Alliteratively coined by the French satirical writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, it means that the more things change, the more they remain the same,

Sony announces its bug bounty program for hacking a PlayStation

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2020-06-26 13:38:56

Alliteratively coined by the French satirical writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, it means that the more things change, the more they remain the same, and it’s a cynical observation that what seems like an improvement may not, in the end, sort out the underlying problems or attitudes it was mean to fix.

About ten years ago, the company famously took legal action against a young George Hotz, better known as geohot, an American hacker – in the neutral sense of the word here – who has found his way into numerous “locked down” devices over the years.

Hotz, who is now into open source self-driving automotive software, has variously come up with jailbreaks (or roots as they are known on Android phones, after the Unix name for the top-level administrative account) for iPhones, locked-down Androids such as Galaxies…

Sony wasn’t impressed, and launched legal action against Hotz, even though the main purpose of Hotz’s reverse engineering seems to have been an attempt to allow PS3 owners to run alternative operating systems such as Linux or FreeBSD on their own devices.

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