Tuesday, June 28, 2011

GeoHot, The Sony Effect, The Untouchables, and Jon Stewart

You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. *That's* the *Chicago* way! And that's how you get Capone. Now do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that? I'm offering you a deal. Do you want this deal? - Malone (Sean Connery) from The Untouchables


George Hotz, nom-de-hack GeoHot, has just been hired by Facebook. If we jog our memories, he was the hacker who broke the Sony PS3 encryption libraries. After which, Sony came after him with the full force of the law and the DMCA act. In his purported defense came the hacker's army where they turned Sony and its multiple affilitiates into a digital pinata. The Sony Effect. Pick on one hacker, you get an army coming after you. At least that's what hacktivists like Anonymous and LulzSec would have us believe. But behind all this noise of the "grey" hats lurks the malevolent hacks. And Sony et al. are forced to they pick their fights, lest they be pushed into a corner by an anonymous army of keyboard commandos. As is often the case, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart highlighted the dilemma we face when dealing with prepubescents, where you run the risk of an outcry from those who are really criminal.

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