cause. All they could of realistically done else was bankrupt him as an example to others.

Plus what exactly would be the precedient in this court case? If you break my console I get to sue you and win either damages or an injuction from you ever hacking our stuff again?Civil cases lack the power or criminal ones and even then legal precedient is overturned all the time back and forth on controversial subjects.

 

Thats great for sony one hacker gone. How many more are there > How many more are there each year ? Doesn't seem like much of a victory

 

All Sony wanted to do is put a scare into the hacking community that's all they really could do with a civil case. There is a question of whether bleeding him dry financially would of been a more effective measure then their settlement but this case wasn't going to have have any broad sweeping effects either way.

 

But they haven't said that!!!

If you want to gut the mobo from your PS3 and put in a PC, you can do that, and tell the world how you did. There are no copyright rules on hardware,

the law could let them though, but BMW decided they didn't need to protect their rights, no doubt because chipping benefits their business. If these guys chipping their Beemers cost BMW future earnings, the situation would be different.

You still haven't answered my question what ruling is expected and feared? That you don't want Sony telling you how to use your hardware is too vague versus a law court ruling that will be far more specific. If the ruling is that you must not decrypt and backwards-engineer Sony's software in a manner that enables DRM to be circumvented, nor publish copyrighted information, the end result would not be as black a picture as you paint - creating your own firmwares and homebrew would still be open to you. We don't know the specifics of the case, nor the way the courts would go. Like so many, you've prejudged the whole situation without taking the time to listen through the various arguments, understand the different perspectives, and try to identify the best solution.

Edit: What I definitely dislike is how the legal system has costs that means those with money can bully those without. Reviews of this settlement are saying how potential hackers will see the potential costs if they get sued, even without it getting to courts, and decide they can't afford the risk. That's abstard behaviour by corporations, but it's true of all of them and not just Sony. What we really needed here, for the sake of justice, was a fair hearing that decides what entitlements people do and don't have. Instead we got a load of divided, uninformed opinions, and a settlement that doesn't shed any light on anything, and the prospect that Sony have 'bought' their prefered outcome. That's no form of justice.

 

But did they accomplish this? I'd argue no. And in turn, they alienated the very same users/consumers of their devices while trampling over our 4th Amendment rights in the process. Sony settled the case because even through all their violations during the discovery phase, they were going to be unable to get the case tried in California. Do you think this ruling will stop this CFW from being out on the interwebz? Will the genie reseal the magic bottle?

In the end, he did no different than what he did with the iPhone, yet that is 100% legal. The iPhone and PS3 provide the same exact features/functions and are practically the same electronic device. The fact this case was even brought up is ridiculous in the first place.

 

I still say that in light of what little we know about the settlement that assuming Sony settled cause they didn't think they were going to get jurisdiction where they want is a bad assumption. They got also everything they could of got in a civil case. No civil case or criminal case for that matter was going to put the genie back in the bottle. And the average consumer is likely more pissed off by anon's stunt then what Sony did cause the average consumer probably never even heard of custom firmware or care what it does. They alienated a subset of gamers who visit forums like this and agree with custom firmware. That's not as big of a subset as you appear to believe it to be and even then how many people of that subset are going to join a boycott of Sony or something like that vs just shaking their fists and going bad Sony I don't like what you did? Not much.

 

So again, what was the point of Sony taking Hotz to court? What was their end game? Hotz isn't the one that settled here, Sony did. Did they just want to peruse through non-associated peoples personal information on Twitter/YouTube? Did they want to gain access to Hotz machine and find out how this 20 something kid outsmarted them?

If a consumer wants to shake their fist, boycott a product, or launch DOS attacks against Sony websites, that's on them and completely unrelated to the case. All this happened after the fact and had no impact on this case and the settlement.

I still stand by believing Hotz did nothing wrong, and him jailbreaking his PS3 is no different then him jailbreaking his iPhone. US Law may currently say other wise but I have a hard time finding any difference between the iPhone (and any other cellphone) and the PS3 that would make it legal on one, and not the other. The same risks and consequences are there for each.

 

I don't know what differences there are either, but Sony felt they had a case, and Hotz hasn't defended his position in court to prove one way or the other. So we don't really know. It may well be that with Sony's latest update they feel they are secure enough that there wasn't anything to be gained going after Hotz, especially if the look at the hacker community reaction and felt they were painting a big, red target on themselves. So letting Hotz go, over time this'll probably be forgotten, like all the other massive corporate screwups over the years. PS3 will be the target of more hacks that perhaps Sony think they can defend against, and they presumably have the sense to secure NGP suitably well. I dare say hackers on the whole, certainly retribution hackers, are pretty childish and if they can't find an easy hack they'll move onto a softer target. The only people who'll work long and hard finding a crack are those wanting either to prove themselves, love the challenge, or have a particular goal like enabling Linux, so in the long run Sony probably won't be any worse off from this than they were before. I don't think now the whole world is set to hack every Sony device to death as soon as it comes out, any more than they hack other devices. All these threats are like the deaththreats people get, from angry individuals who can't do anything constructive to solve their issues and just lash out.

Edit: Eurogamer reports, and links to, the settlement agreement. It makes thoughful reading and raises a lot of questions.

1) The agreement says they'll both stop here, but if Geohotz does any more hacking, it'll carry on with him definitely being liable. So it sounds to me like both parties looked at the situation and didn't know if they'd win or not, so decided the gamble wasn't worth it and they'd both be better off backing down. If Hotz really felt he was going to win and had done nothing wrong regards civil law, why not keep going and have Sony pay costs and damages? If Sony really felt they were going to win, why not see it through and make an example of Hotz?

2) How can Hotz speak on behalf of all the other hackers mentioned? Surely this agreement doesn't apply to them, so what exactly has Sony got from this other than stopping one single person from poking around with their hardware?

3) What about all those donations Hotz got that were to support him in overturning Sony? He's backed down. If I was hating Sony's bullying in this case and wanted to see them taken down and the law uphold the rights of console owners to complete freedom, and I had donated to Hotz to support his position, I'd be wanting a refund at this point!

I don't see that any good has come from this episode. Nothing's the clearer, and people still don't know what is allowed or not, and why. Where is the line drawn? Who knows. The only winners here, as ever, are the fat-cat lawyers.

 

A major difference between iPhone and PS3 hacking would obviously be that the former allows you to select a different provider, while the latter leads primarily to piracy.

 

Yes, I was reading that. The ruling regards the phone jailbreaks was that it's unfair to lock the ahrdware into a provider, so the breaks were deemed acceptible. If PS3 or 360 only worked online with one BB provider, the hacking situation would be different.

It's these sorts of things that have to be examined in detail to get a fair ruling, rather than people just seeing loose connections and making unshakeable judgement calls.

 

An argument could be made that similar to the iPhone being locked to AT&T's service (Prior to it coming to Verizon), both PS3 (PSN) and X360 (Xbox Live) are locked to those respective services. And if a hack were to come out to allow online connections without going through PSN or XBLive the similarity draws even closer with the line blurring between iPhone and the current gen consoles situations.

Regards,
SB

 

Yep. An argument exists that these hardware devices shouldn't be locked to the console companies and their licensing fees. Then there's the argument that these consoles only exist because of the license fee structure and that's an accepted part of the whole package that consumers buy into. There's an argument that the State shouldn't dictate what companies are and are not allowed to do, and it should be left to the open market to decide, by whether people buy into devices or not, whether they are happy with the way things are managed or not. There's the argument that the cost of iPhone development etc. is expensive and if the hardware companies want to enter exclusivity deals to help with their business, they should be free to do so and Joe Public always has the choice to not buy those devices while they are locked into a service provider.

Lots of arguments, all which need a fair appraisal. In the case of the latter, there's still no hard-and-fast ruling. The current freedom to jailbreak is up for review, so not final, and it may be considered then to favour more free market control than state control. Or not.

 

Yes, it's still something that the courts and the law haven't come to grips with. But eventually there has to be a balance between protecting a business' ability to recoup investment in a product and make a profit, and the rights of the consumer to use the product in a manner that doesn't impact upon the ability of a corporation to recoup its investment and make a profit.

Regards,
SB

 

That's the ideal, although on both sides you have 'extremists', such as cynics if believe the courts are completely in the pockets of big business (may or may not be true!) and don't trust consumer rights will be upheld, or extreme captialists if feel business should be left to their own devices. So it's hard to get an honest assessment and fair judgement, but that, in theory, is where the courts are in a better position to make these calls than Joe Public who reads whatever they do in the media and decides who's right and wrong on such limited assessment.

 

So what are the ethics of defending piracy enabling key-fest cracking as opposed to wanting a secure, flexible officially sanctioned linux sandbox environment with decent RSX support?

 

The ethics are, irrespective of how the information is used, allowing people the freedom to use their hardware fairly. Is it okay to ban everyone from using custom FW, including those with legitimate homebrew and extended functionality interests, because of how other people will use the hacks to pirate? Is it acceptible to ban hammers because, where someone may have a legitimate reason to use it for construction, someone else would use it to bash someone's head in, so we put a limitation on everyone to protect against misuse?

And the typical response to that is, "but hammers are rarely used for aggressive acts, whereas console cracking is almost solely used for piracy." Which is a valid observation, but not a matter of ethics; only matters of drawing a line between poles and deciding which side is legal and which side isn't. Certainly, people having a right to explore their purchase, and modify it for their own ends or to improve it, can't be construed as unethical by any sane reasoning I can think of.

 

what happened to clean room design.
thats how we got ibm compatible pc's and it was perfectly legal ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

 

That's still valid. Is someone writes their own custom firmware without reverse engineering, it's a legitimate invention. Although to get installed it'd have to circumvent security measures, and that might be deemed illegal.

 

well there is reverse engineering in clean room design, its just 2 teams one team reverse engineers and passes on a spec and the second team re create the software. To be legal (if it still is) the second team must not have any access to the reverse engineered source