Geohot denies responsibility in PSN hacking
George 'Geohot' Hotz has denied responsibility in the downtime PlayStation Network has received following an external intrusion by hackers last week.
Hotz admitted he had sympathy for those who had their personal data stolen by hackers, adding that whoever brought the network down made the hacking community "look bad."
"I feel for everyone who's data has been stolen. I'm not going to make cracks at Sony for flipping a s**t when /their/ data is compromised, and not even having the decency to apologize when it's your data that's misappropriated," he said on his blog.
"And to anyone who thinks I was involved in any way with this, I'm not crazy, and would prefer to not have the FBI knocking on my door. Running homebrew and exploring security on your devices is cool, hacking into someone elses server and stealing databases of user info is not cool. You make the hacking community look bad, even if it is aimed at douches like Sony."
Hotz insists if blame should be placed at Sony, it should be placed at the executives, not the engineering team.
"Also, let's not fault the Sony engineers for this, the same way I do not fault the engineers who designed the BMG rootkit. The fault lies with the executives who declared a war on hackers, laughed at the idea of people penetrating the fortress that once was Sony, whined incessantly about piracy, and kept hiring more lawyers when they really needed to hire good security experts. Alienating the hacker community is not a good idea."
He also admits to plans of an alternative to PSN, but "recent events" - those being his lawsuit against Sony - led the idea to being canned.
"One of the things I was contemplating back in early January was a PSN alternative, a place for jailbroken consoles to download homebrew and game without messing up anyone else's experience. Unfortunately events led me off of that path, but gamers, if I had succeeded you would have a place to game online with your PS3 right now.
"I'm one of the good guys. I used to play games online on PC, I hated cheaters then and I hate them now."
Hotz was the one who exposed the PS3's root key in January which led busted open the machine to piracy. Sony issued a lawsuit towards Hotz and other hackers, but settled earlier this month, details of which are confidential.