Sony tweets 'secret' key at heart of PS3 jailbreak case
'You sank my battleship' indeed
An official Sony Twitter account has leaked the PlayStation 3 master signing key at the heart of the company's legal offensive against a group of hackers being sued for showing how to jailbreak the popular game console.
Kevin Butler, a fictional PS3 vice president, retweeted the metldr key in what can only be assumed was a colossal mistake.
“Lemme guess... you sank my battleship?” he wrote in a post to the micro-blogging website that has been preserved for all the world to see. It goes on to include the key and the ironic words “Come at me.” The message was later removed from Butler's tweet stream with no explanation why the key was leaked and then removed.
In a lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco last month, Sony accused well-known jailbreaker George Hotz, aka geohot, and more than 100 other hackers of violating US copyright law by disclosing the key, which is used to sign games and software that run on the PS3. Last week, Sony expanded its legal dragnet when it filed a series of motions seeking the identity of YouTube and Twitter users who did nothing more than discuss the issuance of the key or view videos showing how the latest hack worked.
Sony contends that videos and web postings disclosing the key violate provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that prohibit the circumvention of technology designed to prevent access to copyrighted material. Two weeks ago, the judge presiding over the case tentatively ruled Sony was likely to prevail on those claims and issued a temporary restraining order to prevent what she said would be “irreparable harm” if Hotz wasn't required to surrender all his computer gear and remove all references to the hack that he posted online.
Sony's gaffe shows just how futile Sony's attempts are to prosecute people who discussed the key, said Stewart Kellar, the San Francisco attorney representing Hotz.
“It just demonstrates that the restraining order here will not prevent imminent irreparable harm to Sony because if there is harm it's already occurred,” he told The Register. “The key is already out there. Restraining George will not stop the key from being distributed.”
A court hearing is scheduled for Thursday in the case so the judge can hear arguments that the temporary restraining order is overbroad and should be rescinded.
Sony, which says it's sold about 44 million PS3s, has said its suit is necessary to prevent pirated games from running on the console. Hotz and members of the fail0verflow hacking collective, which in December published a PS3 jailbreak technique independent of Hotz, insist the hacks expand the functionality of the console so it can run custom, “homebrewed” applications that aren't covered by copyright.
Last year, the US Copyright Office exempted iPhone jailbreaking from the DMCA so the handsets can run apps not officially sanctioned by Apple. Game consoles are unaffected by that act.
A email sent to Butler and a phone call left to Sony's PR department weren't returned. ®
COMMENTS
Sony screwed themselves
Sony have put themselves into this situation.
their knee-jerk reaction to remove the OtherOS feature has actually pushed people who used that legitimate feature to now look at the jailbreak/rooted world to get that feature back... they then
enter the world where pirated games are a download away..and its all too easy for them to join the dark side.... when they used to live a world away from it, happily booting between linux and GameOS.
Twitter messages are not private ruling...
So this info appeared on twitter officially by sony we are allowed to publish it ourselves since twitter was ruled not private.... brilliant :D
lets face it
At the moment the Japanese are going a bit crazy on copyright what with passing new laws that makes lending games illegal, and nintendo is trying to sue people that sell their saved games to other players.
http://www.zakzak.co.jp/society/domestic/news/20110208/dms1102081601011-n1.htm
Note game rentals are already illegal in Japan (unless you pay the correct Yakuza boss the correct sums of course.)
His mistake was on many levels, due mainly to a big ego.
one, it was not @exiva to the original sender, but was a public tweet.
two, it was not just a reply to @exiva but a RT of the orignial tweet containing the secret key.
three. it was the real secret key NOT a "random string of hex" if he'd changed it then no problem.
What he should have tweeted was:
"@exiva you just sank my Battleship >:'o("
But no the marketing twonk thought thats such a good joke I'll publish it so the world can see it.... And in doing so broke the first rule of secrets club, dont publish your secret.
The fact that the marketing twonk did not know the key is technically not relevant, the key should be so obscure that there is a billion to one chance of him publishing it in a series of random numbers. so it's not possible(incredibly unlikely) to just publish it without knowing or being prompted. The point here is that he was prompted to publish it and did so.
A marketing person needs to be fully aware of every character they publish, THIS is the FAIL. he published something he did not understand, and the consequence is dire.
IF someone had posted "sony to give away ps3s for free" to him in English or Japanese, would he have reposted it? verbatim?
He didn't go into their secret source code, find the secret key, and post it to Twitter.
Proove it!
He published the key where he got it from is not relevant.
