Xen said:
He gave everyone the means to. I won't use the old keys and house argument here, but you see what I'm talking about. |
A malicious hacker can use his PC, that he can program as he likes, to do the same to countless networks. Are PC makers and retailers guilty for this? Are programming teachers too? No, neither of them. Should be people forbidden to build or modify their PCs due to malicious hackers, crackers, pirates, etc, actions? NO. The particular GeoHot issue is quite borderline: he has every right to modify the HW he bought, about the SW, what he can do varies, laws about it aren't the same everywhere. What's for sure is that he didn't pirate and didn't mean or promote his work for this. And it's also sure that adding features or restoring removed ones is in consumer's rights. One last thing, the hole always was there, revealing it could be considered in consumers' interest, as security by obscurity never worked, it could have been discovered by any cracker or malicious hacker with skills comparable to GeoHot and used only for malicious purposes without letting the public know, common people would have suffered only the negative consequences without having any advantage. Instead, as people now know, Sony is forced to act quickly against any malicious exploit. Somebody could say that without GeoHot maybe malicious exploiters would have discovered the hole later, but how can we know for sure they didn't discover it before him? And had they not found it yet, Sony showed them where to look precisely when it removed the OtherOS feature, a very dumb action, because by then there were more than 10 million phat consoles around with the feature available to study and hack, showing where there was surely a hole just saved them time.
