UPDATED 14:14 EDT / JULY 16 2011

The Sony Online Soap Opera [Infographic]

Sony Versus GeoHot (Thumb)

Sony Versus GeoHot

When it’s all said and done, 2011 could go down in the geek history books as “The Year of The Hacker”,  and Sony vs. George Hotz has seen all kinds. The term in the media has two connotations: People who tinker to develop tools, or malicious attackers intent on breaking into networks for the purposes of theft or damage. It all started for young, enterprising hacker George “GeoHot” Hotz when he developed a jailbreak tool for the PlayStation 3 and has recently culminated with him getting a job at Facebook.

In response, Sony saw fit to sue Hotz, and in the process also sought to go after Internet users who had downloaded his jailbreak software (by asking a court to obtain their IP addresses.) This activity by Sony caught the attention of the “hacktivist” collective Anonymous and the thought of Sony harrassing Hotz for simply tinkering with his own PS3 and giving other people the ability to do the same didn’t sit well in the meme-infested forums.

Sony quickly found themselves buried under an onslaught of hackers intent on teaching the corporation a lesson in Internet civility. Through their efforts, we saw the PlayStation Network shut down and stay down for nearly a month. In the beginning, the hacker intrusion exposed almost 24.6 million user accounts across the PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment. Even after they brought it back, hackers probing the network continued to cause issues by breaking through poor security in password retrieval.

In light of Sony customers being continyally put at risk, the authorities became involved, and executives of Sony found themselves called in front of the U.S Congress. Interestingly, Amazon also found themselves entangled in the mess after it was discovered that the PSN hackers had leased time in Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud service.

At the outset, Jack Tretton, President and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, spoke at the gaming convention E3 2011 and apologized for all the incontinence that Sony had put their customers through. All the while the PSN remained down, most PlayStation 3 owners found themselves locked out of pretty much everything.

The aforementioned hacker has now moved on to a job at Facebook, and now that it’s all over, let’s hope that Sony can better secure its networks, and maybe, just maybe develop a better relationship with its customers.

Enjoy an encapsulation of the entire saga in the infographic below.

Sony Versus Geohot

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