GeoHot joins Anonymous' boycott of Sony, asks you to come along

[Emil]

PlayStation 3 jailbreaker George Hotz, also known as GeoHot, made a joint announcement with Sony today, saying the two parties have settled the lawsuit SCEA against Hotz. In the announcement, GeoHot made a brief statement saying that he never wanted to cause any users trouble or to make piracy easier, and that he was happy to have the litigation behind him. On his blog, GeoHot got sued, however, he let his true thoughts on Sony out.

"As of 4/11/11, I am joining the Sony boycott," GeoHot said in a statement. "I will never purchase another Sony product. I encourage you to do the same. And if you bought something Sony recently, return it. Why would you not boycott a company who feels this way about you? There is much more to come on this blog."

The words "this way" are a link to a rant by George Ouzounian, also known as Maddox, titled "I'm tired of Sony's bullshit" on his satirical website The Best Page in the Universe. It appears that when it comes to Sony, GeoHot believes Maddox says it best.

Last week, the hacker group Anonymous launched Operation Sony, which included a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against its various online properties. In the settlement today, it was explicitly stated that GeoHot had nothing to do with the attacks on Sony's internet services and websites. Nevertheless, GeoHot is apparently very interested in the offline plan Anonymous has for Sony.

Most Anonymous are online-only attacks, but Operation Sony also features a protest on April 16, 2011 where gamers from all around the world gather at their local Sony stores to complain in person. The lawsuit may be over, but as GeoHot puts it beating them in court is just a start" (though as we already said, he didn't win, he settled).

Protesting the lawsuit won't achieve much, since it is pretty much over, but many still want Sony to allow its customers to do anything they want with the products they buy from the company. Will you be protesting this weekend?

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/43249-geohot-joins-anonymous-boycott-of-sony-asks-you-to-come-along.html

 

[oldikes]

good luck man. thats all i got to say.

 

[mosu]

Like I've said before, I'll never ever buy Sony.

 

[Guest]

Does 'eta' belong as a prefix or as a suffix when mentioning Sony's utterly filthy attitude towards its customers (eta-Sony or Sony-eta)?

 

[Trillionsin]

I wonder if GeoHot can "indirectly" lead "anonymous" and help them attack Sony more efficiently, or... if this is the end and we wont see another article out of this again...

 

[Lurker101]

Anonymous will give up in about two weeks and GeoHot is completely done. He's only waving the Anonymous banner in a thinly veiled attempt to save face.

 

[captaincranky]

Like I've said before, I'll never ever buy Sony.

Well, that's a bold statement, and terribly altruistic, but a bit impractical. In fact, as a multinational electronics and entertainment media conglomerate, patronizing Sony is really to difficult to avoid.

I like to hear myself talk as much as the next person, but the reality is that Sony is pervasive industry wide.

So, (as a realist), if I want a CD and it happens to be distributed by Sony, I'm not going to turn it away. Same thing with movies.

As to hardware, I bought a Sony upscaling DVD player, (refurbished, 29 bucks), from Walmart on line. The market is flooded with Sony's computer DVD (SATA drives). So, there goes another 20 bucks of to Japan from time to time. High end hardware, not a chance though. My TVs computers, loudspeakers, and home entertainment equipment are all from somebody else.

So, considering the amount I spend from other brands, to what I spend with Sony, I'd say I've been effectively boycotting them for years.

Also, I don't have the video games jones that most here at this site do. That said, Sony has done enough underhanded things corporate wide, to elicit a boycott long before this episode.

If Geohot had thought this issue through beforehand, he might have bought an X-Box.

If you take the time to think about it, most of these cracks are done to impress one's peers, and then sucked up by leeches. Then, when the s*** hits the fan, all the rats jump ship, and it leaves the originator wondering where are all his "friends" have gone.

Apparently, an understanding of the inner workings of a computer, doesn't carry over into the understanding of human nature.

Anonymous will give up in about two weeks and GeoHot is completely done. He's only waving the Anonymous banner in a thinly veiled attempt to save face.

It does give one pause to wonder how a person could be "anonymous" and "Geohot" simultaneously......?

 

[Guest]

Sony Is Bad Anyway Choose Xbox

 

[yRaz]

Guest said:
Sony Is Bad Anyway Choose Xbox

Learn something, build a computer. At least the computer YOU build is YOURS to do what YOU want to with. I know sony is locked down hard, don't know much about xBox security. I won't buy either of them anyway.

As far as a sony product, only one I ever owned was PSP I got for Christmas. I later sold it to get guitar hero 3 for PC.

 

[Guest]

Boohoo, you tried hacking Sony and they sued your ****. Honestly what do you expect to happen? Get a warning that you wont listen to anyways? It's sad that people get so utterly bent out of shape when a company tries to protect itself. Next time don't go about bragging that you cracked Sony's source code and maybe you wont get sued. GeoHot, you get absolutely zero sympathy and zero respect from me.

 

[Guest]

I never buy sony anyway, especially when companies like Samsung produce far superior products at much better prices.

 

[Trillionsin]

Guest said:
Boohoo, you tried hacking Sony and they sued your ****. Honestly what do you expect to happen? Get a warning that you wont listen to anyways? It's sad that people get so utterly bent out of shape when a company tries to protect itself. Next time don't go about bragging that you cracked Sony's source code and maybe you wont get sued. GeoHot, you get absolutely zero sympathy and zero respect from me.

Of course a guest said that... hah!

 

[BMfan]

Geo is just a sad little man that can't believe he had to settle(even after taking people's money).
Sony has done nothing wrong for me and a few million others,i/we bought the console to play games and it works fine for it's purpose,the only trouble i have had with it was when Sony rushed a new update to fix Geo's firmware.

So my only trouble and a few others were because of hackers,i wonder what other market suffers because of hackers?

 

[Guest]

Soon we'll be reading about GeoHot temporarily ceasing his boycott to play Just Cause 3.

 

[zillion]

Cpt.Cranky I applaud u for saying the words i think of and at the same time spell it out in a worthy fashion, of which my current english is not even remotly close to.

Agree with all he said!

 

[Guest]

Boycott sony? Hmm on the long list of things I am not going to do this year. If you damn console heads stopped buying consoles we could avoid all this crap. PCs forever!

 

[BMfan]

Boycott sony? Hmm on the long list of things I am not going to do this year. If you damn console heads stopped buying consoles we could avoid all this crap. PCs forever!

I agree because no one hacks PC software.

 

[LNCPapa]

Yeah - I think CC pretty much hit it. I can be mad at my wife, I mean Sony all day long, but I'm not really gonna do anything about it. I'll be back the next time they release something I want to see or buy. I'll probably get a PSP2 and hope GeoHotz's best friend wants to share some anonymous code for it.

 

[Guest]

PCs are not proprietary pieces of hardware and I have hacked everything in my PC from adding capacitors or soldering my 7900 so it looks like a quadro and I don't hear anyone knocking down my door. I even published this info so others could do it.

Consoles are bad Mmmmkay

 

[oldikes]

i wonder if half these people even know who geohotz is, as a huge name in iphone jailbreaking.

 

[captaincranky]

i wonder if half these people even know who geohotz is, as a huge name in iphone jailbreaking.

Super! But still, as an adult, he still needs to learn where to step. I mean really, some times there's dog s***, and sometimes there's quicksand. Oh, and you also need to learn not to listen to your friends when they say, "I dare you"!

 

[spydercanopus]

I'll never buy another Sony. After the PS3 came out, I received one as birthday present. The controller was defective so I called Sony a week after it was released, but they wouldn't replace it without the receipt. Which I didn't have. I'm pretty sure the warranty was at least a week long, so they should have been cool about it. F' them.

 

[mrtraver]

zI almost wish that I bought Sony products just so I could boycott them now! But I have never bought a Sony product. In college one friend had a sony carousel CD player where the display stopped working after just a few months. Another had a car stereo that was repaired repeatedly and never did work right. And don't get me started on their arrogance with overpriced proprietary media formats.

 

[Guest]

So thats good news for sony. That means fewer people trying to break its securities thus less stolen games and cheating. So a win for the consumers! yay!

 

[BMfan]

What amazes me now is how everyone has had problems with Sony's stuff,yet i've had a car cd\radio that worked fine for the 2 yrs i owned it,the home amp i have has worked fine for the last 4yrs(it's used every day for my PC and PS3) and the only problem i've had with my PS3 was because of a hacker.