Sony granted temporary restraining order and impoundment against GeoHotz

[darkknightkryta]

twesterm said:

darkknightkryta said:

Geohotz hasn't done anything illegal, whether or not people use his work for piracy (Though if a certain bill in Canada gets passed it will be illegal here... hint hint... write your PMs to not let bill C-32 pass).  The only thing that's possibly illegal is that he published a key that may be protected under copyrite law.  But there's a problem with that, the key might not be copyrited since it's supposed to be random and their coders screwed up and made that random number return 4.  The only way Sony will win this trial is if that key is copy protected and if it is Geohotz will loose and he shouldn't have released the keys but the way to get it.

lol, your heart's in the right place but you have a few things mixed up.

The key isn't a random number (well, it's a specific number of random digits).  They were able to find that key because they used the same random number over and over again.  The other part you missed is that the random number is not 4 like the XKCD comic you're thinking makes it out to be, it's a very very large HEX number.

The random number generator returns 4 (If what my co-worker told me and read is true), that random number is used to generate that long hex string.  The thing is that hex string is supposed to be different everytime its generated, but it's not because their random generator returns the same number always.  How that got overlooked is beyond me, I mean you had to have not tested that more than once to not see it return the same string over and over again.

edit: watched the video of the hack, they stubbed that 4 in there, my friend must have gotten confused.