Playstation 3 hacker Hotz donates $10,000 to the EFF

PLAYSTATION 3 HACKER George Hotz has donated all of the leftover cash given to him by supporters of his legal defence fund to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

Hotz, better known by his Internet handle of geohot, had set up a defence fund as Sony took legal action against him for jailbreaking its Playstation 3 games console. After facing a barrage of bad publicity and attacks from the onllne hacktivist group Anonymous, Sony decided to quietly settle its legal action against Hotz.

With Sony deciding to settle with Hotz, the hacker did the honourable thing and donated all of the money left in the fund, adding some change to make it $10,000, to the EFF. Hotz said that he made his donation to the EFF in the hope that "America can one day again be a shining example of freedom, free of the DMCA and ACTA, and that private interest will never trump the ideas laid out in the constitution of privacy, ownership, and free speech."

Hotz also said that he will not continue hacking Sony products, saying, "As much as I don't respect the goons at Sony, I do respect the court." That's probably a wise decision and quite frankly Hotz did a bang up job of showing up Sony's poor security procedures and legal bullying.

To that end, Hotz predicted that Sony would do a worse job with security in the future. Hotz said, "I'm curious as to who Sony is hiring for NGP security. Lawyers? Get the code to sign a contract that it won't have exploits?" Hotz then added something so obvious that only a besuited manager would be too ignorant to recognise it, saying, "You shouldn't piss off the community of people who are actually talented at this stuff. Hell, maybe you even pissed off your engineering employees enough to leave some nice backdoors?"

Sony had better hope that Hotz's backdoor speculation was not based on anything more than hot air because if it isn't, Sony's legal team might become very busy for a very long time. µ