Hacker extraordinaire, George Hotz recently made huge waves in the gaming world by hacking the PlayStation 3 to run homebrew and allow pirated games is in a pickle. After having his hard drive seized, a U.S. judge has now granted Sony access to looking inside of it for hacking information. Boo, Sony, you're a meanie.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston issued an order that allows Sony to peek inside of Hotz's hard drive and prevents him from deleting anything off of it while the investigations take place. Sony will be specifically combing for information that is only related to the PS3 jailbreak. It's therefore possible that Hotz might have the real identities of the fail0verflow hacker team who initially kickstarted this whole PS3 jailbreak business.

Those following closely will know that Sony is out on a rampage, threatening the likes of Twitter and Google to fork over the names and other private information held by the hackers who have contributed to jailbreaking the PS3. Both companies have declined to give Sony any information. It's laughable that Sony thinks it can rid the Internet of the jailbreak code — it's virtually impossible — once something's out on the Net, it'll be there forever — somewhere out there in the virtual ether.

This entire saga is playing out almost like a B-rated movie. While we don't support piracy, we have no qualms with running homebrew on hardware you rightfully bought and own. As long as you're running code that is for non-commercial purposes, it should be okay. Here's to hoping the underdogs triumph over the big bad Sony.

Via Wired