Is it me or is Sony getting people to *astroturf* here?
Or is everyone commenting against Geohot really *that* uninformed?
You may know that kitchen knives can be used to kill people (and I REALLY hope it's not by experience). So does that mean that the kitchen knife manufacturer is a criminal? No.
"the ONLY things those keys are good for are piracy or unlocking of games and thats it." NO. BIG NO. A half truth is a whole lie. I strongly believe that this was NOT Geohot's intention. Ever heard of PSL1GHT? I admit that I only just found out about that today.
Some people like myself are programmers, and while I do not own a PS3, I do like to program stuff. If there is some artificial restriction, I get somewhat titchy, because I like to see how far I can push a system.
Not all games (or programs full stop) people make must be paid for. A lot are released by their authors free of charge, and a lot of these are released with the full source code (seriously, look up what "source code" is), almost always permitting you to modify it (usually requiring you to release your modified source code if you want to redistribute your modifications, something called a "copyleft").
Some software is even in the public domain, which means there is no restriction on what you can do with it (within the boundaries of the law, of course) - some of my software is PD'd, one such program is it2vgm, which can be and has been (my LudumDare 19 entry, "Cardiac Arrest", for instance) used for making music for the Sega Master System.
Sony's best move is to back off. Attempting to restrict homebrew development is just going to do serious damage to their image, and now that the files are out there due to a Streissand Effect (and I just downloaded them a short while ago), they actually can't stop it -- the best they can do is a bunch of FUD.
Pirates will pirate, and if they can't get it to run on the PS3, they might manage to port it to the PC instead (yes I *know* that's tricky but there's "bootlegs" of the *Mega Drive* version of Sonic the Hedgehog ported to the NES), so flaming Geohot is not going to stop piracy.
Nobody needs to burn here, but a few of you need buckets of icy cold water thrown over your heads.