George ‘Geohot’ Hotz has denied responsibility in the downtime PlayStation Network has received following an external intrusion by hackers last week.

Hotz admitted he had sympathy for those who had their personal data stolen by hackers, adding that whoever brought the network down made the hacking community “look bad.”

“I feel for everyone who’s data has been stolen. I’m not going to make cracks at Sony for flipping a shit when /their/ data is compromised, and not even having the decency to apologize when it’s your data that’s misappropriated,” he said on his blog.

“And to anyone who thinks I was involved in any way with this, I’m not crazy, and would prefer to not have the FBI knocking on my door. Running homebrew and exploring security on your devices is cool, hacking into someone elses server and stealing databases of user info is not cool. You make the hacking community look bad, even if it is aimed at douches like Sony.”

Hotz insists if blame should be placed at Sony, it should be placed at the executives, not the engineering team.

“Also, let’s not fault the Sony engineers for this, the same way I do not fault the engineers who designed the BMG rootkit. The fault lies with the executives who declared a war on hackers, laughed at the idea of people penetrating the fortress that once was Sony, whined incessantly about piracy, and kept hiring more lawyers when they really needed to hire good security experts. Alienating the hacker community is not a good idea.”

Before his legal issues Geohot had contemplated a PSN alternative.

“One of the things I was contemplating back in early January was a PSN alternative, a place for jailbroken consoles to download homebrew and game without messing up anyone else’s experience. Unfortunately events led me off of that path, but gamers, if I had succeeded you would have a place to game online with your PS3 right now.

“I’m one of the good guys. I used to play games online on PC, I hated cheaters then and I hate them now.”

Thanks to VG247 for the info.

Geohot has donated the remaining amount of money, that he had collected via donations from people for fighting against Sony to EFF.

He revealed this in a blog post which stated:

As promised, all left over legal defense money, plus a little to bump it to a nice number, has been sent to the EFF. Thank you all so much for your support, without it, things could have been much worse.

This money goes to the EFF in hopes that America can one day again be a shining example of freedom, free of theDMCA and ACTA, and that private interest will never trump the ideas laid out in the constitution of privacy, ownership, and free speech.

He had earlier asked his readers to stay tuned to find out, what he’s going to do with the amount.

Sony and GeoHot had come to an settlement last week, wherein Sony settled the case against him, while Gehot was permanently ordered to not tamper or use any present or future Sony products, including the PS3.

Despite the court case between Geohot and Sony reaching a conclusion with an out of court settlement, hacker group anonymous are not satisfied with the outcome.

The above video has been released by the group and states that “GeoHot has taken a settlement with Sony. The case has been dropped. In the eyes of the law, the case is closed. For Anonymous, it is just beginning.”

“By forcing social networking sites such as YouTube and Facebook to hand over IP addresses of those who have viewed [videos demonstrating PlayStation hacking techniques, Sony has] performed an act of privacy invasion.”

“We, Anonymous, will not allow this to happen.”

Real cloak and dagger stuff right there.

Hotz has also made a personal blog post commenting on all this:

Apparently, I have fled the country. ROFL

Factually, it’s true I’m in South America, on a vacation I’ve had planned and paid for since November. I mean, it is Spring break; hacking isn’t my life. Rest assured that not a dime of legal defense money would ever go toward something like this. And of course Townsend loves the idea of painting me as an international fugitive. I have been in contact with my lawyers almost every day; I would not let the case suffer. That said, I also won’t let this ridiculous lawsuit run my life either. Then the fearmongerers win.

I will be back, I hear it’s hard to come by the Xperia Play down here.

Thanks to Gamesradar for the info.

Thanks to IGN for the info.

Having been ordered to give his hard drive up to Sony a month ago in court George Hotz or Geohot, infamous PS3 hacker, requested for the order to be reconsidered. The reconsideration is now over and the ruling remains the same.

District judge Susan Illston told Hotz’s lawyer that “here, I find probable cause that your client has got these things on his computer,” she said. “It’s a problem when more than one thing is kept on the computer. I’ll make sure the order is and will be that Sony is only entitled to isolate … the information on the computer that relates to the hacking of the PlayStation.”

Thanks to CVG for the info.

We all saw this coming and it has finally come.

Yes, Sony’s sued George “GeoHot” Hotz and the entire group of failoverflow which includes Hector Martin, Sven Peter and others. This lawsuit was the result of them releasing the PS3 root security key to the public which allows the release of modified firmware, pirated software and homebrew apps to be run on the console.

The charges filed by SCE are as follows:

• 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(2)(C) – Confidential Information On Computer
• 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(4) – Intent To Defraud And Obtain Value
• 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(5)(A) – Knowing Transmission of Code
• 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(5)(B) and (C) – Intentional and Reckless Damage And Loss
• 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(6)(A) – Trafficking in Password
• 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(7)(B) – Intent to Extort

GeoHot has updated his website to inform about the same.

The lawsuit against Martin and Peter appears to be an act of desperation since neither reside in the United States.

You can download the lawsuits from Hotz’s website.

We think this is a good move by Sony as it’ll teach such wrongdoers a lesson and might prevent other hackers to try and carry out similar acts of disgust in the future.

To this Twitter post GeoHot states that the PS3 is 100 percent hacked:

Today I verified my theories about running the isolated SPUs as crypto engines. I believe that defeats the last technical argument against the PS3 being hacked.

In OtherOS, all 7 SPUs are idle. You can command an SPU(which I’ll leave as an exercise to the reader) to load metldr, from that load the loader of your choice, and from that decrypt what you choose, everything from pkgs to selfs. Including those from future versions.

The PPU is higher on the control chain then the SPUs. Even if checks were to be added to, for example, verify the hypervisor before decrypting the kernel, with clever memory mappings you can hide your modified hypervisor.

Ah, but you still didn’t get the Cell root key. And I/we never will. But it doesn’t matter. For example, we don’t have either the iPhone or PSP “root key”. But I don’t think anyone doubts the hackedness of those systems.

I wonder if any systems out there are actually secure?