Sony has won a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) that stops hacker George Hotz, also known as GeoHot, from putting information on the Web about the hack. GeoHot has 10 days to comply with the Californian court order and hand over his computers to Sony.
PSX-Scene has posted the relevant court documents. If you want to read through them yourself, here are the links to the PDFs: one and two.
The court order comes despite the lawsuit being delayed because San Francisco District Court Judge Susan Illston does not agree with Sony's argument that California courts have jurisdiction due to the use of a Paypal account and GeoHot agreeing to the Terms of Service on the PlayStation Network. Nevertheless, Illston granted the order citing the legal concept of "purposeful direction."
Sony's legal attacks against the hackers that released the PlayStation 3 root key and custom firmware began earlier this month. Sony is targeting 100 members of the fail0verflow hacker collective who found security codes for the PS3, as well as GeoHot who had independently found and published the PS3 root key.
Of course, Sony's recent victory with the TRO is just the beginning. The company still has to actually win its formal lawsuit to collect any damages or a permanent injunction. Furthermore, forcing GeoHot to stop distributing his work won't stop anyone else; it's all over the Internet anyway.
Sony actually released a new mandatory PS3 security update, bringing the firmware version up to 3.56, which was meant to keep hackers from executing unsigned code such as homebrew programs and pirated games. The new firmware was cracked in a matter of hours by KaKaRoToKS, so Sony effectively achieved nothing.
