Mirror of GeoHot's PS3 Jailbreak

Mirror of GeoHot's PS3 Jailbreak

January 11, 2011:

Our friends at Sony are having another bad day: i.e., doing something breathtakingly stupid, presumably because they don't know any better. This time they're suing George Hotz for publishing PS3 jailbreak information, as reported by EnGadget, Attack of the Fan Boy, and inevitably, Slashdot. Hotz's jailbreak allows PS3 owners to run the software of their choice on a machine they have legally purchased. His site is geohot.com.

Free speech (and free computing) rights exist only for those determined to exercise them. Trying to suppress those rights in the Internet age is like spitting in the wind.

We will help our friends at Sony understand this by mirroring the geohot jailbreak files at Carnegie Mellon.

GeoHot Mirror

Click here for usage instructions.

Note to Sony lawyers: no doubt you're eager to rack up another billable hour by sending legal threats to me and my university. Before you go down that unhappy road, check out what happened the last time a large corporation tried to stop the mirroring of technical information here: The Gallery of CSS Descramblers. Have you learned anything in ten years?

A reader points out that jailbreaking the iPhone is legal in the US thanks to the efforts of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. What bearing this has on the PS3 controversy remains to be seen.

Update: My light-hearted use of the editorial "we" above should not mislead anyone into thinking that I an speaking on behalf of Carnegie Mellon. On all my personal web pages hosted by CMU, including this page, I speak only for myself, as does every other faculty member. We have a PR department whose job is to speak for the university.

via cs.cmu.edu