The infamous George Hotz better known as Geohot is now working at Facebook. Geohot is known for exploiting both the PS3 and the iPhone. I guess all of that hacking of the iPhone and PlayStation have finally paid off for him.

According to CrunchGear, Geohot left for South America to go on Vacation he is not fleeing from Sony's lawyers. He states that he had this vacation planned well in advance of the actual lawsuit at hand and he wasn't going to let that stop him from having fun. Hotz is assuring us that he is in 100% contact with his lawyers because they all have cellphones and can contact him at any time. So there it is folks, the rumors that he had fled the US are false. He's just working on his tan.

The Geohot saga continues as George Hotz has left the country and gone to South America. According to Sony Geohot is "engaged in a campaign to thwart jurisdictional discovery at every turn" in his current lawsuit. It appears Sony had gotten a hold of Geohot's hard drives which were missing necessary components to be viable. No specifics have been given to what parts were removed exactly from the hard drives. The fact that he has fleed the country does indeed raise more questions as to what else he is hiding.

Though the evidence establishing personal jurisdiction is already overwhelming, SCEA has little doubt that there is much more. However, over the last several weeks Hotz has engaged in a campaign to thwart jurisdictional discovery at every turn – regardless of whether the Court has ordered such discovery or not. Most seriously, after Magistrate Judge Spero ordered an inspection of Hotz’s devices and ordered Hotz to appear at a deposition in California, SCEA learned that Hotz had deliberately removed integral components of his impounded hard drives prior to delivering them to a third party neutral and that Hotz is now in South America, an excuse for why he will not immediately provide the components of his hard drives as requested by the neutral. Hotz’s attempts to dodge this Court’s authority raise very serious questions.

More evidence has also been found that he did have a PSN network account even though he told judges that he did not.

"records show that the same PS3 System was used on March 10, 2010 to create a PSN account under the user name “blickmanic.”

Why would he run to South America? What more could he be hiding? All this seems a little much and I am amazed that it is still continuing.

The Sony vs Geohot case has just heated up even more. It looks like Federal Magistrate Joseph Spero has approved Sony to obtain information about every user that visited Geohot's hacking sites and/or downloaded the hacking software from him. The subpoena covered Geohot's website hosted at Bluehost (www.geohot.com) as well as his videos hosted on YouTube, Google, and Twitter. This allows Sony to obtain identifying information about every user that visited any of these resources for any reason whatsoever. This could be an extreme violation of our privacy, Sony should not be allowed to know if we visited a website other than their own at any given time. The request calls for all server IP logs, and activity logs from Bluehost and any other identifying information about users that may have accessed the site. Sony even reached out as far as information about people that viewed the hacking videos on YouTube. Now I know that I have even visited Geohot's website at some time or another, however I don't even own a PS3 or intend to hack one at all. So why would Sony need my information and get me involved in this lawsuit. Anyone who followed a link from this site or another site to any of the videos or Geohot's website is now included in the lawsuit if Sony does obtain this information. We will have to see if Sony will really send letters out to the possibly hundreds of thousands of users that have been to these sites with malicious intent or none at all.

Okay so Geohot (George Hotz) was sued by Sony for hacking the PlayStation 3 and releasing the root keys out to the web. So what! Everyone is against him and his legal battle with Sony, saying that he deserves it. I have got news for you guys, Geohot has never condoned or supported piracy or hacking on the PSN network. He does however support the ability to hack YOUR OWN equipment that you have purchased legally and therefore releases tools to do so. Right on his website and the statement below it states that he fully supports anti-piracy when it comes to equipment and networks that are not your own. Sony should not be allowed to sue based only on the fact that he is hacking his own PlayStation, I do agree that releasing the root key for the PlayStation may have been ill-advised. However like I stated before, he never condoned the piracy on equipment other than your own.

I am an advocate against mass piracy, do not distribute anyone's copyrighted work but my own, do not take crap lying down, and am even pro DRM in a sense. For example, I believe Apple has every right to lock down their iPhone in the factory as much as they want, but once it's paid for and mine, I have the right to unlock it, smash it, jailbreak it, look at it, and hack on it. Fortunately, the courts agree with me on this point.

Geohot does not control what other people do with those tools on the PSN network or on their own consoles, he just makes it easier. Nobody was mad when he jailbroke the first iPhone and then released said Jailbreak to the public for everyone else. Now as soon as he Jailbreaks the PlayStation 3 and posts information and tool-kits for it he is the worst person on the planet. What about all of the other hackers that break into Windows based systems or other systems on a daily basis? Should they have stones thrown at them by the general public as well? Geohot has already scored support from organizations like EFF, and just regular people and is still taking donations on his blog. Feel free to leave a comment below if you have an opinion on the matter. Update: I do understand that I could have written this article a little better than I did. I wanted to voice my opinion on the matter and I am glad that other people's comments can open my eyes to sides I didn't consider before. Thank you.