Uh huh...

You see, for some people it's more important to support a company than your fellow gamers.

or it's more important to support no Mod chipped system's

How exactly will stopping Linux achieve that? If in fact having Linux helps, hackers can always get non-updated consoles to play around and find out exploits.

Now they have an extra incentive to do it, the fact that an exploit is required for homebrew (as is the case on the Wii, 360 and tons of other hacked consoles).

If it doesnt then why is Geohot telling people to not update their systems?

Sony can't force hackers to update their systems, so it's not like they're really stopping anything...

we have enough threads on this, go post this in one of those.

4. What is the SmartScan technology?
SmartScan is a unique technology for fast disk structure restoring. The data is restored from the information obtained from disk scan. A physical or logical disk, disk region, or disk image saved as a file can be scanned. SmartScan can restore all previous partitions if the scanned disk has some direct or indirect partitions data on a hard drive. SmartScan allows you to interactively control and modify these data during scanning.

if your Harddrive has a second partition they know you have linux installed on your PS3 trying to access PSN.

the point being Sony did not want to take a chance with Mod chipped PS3's hitting the PSN so stopping you harddrive from being scanned may not even be likely to be avoided.

also:

you can still use BD-JAVA for Home brew on the PS3 yes you have to burn your Application's to a Blank BLU-RAY DISC, BUT IT WORKS FOR HOMEBREW.

and you did not need a board jumper to mess with the system's Hypervisor to do it.