ps3-jailbreak
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Report: PS3 jailbreak, second edition, is now circulating in Indonesia
A team from Indonesia claims it has successfully jailbroken the PS3 with a new dongle it's calling "JB2." JB2 is supposedly based on the original jailbreak key produced by GeoHot and works on firmware version 3.55 consoles, but plays games up to the current version, 3.73, PS3Crunch reports (as of writing, the PS3Crunch website is down, whether from server overload or more purposeful action is unclear). The dongle will play titles burned onto Blu-ray discs via HDD, including FIFA 12, Driver: San Francisco, God of War: Origins Collection, Pro Evolution Soccer 2012, X-Men Destiny and Sniper Ghost Warrior, PS3Crunch says. The dongle is now circulating in Indonesia and will be sold globally for roughly $45, reports say. The above video supposedly shows the JB2 in action, booting up to a developer-build screen and expanded option set. Personally, finding and buying the JB2, getting BD-Rs and burning copies of new games seems like more work than we'd ever invest in an illegal, temporary piece of hardware. Maybe that's just us -- given, we're extremely smart, well-informed, good-looking and all-around cool people -- but again, that's just us.
Geohot's lawyer responds to Sony's South America accusations
Yesterday, the ballad of hacker George "Geohot" Hotz and his ongoing legal struggle with Sony took a bizarre turn, when the latter claimed Hotz had hampered "jurisdictional discovery" by removing parts of his overturned hard drives, and is currently avoiding trial in South America. Recently, Hotz' legal counsel Stewart Kellar responded to these claims, explaining, "The notion that George has fled the country is absurd." Kellar added, "George is in South America to see a friend, on a trip he planned before this lawsuit ever began." With regards to the claim that Hotz had sabotaged the hard drives he turned over to Sony, Kellar said Sony is "using intentionally ambiguous language" to turn public opinion against Hotz. "The 'components' SCEA is talking about are hard drives' controller cards," he said, claiming that they had been supplied to the prosecutor. We've once again contacted Sony for a response (to this response), but given their policy for not commenting on legal issues, we won't bother crossing our fingers.
Sony claims George 'Geohot' Hotz is avoiding trial in South America
Sony may have access to pretty much all of PS3 jailbreaker George "GeoHot" Hotz's records, but it doesn't have access to Hotz himself. As unearthed by VGHQ, a legal complaint filed by Sony alleges that Hotz "is now in South America, an excuse for why he will not immediately provide the components of his hard drives." Sony believes that Hotz left with the intention of delaying his ongoing trial. According to Sony's lawyers, Hotz has been "engaged in a campaign to thwart jurisdictional discovery at every turn" over "the last several weeks" -- including the intentional removal of "integral components of his impounded hard drives," said to contain implicating evidence of Hotz's alleged misdeeds. Apparently, when SCEA discovered that Hotz's HDDs were missing parts, a request for the components was met with a response from Hotz's legal counsel that Hotz "was in South America." One thing's for sure -- if he is in South America somewhere, Hotz's freestyle rap about Sony is no longer the weirdest thing about the story of the PS3 jailbreak.
Court grants Sony's temporary restraining order against Geohot, PS3 jailbreak still available everywhere
It looked for a moment like Geohot and fail0verflow might beat Sony's DMCA lawsuit over the PS3 jailbreak on a jurisdictional technicality, but things didn't go their way: the US District Court for the Northern District of California granted Sony's request for a temporary restraining order forbidding Mr. Hotz and his merry men from distributing or linking to the jailbreak, helping or encouraging others to jailbreak, hacking into the PS3 or PSN, or distributing any information they've found while hacking. What's more, they've been ordered to turn over any computers or storage media used to create the jailbreak to Sony's lawyers -- although we've got a feeling Geohot's attorneys will raise a bit of a fuss about that. Of course, this doesn't mean that Sony's won anything substantive -- it's just proven to the court that the jailbreak will cause it ongoing harm while the case continues, and it still has to actually win its formal lawsuit to collect any damages or a permanent injunction. And let's not forget that forcing Geohot to stop distributing it won't stop anyone else -- in almost an exact mirror of the deCSS case, we're already seeing the jailbreak mirrored all over the internet. Way to learn from history, Sony. [Thanks, Henry]
