The anger - dear sir - is directed at pirates and freetards

The anger - dear sir - is directed at pirates and freetards, the very people who think that their actions have no consequence. Just like Geohot though that his breaking into the hypervisor had no consequence. Yet it did, it resulted in the removal of OtherOS.

Game Piracy and the freetard mentality costs all of the paying customers because we end up paying more for less because cheap gits won't pay for their entertainment.

Not only that but in their desire to get free stuff, those pirates and freetards - oh hell, let's call it like it is - thieves who steal games are opening a secure platform that is there to protect the paying customers. If the security on a PS3 is compromised and it can access PSN unfettered, that represents a threat to the PSN security and any threat to that is a threat to the security of my financial transactions and information held within PSN. Sony knows this, and sure it protects their profits to protect PSN, but it also protects me as a customer. Thieves with nothing more than free games in mind might not be the biggest threat, but riding on their coat tails are the black hat brigade who want nothing better than to start scraping information from PSN so that it can be exploited.

Before you try to argue otherwise, if you're an IT professional you know that network security is built in layers, and the clients are one of those layers. The first step to cracking a secure network is to compromise a client that has access to the network.

So, yes, anger, bile, vitriol, all directed at the thieves who'd rather spoil the party for everyone else instead of paying for their entertainment. Oh, and that's without even discussing the negative impact that game theft (aka piracy) has on a software market, and that market's subsequent decline - which hurts everyone.

Firmware 3.42 altered the USB device handling, 3.5 altered it further and threw in a whole new encryption layer. Downgrading your firmware back to a version prior to these is great and all, but things move, games get released, new firmware is mandated.

As for doing what you want with your computer, it's a game console, not a computer. The PSN is Sony's network, not yours, the firmware is theirs, the encryption keys are theirs and the stolen service key that was cloned to allow the jailbreak exploit is Sony's too. So, if you're so concerned with your property, why are you not concerned with the property of others? If you want to take your PS3, downgrade it and take it off line forever, that's great. But if you being that compromised system back online onto PSN I hope, as I said in my post, that you find yourself the subject of a perma-ban because I don't want security compromised systems accessing PSN. It's your PS3, great, but it's Sony's PSN. Don't be all hurt when someone points that out to you.

Gotta love that last point of yours. It's always the last resort when losing an argument to resort to the "you have no life and no friends" argument. It always smacks of projection when someone pulls that card though. But, well done you, I'm sure I'd feel crushed by your comments if any of them were even remotely the case.