PlayStation 3 jailbreaker George Hotz has distanced himself from the recent PlayStation Network hack job, denying any involvement in the whole affair and accusing those responsible for making ‘the hacking community look bad.’
Writing on his blog, Hotz, aka Geohot, said: "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 else’s 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 became embroiled in a lengthy legal battle with Sony after jailbreaking PS3 earlier this year, though eventually agreed to settle out of court.
However, the hacker group Anonymous took offense to the electronics giant’s legal actions against Hotz, and openly declared war on Sony – a move which prompted many to believe the group was in fact behind the “external intrusion” on PSN last week. Despite this, Anonymous later denied any involvement.
"I sure am glad I don’t have a PSN account about now," Hotz added. "And, as a one-time victim of identity theft, I feel for everyone who’s data has been stolen. I’m not going to make cracks at Sony for flipping a s**t when their data is compromised, and not even having the decency to apologize when it’s your data that’s misappropriated.
"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.
"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."
"Sony needs to accept that they no longer own and control the PS3 when they sell it to you. Notice it’s only PSN that gave away all your personal data, not Xbox Live when the 360 was hacked, not iTunes when the iPhone was jailbroken, and not GMail when Android was rooted. Because other companies aren’t crazy.
Finally, Hotz addressed the hackers once more, labelling the individual(s) as “clearly talented,” though urged those responsible not to “be a d**k” and freely distribute consumer’s personal information.
"You are clearly talented and will have plenty of money (or a jail sentence and bankruptcy) coming to you in the future. Don’t be a d**k and sell people’s information. And I’d love to see a write up on how it all went down… lord knows we’ll never get that from Sony, noobs probably had the password set to ‘4’ or something. I mean, at least it was randomly generated."