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fordy on 24 February 2011
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Ail said:
buglebum said:
Icyedge said:
buglebum said:
Icyedge said:
 

The point is that its Sony or Microsoft choice to sue an hacker if he release complete or part of their software. If its not doing them any bad they will obviously not sue them (kinect case), this doesnt mean they couldnt if they wanted.

On topic, now the guy is pretty much guilty since he admit releasing the hypervisor code for download.

PS.: May I remind everyone that on PS2 there has been boot disc and mod chip for years without sony sueing anyone.


He's not releasing, or ever going to release "hypervisor code".

It's his code, and his research that he's releasing.

Please do some googling and investigation and you will see this is one of the good guys that has specifically been very careful not to break any laws.


Stop you nonsense bubblegum, its getting ridiculous. When you have tool to reverse engineer or to make custom firmware you have automatically part or full of the original code in it. Its linked together.

"Guys, i don’t joke, it’s serious.
And to prove it, i kept my word and uploaded all my HV reversing stuff."

That isn't true in the slightest, what makes you think that?

The end user downloads the original Sony firmware, the hacker provides the tools to modify that firmware. The hacker provides no copyrighted code.

Even the decryption key that geohot provided isn't copyrighted, since it can be derived by reversing without knowledge of trade secrets. It's questionable if a decryption key can even be copyrighted in the first place from my understanding but I can't be sure of that. Would be curious to know if anyone knows better.

Actually the law around reverse engineering are quite complex.

I know about them because I deal with them on a professional level.

I'm not sure about hardware but on the software level for example it's quite complex.

Lets say you want to make an application that reads excel files. It is not legal to purchase a copy of excel and use it to reverse engineer how excel saves its files...

What you can do it get public available excel files and try to understand what those files contain. But at a business level it is illegal if the developer doing the reverse engineering  has access to the application he is targeting.

What most companies do to get around this is they subcontract that work and the contractor asks for the original company  to create a bunch of excel files with specifics characteristics and then to provide those to him ( and that is legal).

I'm not aware of any company every trying to apply those rules to non company entities, but they are there........

I guess following those rules you could argue those hackers ran the original Sony software to see how it works so that they could change it's behavior through a mod, and technically that's a grey area ( but like I said I'm not aware of anyone ever suing anyone except a business over something like this..)


It all depends on the method of reverse engineering used

If they bought Excel to create spreadsheets with set data, and then try to determine the layout by reading the contents of the XLS file, then that's perfectly legal. If little to no information is given on the product, that is the main process that reverse engineering takes (much like the Hypervisor drivers).