80w ago - Today The Street (linked above) has interviewed Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer, who states that PS3 hackers have not held them back despite numerous PlayStation Network disruptions over the last year.

He believes that they were the victim of a sophisticated vendetta orchestrated by elements within the hacking community, stating it was a revenge attack, due to them going after a PS3 hacker who exploited the PlayStation 3 console. Below is an excerpt from the interview, to quote:

NEW YORK (TheStreet) - Sony (SNE) has bounced back from a wave of hacking attacks on its PlayStation business earlier this year, according to CEO Sir Howard Stringer, who says that digital assaults are an occupational hazard for major firms.

“The press was on us for four days until somebody else got hacked and everyone realized that hacking is a fact of life,” he said, during a briefing event organized by The Wall Street Journal. “We took it on the chin over and over again - the problem that we have is that we were alone out there, so nobody had anything else to write about that month.”

Sony’s security travails certainly grabbed plenty of headlines. In May, the company confirmed that it was the victim of a massive denial-of-service attack, likely timed to coincide...

110w ago - Today Sony's Senior Director of Corporate Communications & Social Media Patrick Seybold has announced a settlement in the GeoHot PS3 hacking case, with the ruling issuing a permanent injunction against George Hotz barring him from hacking or collaborating with efforts to hack any Sony product moving forward.

To quote: Joint Statement

Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) and George Hotz (Hotz) today announced the settlement of the lawsuit filed by SCEA against Hotz in federal court in San Francisco, California. The parties reached an agreement in principle on March 31, 2011. As part of the settlement, Hotz consented to a permanent injunction.

Both parties expressed satisfaction that litigation had been quickly resolved. Sony is glad to put this litigation behind us, said Riley Russell, General Counsel for SCEA. Our motivation for bringing this litigation was to protect our intellectual property and our consumers. We believe this settlement and the permanent injunction achieve this goal.

It was never my intention to cause any users trouble or to make piracy easier, said Hotz, Im happy to have the litigation behind me. Hotz was not involved in the recent attacks on Sonys internet services and websites.

In the action,...

113w ago - Update: Some more legal doc updates have now surfaced, which include GeoHot's laywers response refuting Sony's claims (via Groklaw) that the "blickmaniac" PSN account belongs to him.

ArsTechnica is also reproting that GeoHot's PS3 SCEJ manuals remained sealed, that he couldn't have known of SCEA to set up a PSN account and that the PlayStation 3 serial numbers don't match.

Today many sites are reporting that Sony has allegedly found George Hotz's PSN account under the nickname of blickmanic which would subject him to their TOS, that the PS3 hacker is currently fleeing or vacationing in South America, and finally that GeoHot may have intentionally removed integral components of his impounded hard drives prior to delivery.

To quote from EscapistMagazine.com:...[/B]

114w ago - Today Groklaw.net reports that PS3 hacker GeoHot is now accusing Sony of "false representations" to the court and petitioning for a protective order while Wired.com confirmed that SoftLayer is moving to quash Sony's subpoena on George Hotz Forum account details in the pending PlayStation 3 hacking case despite their recent PayPal victory.

To quote from Groklaw: "Specifically, Hotz says that Sony Computer Entertainment America falsely claimed at a recent hearing that the Software Developer Kit at issue in this litigation referenced SCEA being in California. The SDK, Hotz says, is owned by Sony Computer Entertainment in Japan, and the installation procedures reference Sony Japan, not SCEA.

This is relevant, Sony argued, because if they found any of the SDK tools on his computer, it would "establish contacts between SCEA and Mr. Hotz" in that they claimed SCEA is the only entity distributing the SDKs. The discovery that the court ordered was based on SCEA's representations. Now what? Should the discovery...

116w ago - Today Wired.com (linked above) has published legal documents confirming a federal judge has granted Sony the right via subpoena to unmask anybody who visited GeoHot's site, including but not limited to those who downloaded the PS3 "jailbreak.zip" file.

To quote: "A federal magistrate is granting Sony the right to acquire the Internet IP addresses of anybody who has visited PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz' website from January of 2009 to the present.

Thursday's decision (.pdf) by Magistrate Joseph Spero to allow Sony to subpoena Hotz' web provider raises a host of web privacy concerns.

The subpoena to Bluehost, which maintains Hotz' geohot.com site, is part of Sony's lawsuit against the 21-year-old New Jersey hacker. Respected for his iPhone hacks and now the PlayStation 3 jailbreak, Hotz is accused of breaching the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other laws after he published on his website an encryption key and software tools that allow Playstation owners to gain complete control of their consoles from the firmware on up.

Sony also won subpoenas (.pdf) for data from YouTube and Google, as well as Twitter account data...