I’m sure most of you heard of Geohot, but in case you haven’t here is a little back story. Geohot is a hacker famous for hacking the iPhone, PSP, and now the PS3. Because of him publishing the hack online and documenting how to do it yourself Sony decided to pursue legal action. Sony quickly went after all those responsible in the matter. Geohot defended his actions and tried to stand up for freedom. He claims his intentions were not to open the doors to piracy.

Whether the piracy thing is true or not, he still opened the doors. Within hours the torrent website were flooded with “back-up” PS3 games free for anyone to download. Geohot’s attempt to free the PS3 was only used by pirates, because in all honesty, it’s not about the “homebrew” anymore. For the PSP it made some sense, as that is a mobile device and you want to use it for as many things as you can. I’ll admit, I had a modded PSP for a bit, and I used it to play SNES roms. But would I want to do the same thing on a PS3, nope. If I am at home I have far more devices that can do the same things with far less effort. Why should I spend an hour hacking my PS3 when I can spend 20 seconds downloading an emulator on my PC?

But what about the Linux functionality that Sony dropped? Geohot’s exploit brings it back. While the OtherOS functionality in the PS3 is a much missed item from various users, I personally never found a use for it. Again, why should I bother trying to manipulate the PS3 to do OtherOS when I have a perfect computer right beside it? Regardless of whether I used it or not, some people did so I suppose it was a loss for them. I do agree that Sony shouldn’t have removed it. But the only reason that they did in fact remove it was because of Geohot’s previous exploit which used the OtherOS functionality to run arbitrary code. Thanks Geohot.

The real intentions of Geohot can be a bit confusing. After he published his exploit he tried getting Sony to hire him (unconfirmed) , well fat chance there. If you truly wished to get hired by Sony you should have contacted them with the details of the exploit BEFORE you published it. Many hackers get credited or employed due to finding exploits. Every time Apple puts out a security update they credit to whoever found the exploit.

What the hell where you trying to do man? If you were an ethical hacker you’d keep silent about this whole thing. If you were rebellious you would have released the code without your whole “anti-pirate” attitude. Face it, you knew that people will exploit your code to pirate games. You’re a hacker for Christ’s sake. Don’t tell me you didn’t see that coming!

While I do not agree with all of Sony’s decisions about the PS3 (such as removing PS2 compatibility) Ido not in any way support what Geohot has done. He don’t offer any kind of fix, and instead he just create more of a problem.