Maz, do you by any chance have an Ipod which you have jailbroken? because that is hacking. It is used to make your life easier. hacking is not what you think it is. there is a big difference in Hacking, in fact in todays world, it has many meanings. The main one is to modify, or create something new out of something else.
I have been taking a programming class at my school for the past 3 years now. In all of my programs I end up making, I almost always have to hack the code to find errors, as well as generally improve it for the better. This isnt Malicious, and it is all Hobby and Education. This is that same people who did minor experimentations in Linux on the PS3. They brought the PS3 because it was advertised that it had it. When it was taken away, that goes against the advertising what the people bought it for. They were doing nothing bad with it, they were using it for basic things like seeing the specs of the PS3, or unlocking a better web browser, or Running that cool Linux app that their PC didn't officially support.
Inside of linux on the PS3 the users were still locked down from uploading hacked, or modified saved files to the Playstation servers. Everything done on linux was strictly local on the hard drive.
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Sonys Servers were hacked by a Criminal organization who had intents of stealing credit card information, as well as peoples personal information. They do not, and are not put in the same group as hackers. Hackers are harmless, once you do something that is harmful, it becomes Crime. Even if OpenOS was still on PS3, they would have still been hacked due to the criminal organizations Criminal ways. Its just now, due to Sony Attacking the hacking community threatening them with lawsuits for modifying their own hardware for personal use, not going online, and not ruining the days of others. Sony did the wrong thing by Suing, and Blaming the every single hacker ever made. And After their system was hacked a little by the popular GeoHotz (who at the time only had 5% of the code cracked for personal use) Sony Pulled their biggest lawsuit against all of the hackers and issued an opened challenge to every single hacker.
Sony made the fatal error of suing him though, because unlike the previous ones, This one went through to the court system, and while Sony thought they had picked an easy target, it soon turned out that he had the full financial support of many many hackers behind him. Because it made it into court, Sony was forced to review 75% More of their Code inside of the Court Files putting the known amount at 80%. it was inside of these court files (which law requires be opened to the public because Sony is a Foreign owned Stock Exchange Corporation)
With that code known, Hackers used that 80% to continue doing what they have always done by bringing back OpenOS for them by being able to downgrade, and even add OpenOS to the new updated PS3 Version. But then the Criminal Organization got ahold of that 80% Known code and used it to hack into the Playstation Servers though their Advanced Criminal Ways, and steal the credit card, and personal information of every single playstation user.
It is speculated that they chose this time to attack because there would be many scapegoats, with Sonys Many Many Lawsuits, GeoHotz, the Hackers, OpenOS, Anonymous, the Controversy, everything they could easily work under their disguise in their favor.'
So please note, there is a difference between Crime and Hacking.
Edit by Tran: Shortened the line of dashes so it wouldn't break layout.