CASPER
THE FRIENDLY GHOST
Someone over at Sony is in big trouble. Less than a month after Sony launched its legal armada against the hacker group who recently jailbroke the Playstation 3 game console, someone at the company accidentally retweeted the “jailbreak” code through an official Sony Twitter account, reports Engadget.
Here’s what happened: Twenty-four-year-old self-proclaimed geek Travis la Marr (aka @exiva) sent a message to the Sony-operated Twitter account @TheKevinButler containing the root code to the PS3, which unlocks the device, along with the challenge, “Come at me, @TheKevinButler.”
Not understanding the significance of the sequence of numbers and letters @TheKevinButler — an entirely fictional Sony employee whose tweets are presumably created by some poor sap at the company — thought la Marr was playing some sort of Twitter-centric game of “Battleship,” and retweeted the code to the account’s nearly 70,000 followers.
Done laughing yet? Ok, now, it gets better. Had Sony simply published the code that allows tech-savvy users to unlock the “unhackable” PS3, that would be bad enough. Unfortunately for the company’s PR and legal departments — and whoever published the damning tweet — Sony just sued infamous jailbreak hacker George ‘Geohot’ Hotz, along with 98 other members of the hacker group fail0verflow, for jailbreaking the PS3 and publishing their digital escapades online.
Sony won a temporary injunction against Hotz which, ironically, prevents him from publishing information about the PS3 jailbreak. Who says there’s not justice in this world?