You might have seen some of these links floating around on twitter recently: wololo.net and a few other sites/hackers are being mentioned in a document posted by the Entertainment Software Association. The ESA is the videogame industry lobby: just so we’re clear, these are people who do not protect gamers’ interests, but the interests of the videogame industry companies. Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo among others.

There’s an ongoing discussion in the US about exemptions to the laws regarding DRMs. Long story short, the US are trying to decide what devices are legal to jailbreak, and videogame consoles are part of the suggested devices.

The ESA, of course, does not like the idea, and commented on it to make a point. Their full document can be found here, there’s a lot to be said about it, and I’ll probably be writing about this one of these days if I feel like it.

What’s interesting to me though is that, out of the blue, wololo.net is pictured in a screenshot on this document. The goal of “Exhibit A” is to show that in the gaming community, “jailbreaking” or “hacking” a console is usually associated with the goal of piracy. This is probably a fair statement, and, again, there are lots of things to discuss on this topic in general, and the ESA’s document in particular, but let’s look at the sample sites and hackers that have been compiled in Exhibit A:

1. A random website with a fake jailbreak tool for PS3 and PS4, one of the sites we regularly debunk here on wololo.net
2. wololo.net, in one of our controversial tutorials explaining how to run isos on a CFW PS3
3. ps4news
4. Our friends at hackinformer.com
5. nexgenupdate
6. Smealum gets the spotlight for a long interview in eurogamer, where he admits that hacking could lead to piracy (shocking revelation)
7. A reddit thread, pointing to ps3hax
8. Maxconsole, in an article on a PS4 Jailbreak hoax that I’ve debunked numerous times
9. Instructables, on a tutorial to hack the Wii

Keep in mind that these examples are not here to picture people or sites that promote piracy, or actual working hacks (otherwise the maxconsole article, and that other random website would have been an interesting mistake to discuss), but rather the general perception from the gaming community that hacks are here mostly for piracy. As a matter of fact, “Exhibit A” highlights not necessarily the articles, but the comments of random readers on the sites.

As smealum pointed out on twitter, probably the most shocking thing in this document is that whoever took the screenshot is still running Windows XP. Not very serious, from a company that is supposed to represent, among other companies, the interests of Microsoft 🙂

Source copyright.gov, thanks to @plysburydoughboy and @smealum