PSGroove PS3 hack dev blasts Sony lawsuit

Since news surfaced this week regarding Sony’s lawsuit against George “GeoHot” Hotz and Fail0verflow members for irrevocably hacking the PS3, the hackers have remained relatively silent on the matter except to say that they believe that the lawsuit has no basis. Now, however, Mathieu Hervais, another high-profile PS3 hacker who is known for releasing the PS Groove payload, has spoken out with his opinion on the events and explains exactly why he believes the case will be a bust for the jaded console manufacturer.

The transcript below is a collection of tweets from Hervais’ Twitter account as he reacted to the motion for temporary restraining order and complaint for injunctive relief filed by Sony this week:

“I’ve just read Sony’s legal document, it’s full of crap and the guy who wrote that doesn’t know shit about how the PS3 works. Any judge acknowledging those court documents is a moron.

“Btw apparently you can violate the PSN user agreement without having a PSN account or agreeing to those in the first place… At least that’s according to the crap SCE lawyers wrote in their legal paperwork. I think they fail just as much as their security team.

“Until a few days ago, the efforts of these hackers were largely thwarted by the TPMs that secure the various levels of the PS3 System.” < == yeah right, they seem to forget about the memory glitch, the libusb bug, or the fact that maybe some hackers got code running ages ago but didn’t want to publish their work…

“Because the PS3 System and its code are protected by these TPMs, users can neither access nor read the signatures or the Keys, and therefore cannot use those elements to gain access to the System to run a pirated video game” <=== Err… if we can’t “read the keys” explain how we got to pwn loaders and get all the keys from there uh ? xD I mean, we did get to read them in the end, from our own legally purchased and owned PlayStation 3 consoles that is. The keys were there for the taking.

“I’ll only say that their real good security measure was to have other OS in there that gave a reason for the skilled hackers not to work.

“Sony is wrong. I can “Obtain such software” (firmware updates) without agreeing to any TOS, the TOS only appears upon (regular) install.

“Why does no one speak of how Sony is violating a large number of anti-trust laws worldwide while preventing their consoles interoperability? Perhaps if they led us run our code on consoles we purchased, those would never have been hacked. They should just suck it up, face the truth and tell their licensees how they screwed up their console’s security implementation. Oh! And they should hire decent security engineers (like hackers) rather than suing them, at least that’d have some form of effectiveness.”

Youness “KaKaRoToKS” Alaoui, founder of the PS Freedom and the hacker who created the first custom firmware following Fail0verflow’s release of the tools, is also speaking out on the case. Alaoui stated on his Twitter account that Fail0verflow had done nothing wrong, and that he had emailed the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) to “requesting information/counseling, maybe they can shed some light on all this and maybe defend the people sued.”

The fact is that Sony had the Other OS option enabled for quite a length of time before they eliminated the feature from PS3 consoles, and I eagerly anticipate whether a US judge will laugh them out of court for this lawsuit the same way the judge in Spain’s PS Jailbreak trial did.