Do you think that home searches and cloning of geohot's hard drives will quench the "thirst for revenge" of those from Sony? If yes, then you are wrong because the company just received acordl in a US court to request data on users who accessed geohot's website and YouTube videos related to the PlayStation 3 jailbreak solution. Sony will request from geohot's hosting company data on all people who have accessed www.geohot.com and more information about all those who downloaded the jailbreak solution. Sony will request information from YouTube and Google about all the people who watched the PlayStation 3 jailbreak videos, about those who left comments on those videos and about those who accessed geohot's blog on blogspot.com. Finally, Sony can ask Twitter for the personal data of geohot and probably of all those who retweeted his tweets about the jailbreak solution for PS 3.
A federal magistrate is granting Sony the right to acquire the internet IP addresses of anyone who has visited PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz's website from January of 2009 to the present.
Thursday's decision by Magistrate Joseph Spero to allow Sony to subpoena Hotz's web provider (.pdf) raises a host of web-privacy concerns.
Sony claims that it needs this information to prove that geohot has distributed the jailbreak solution and to demonstrate that in this case the competence to resolve the case falls to the court in San Francisco, where Sony's headquarters are located. Basically, Sony will now find out how many people have seen those videos, how many people have accessed geohot's website, and of course it will have the IPs of everyone it can identify. Personally, it seems to me the most miserable measure ever taken by any company and surely many will be reluctant to develop any modding/jailbreak solution for PlayStation.
And yes, if you accessed geohot's blog or watched the video clip with the jailbreak solution for PlayStation 3, you will be in the logs that Sony receives.
