What difference do you see between hacking your PS3 and hacking your kinect? How is hacking your ps3 "cracking"? In my opinion, and I suspect that the vast majority of technologically literate people would agree with me, what happened with the PS3 fits the classic definition of hacking perfectly.
On the other hand, the PS3 hack will primarily be used to enable piracy. That's it really. Did it initially enable homebrew games? Yes, but is that what the vast majority of people will use it for? You're deluded if you think otherwise.
The problem I have with non-ethical non-consequentialist crackers like Geohotz is that they are not solving a legitimate problem in the first place. If you want to make open systems, then stop providing monetary support to closed systems in the first place.
XBMC led to incentives to accelerate the development of home media center components like audio/video decoders. This obviously helps everyone in the growing media center industry.
XBMC also is directly responsible for the birth of at least two startups in the media center space, Boxee and Plex.
So while some companies in an established and profitable industry lost some revenue from piracy, a new industry got a big boost from people being able to experiment with and innovate on top of a console.
The PS3 was a freer console for the masses before his work. His work enabled piracy, theft, and constitutes extortion. What part of his initial explanation of the PS3 root key divulgence don't you understand? Here it is:
" ~geohot
props to fail0verflow for the asymmetric half no donate link, just use this info wisely i do not condone piracy
if you want your next console to be secure, get in touch with me. any of you 3. it'd be fun to be on the other side.
...and this is a real self, hello world although it's not NPDRM, so please wait to run... shouts to the guys who did PSL1GHT without you, I couldn't release this
first piece of homebrew you can run put in service mode, put on usb stick, boot"
"i do not condone piracy" = I don't think you should use this for piracy
"if you want your next console to be secure, get in touch with me. any of you 3." = I know this shit I did will be used for piracy, that's why you 3 (Nintendo, MS, Sony) may want to consult me to avoid the massive piracy that will surely result due to my hacks in the future
Is this not, in a sense, extortion? Is he not willfully and knowingly enabling theft?
My point is that the PS3 was a more open platform before Geohotz arrived on the scene. It would be more open today if it weren't for his efforts, which are almost entirely in aid of piracy and theft. Please, name one thing that he has enabled that wasn't previously possible with an Other OS install that is not essentially just stealing. Please. Go for it. Tell me I'm wrong.
I'm just a guy that makes a living making software, Geohotz is a guy that is making a living by robbing the companies that pay me. Why should we grant him the glorified title of hacker? RMS is a hacker. Linus is a hacker. PG is a hacker. Carmack is a hacker.
Geohotz is a cracker.
It's much better than jumping through DLNA hoops.
This "enable massive piracy" claim sounds really scary. You do know, that right now, there are millions of vehicles out there that can all be used to commit crime, murder people, crash into banks and run off with ATMs, etc. And yet, these criminal enabling machines just lying around (OMG theres two outside my house right now), there is no outbreak of "massive vehicular crimes".
They added it because they knew that the PS3 could be used in cluster computing and that it could be an interesting feature for Linux enthusiasts that wanted to use the PS3 beyond its original capabilities (e.g. as a better, crazier home theater device, or as a desktop replacement even). Then people started to get closer to being able to run pirated games with certain versions of the "Other OS."
At that point Sony realized that it would be better to drop that feature from their hardware rather than risk massive piracy. But what did the removal of that option really entail? Did it mean that all those massive compute clusters could no longer run? Nope. Did it mean that people that were using the console with games that they bought up until that point couldn't play those games any more? Nope.
It just meant that if they wanted to play new games, or play online, that they couldn't have that option any more. No killswitch. Nothing too awful. Protecting their business interests. And who really forced them to do that? It was the crackers that were trying to enable piracy, err... sorry... "homebrew." Sony is not against hackers. They want hackers. They don't want crackers and thieves.
Another example, If I hack the US ID card to see what data is stored on it..am I now a criminal by what the popular use of that hack is?
" ~geohot
props to fail0verflow for the asymmetric half no donate link, just use this info wisely i do not condone piracy
if you want your next console to be secure, get in touch with me. any of you 3. it'd be fun to be on the other side.
...and this is a real self, hello world although it's not NPDRM, so please wait to run... shouts to the guys who did PSL1GHT without you, I couldn't release this
first piece of homebrew you can run put in service mode, put on usb stick, boot"
So, in that initial post, he does not solicit donations (although he had before and does after). He then announces that he doesn't "condone piracy", then he solicits employment from the three major console manufacturers. What reason would they have to employ him? What he's doing just enables homebrew software, right? They don't really care about homebrew now do they? No, they care about piracy. So what he's really conveying here is this: "I just enabled massive piracy on the console that so far has been hardest to crack. I don't approve of it, but I know that's what it will actually be used for. Hey, why don't you give me some money so this won't happen again?" Sounds like extortion and accessory to theft to me. But our laws don't really work out that way. Yet. I don't want our laws to enable that. I want people with Geohotz' skill to be responsible and actually work with companies like Sony. Is it partially Sony's fault that he didn't? Maybe, but that's a tenuous conclusion at best (does anyone know if he ever privately gave this information to Sony? or if he even attempted to?). On the other hand, it's patently obvious that he knew exactly what his work would be used for, and released it to the masses anyway.
What's hard about this? Do you not understand that companies will lobby very hard and very successfully to enable laws that are so strict that it will not only make what geohotz did illegal, but what the (admirable) kinect hackers did illegal as well?
The Laws that can and will be made as the result of his craven greediness, stupidity, and arrogance will not be favorable to any real hacker, because laws are not a precise enough instrument for enforcing ethical standards. We must enforce the ethical standards. Geohotz should be a pariah, not a hero, for anyone other than the piracy enablers that will make a fortune from his work.