Trouble coming for PS3 owners (Do you know who George Hotz is?)

If you own PS3 you might want to read this, if you own “jail-breaked” PS3 you should definitely read this! As you know for a while now we are trying to convince you (and through you your friends and family) that anonymity in the internet is as virtual as the data itself. That idea of protecting your own IP address and your Identity at the same time is not some scary tale for kids but a reality. As you will read in a moment you never know what it might be useful be protected.

You probaly have heard about lawsuit of Sony against Mr George Hotz. If you have not than let us tell you. A while back ago Mr Hotz (known for his tremendous work on unlocking iPhone) has set himself to work (successfully) on a different project. He cracked security measures of Palystation 3 and allowed for so called “jail break” of console. “Jailbrake” means that all things Sony did not wanted you to do on their product (this include running pirated games) were possible thanks to Mr Hotz’s work. We do not commend piracy but we are all for “open source” and ability to add or change products we buy. Never the less we are against treating all internet users as “guilty without charge”.

According to news published by heise-online all IP addresses of internet users who visited psx-scene and also Mr Hotz’s websites (geohot; geohotps 3 blogspot), followed his twitter account: twitter.com/geohot or even watched his videos at Youtube.com!!! will be reveald to Sony. Few days ago Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) demanded from companies running sites mentioned above (including Twitter and Google) to turn over all user data (including IP addresses and logs). Judge Joseph C. Spero from the District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco has granted this request. This means that Bluehost (geohot), Google (blogspot), SoftLayer (psx-scene), Twitter and YouTube do not have a choice but to act as requested. If you have been to one of those sites… It does not matter whatever you have done something wrong or not, your identity will be reveald to someone else (this time it is Sone, who it will be next time?). What Sony will do with this data it is unknown. They have announced a while back that anyone cought using PS3 with “jailbreake” will be banned for for life.

Any device that you use to connect to internet should be connected via proxy or VPN. As you can see you will never know when it might be useful. Most devices have their own build in online vpn chrome client (check our How to… section for more information about VPN setup). With game consoles things are a bit more tricky. The easiest way to do it is to connect thorough PC with active VPN connection (PC will act as a gateway). Some of the router available on the marke also allow for this kind of set up to hide your real identity. You can find out more here: helpdesk scothosts and here dd-wrt. If you are our existing customer and you have other devices that you would like to hide behind one of our VPN servers, please contact us and we will do our best to help you (if it is possible).

For all of you surfing internet without any IP/Identity protection we ask you think about it… Read older articles on our blog about this subject (hideipvpn) and see our Premium section to see what packages are available and which one would suit you best. With our VPN not only you will be able to access sites unavailabe from you current location, like hulu, bbc, pandora, fox and many others but your IP will be safe and hidden at all times.