Geohot: "PSN hack nothing to do with me"

George "Geohot" Hotz, the man who broke the PlayStation 3 wide open, has denied responsibility for the recent PlayStation Network hack that saw the details of 77 million accounts stolen.

He even slammed those responsible, saying, "You make the hacking community look bad", and called on them to not sell users' personal information.

"To anyone who thinks I was involved in any way with this, I'm not crazy, and would prefer to not have the FBI knocking on my door," Hotz wrote on his blog.

"Running homebrew and exploring security on your devices is cool, hacking into someone else's server and stealing databases of user info is not cool. You make the hacking community look bad, even if it is aimed at douches like Sony."

After jailbreaking the PS3, Hotz settled out of court with Sony amid a bitter legal battle that began in January. Sony was "glad" and Hotz was "happy" to bring an end to the scrap.

Hacker group Anonymous, however, was not, and declared war on Sony for its legal actions against Hotz. Some have suggested Anonymous was to blame for last week's "unauthorized intrusion" into the PSN, although it has denied responsibility.

"I sure am glad I don't have a PSN account about now," Hotz continued. "And, as a one-time victim of identity theft, I feel for everyone who's data has been stolen. I'm not going to make cracks at Sony for flipping a s**t when their data is compromised, and not even having the decency to apologize when it's your data that's misappropriated.

"One of the things I was contemplating back in early January was a PSN alternative, a place for jailbroken consoles to download homebrew and game without messing up anyone else's experience. Unfortunately events led me off of that path, but gamers, if I had succeeded you would have a place to game online with your PS3 right now. I'm one of the good guys. I used to play games online on PC, I hated cheaters then and I hate them now.

"Also, let's not fault the Sony engineers for this, the same way I do not fault the engineers who designed the BMG rootkit. The fault lies with the executives who declared a war on hackers, laughed at the idea of people penetrating the fortress that once was Sony, whined incessantly about piracy, and kept hiring more lawyers when they really needed to hire good security experts. Alienating the hacker community is not a good idea."

Hotz suggested Sony's "arrogance and misunderstanding of ownership" caused the hacker attack.

"Sony needs to accept that they no longer own and control the PS3 when they sell it to you. Notice it's only PSN that gave away all your personal data, not Xbox Live when the 360 was hacked, not iTunes when the iPhone was jailbroken, and not GMail when Android was rooted. Because other companies aren't crazy.

Hotz signed off with a message to the PSN hackers.

"You are clearly talented and will have plenty of money (or a jail sentence and bankruptcy) coming to you in the future. Don't be a d**k and sell people's information. And I'd love to see a write up on how it all went down... lord knows we'll never get that from Sony, noobs probably had the password set to '4' or something. I mean, at least it was randomly generated."