Following Sony's settlement with 21-year-old NJ hacker George "GeoHot" Hotz, the company has ratcheted up its legal pressure on Alexander Egorenkov -- a German hacker who was sued after his work reverse engineering the PlayStation 3 and reintegrating OtherOS was outed in February.
Like his American counterpart, Egorenkov (who goes by the handle graf_chokolo) has struggled since Sony's initial coup that found an SCEE representative along with police raiding the hacker's home, delivering a TRO and seizing property - PS3 consoles and computer equipment, natch.
The embattled hacker's PS3 development page - home to various research - is now down as per a request from SCEE. Non-compliance could have yielded a hefty fine and jail time.
PS3Crunch, which apparently has ties to Egorenkov, detailed the page's closure: "If you are wondering why some of the pages have been removed at grafchokolo.com, then you need to know how Sony Computer Entertainment Europe are forcing us to remove them or graf_chokolo will be fined 250,000 Euros or worse, 6 months time in prison."
The closure extended to all development blogging, documentation and Git repositories, though the site maintains they hold back-ups to everything. The only thing still live is Egorenkov's legal donation page, which was set up in March.
The site clarified there was no raid; just a friendly request where the wrong answer could equal a nice long stint in a cell.
Earlier this month SCEE served Egorenkov a second TRO, confiscating his computer equipment (again) and demanding he cease his work on OtherOS once and for all.
MyCE reached out to both PS3Crunch and Egorenkov for a comment on this developing situation, but received none at the time of this article's publication.
