Fraudulently Unlocking Trophies is Serious Business; Sony’s Pissed

With the new year came a new way to play with your PS3, as New Jersey-based hacker George Hotz cracked the Sony machine to allow pirated games, homebrew and other unauthorized software to be used on it. If you haven’t heard about this by now, well, now you have.

Sony was quick to file suit against Hotz in San Francisco, though Judge Susan Illston has doubts about the correct jurisdiction of the case. Sony’s lawyers’ arguments that the case belongs in California because Hotz released it via Twitter and Youtube, CA-based companies, were shot to pieces yesterday; as Judge Illston put it, if Twitter and Youtube being involved were enough to land a case in California, “the entire universe would be subject to my jurisdiction.”

Hotz appears to have sound legal counsel, so we can hope he emerges from this trial unscathed. Regardless, the hack exists, and people are really starting to get into it. For example, a new homebrew application has been developed to allow players to unlock Trophies all willy-nilly and without actually playing the games.

Naturally, Sony is pissed. They issued a statement to CVG yesterday claiming that they’re looking into locking out that software and all others like it through network updates. Of course, an individual who’s hacked their PS3 would have to be a moron to allow Sony to update it, though if they’re not going to log into PSN, why bother unlocking the trophies at all?

Actually, why would anyone want to fraudulently unlock Trophies? Isn’t the whole point of Trophies and Achievements and the like to actually achieve something? Cheating to beat a game and reach the ending or mess with people online is one thing, if you’re into that, but this type of cheating appears to have no point whatsoever.

Would you cheat to unlock Trophies? Why?