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George Hotz (Geohot), [1] often misattributed as the genesis of homebrew on the PS3, later created the first homebrew signed using the private "metldr" encryption key which he leaked onto the internet. Leaking the key led to Hotz being sued by Sony.
George Francis Hotz (born October 2, 1989), alias geohot, is an American security hacker, entrepreneur, [1] and software engineer. He is known for developing iOS jailbreaks , [ 2 ] [ 3 ] reverse engineering the PlayStation 3 , and for the subsequent lawsuit brought against him by Sony .
PlayStation 3 Jailbreak was the first USB (Universal Serial Bus) chipset that allowed unauthorized execution of code, similar to homebrew, on the PlayStation 3. It works by bypassing a system security check using a memory exploit ( heap overflow ) which occurs with USB devices that allows the execution of unsigned code .
In an act of hacktivism, Anonymous announced their intent to attack Sony websites in response to Sony's lawsuit and, specifically due to Sony's gaining access to the IP addresses of all the people who visited geohot's blog, terming it an 'offense against free speech and internet freedom'. [13]
George Hotz, also known as Geohot, managed to jailbreak the PS3 firmware on January 2, 2011, and began sharing the jailbreak online shortly afterward. [80] In response, Sony sued Hotz on January 11, 2011, for his jailbreaking activities. [81] The hacker group Anonymous initiated "Operation Sony" on April 2, 2011, as a form of protest. [79]
In January 2011, security researcher Geohot and associates of the hacking group known as fail0verflow were sued by Sony for jailbreaking the PlayStation 3. [2] Sony and Geohot later settled the case out of court, with Geohot agreeing not to reverse engineer any Sony product in the future.
OtherOS is a feature of early versions of the PlayStation 3 video game console, allowing user installed software, such as Linux or FreeBSD.The feature was removed since system firmware update 3.21, released on April 1, 2010.
Due to the removal of the "OtherOS" feature from older models of the PS3 due to security issues (possibly related to the exploit released by geohot) which caused an uproar in the PlayStation community, several lawsuits have been filed. The first one was filed on behalf of PS3 owners by Anthony Ventura. [49]