Sony mistakenly retweets PS3 jailbreak code

Whoops.

Kevin Butler, Sony's fictional spokesman and vice president of several fake departments who appears frequently in PlayStation 3 commercials, retweeted the console's jailbreak code last night after apparently believing that it was a reference to the board game, "Battleship."

"Lemme guess, you sank my battleship?" read the tweet on @TheKevinButler. It was followed by the complete code, which had been tweeted to Sony's account by user @exiva. The user, whose name is Travis La Marr, according to his Twitter page, followed the code with a message to Sony: "come at me."

After realizing its mistake, Sony removed the tweet from Kevin Butler's Twitter feed. The company did not mention its error and instead went back to cracking jokes about the PlayStation 3, as it normally does in that Twitter account. However, people did capture screenshots before Sony removed the tweet.

Sony's mistake is all the more glaring, considering the company is so sensitive about the jailbreaking that continues on its PlayStation 3.

Last month, Sony requested a restraining order against famed hacker George Hotz, also known as Geohot, for creating a jailbreak that allows people to run custom packages on the PlayStation 3. Sony alleged that the jailbreak violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and asked a court to stop Hotz from making anything related to his hack available on the Web.

Hotz took issue with Sony's claim that his jailbreak violated DMCA, asserting that his solution was a jailbreak for a closed system, just like any jailbreak for mobile phones, which are explicitly allowed by DMCA.

After some jousting between Hotz's and Sony's attorneys, a U.S. District Court granted Sony a temporary restraining order. Hotz has since removed all mentions of the jailbreak from his site.

But if Sony really wants to stop the jailbreaking, it should probably stop tweeting the code itself.

(Via Engadget)