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Buffer Overflow Found in PSP Firmware v2.0
Doomstalk writes "PSP news site PSP Updates is reporting that a buffer overflow flaw has been found in PSP firmware v2.0's photo viewer. So far it's only been used to corrupt the menu display, but it holds great promise for running homebrew code on upgraded PSPs." From the article: "Thanks to the unknown author(s) for this great starting point to have homebrew on 2.0, all that is needed are coders to extend this knowledge for full homebrew usage on the v2.0 firmware. We cannot say when someone will step up to the plate and write the code for users to run homebrew on a 2.0 using this exploit, but we will definitely have our ears (and email boxes) open and be sure to let you know as soon as we do."
There is no point in a PSP Virus, If any of them were mass-bricked, It would end up hurting nobody but sony in the long run because they would have no choice but to fix all the bricked psp's...
I'm sure somebody could write somthing to brick a psp using the lua language...even just ruin somthing by possibly clocking up all 3 processors by insane amounts then make it do millions of simple commands over and over till it breaks... But the only way it would really spread would be way of the homebrew, and its not like wifi would spread it because nomatter what to recive somthing via wifi you must:
1: Have the wlan switch on
2: Have an active connection
3: Accept this file
Therefore any worm that would be released would proove useless...
And if anybody is dumb enough to shop on their psp, well then they should have their identity stolen for not having anywhere near enough security!
--PrimalTheory
Well you see when companies go to great lengths to piss off their most devoted customers. It becomes an event worthy of celebration when said customers manage to use the product in the way they wanted to when they paid for it.
your agument is the same for cabir
Does this sound familiar ? :
Cabir replicates over bluetooth connections and arrives to phone messaging inbox as caribe.sis file what contains the worm. When user clicks the caribe.sis and chooses to install the Caribe.sis file the worm activates and starts looking for new devices to infect over bluetooth.
To get cabir you need
1. Have Bluetooth switched on
2. Have an active connection
3. Accept this file
4. Press OK to install
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
"...when the japs..."
You lost me there. Try again with a little less insultingly ignorant speech next time.
What did Sony do that "pissed off their most devoted customers"?
Required all code to be signed by Sony before it would run on a PSP.
Actually the Zodiac itself had a better hardware spec than the DS in the shape of vastly more memory, superior support via it's ATI Imageon graphics card, higher resolution display and a much faster CPU). It also had a much sleeker form factor and had the added bonus of being a functional PDA with a huge library of Palm software available for it (something I wish the PSP had).
Obviously this came at a cost - it was double the price (so at the PSP price point, but with less than PSP level performance, and without the supreme benefit of Sony's brand recognition - which is the only reason I think consumers are willing to trust in a device as expensive as the PSP).
That aside, I think biggest thing it had issue with was lack of developer support and poor marketing (which to some extent go hand in hand, stores won't stock it and people won't buy it if there are no games, but developers aren't keen to flock to an unknown quantity and invest time and money in such a risky enterprise).
I was on the verge of buying one but held off when I read about the PSP for the first time, not that I wouldn't mind owning both but the game library for the Zodiac (that is, games that took advantage of the unique 3D hardware - not just the regular Palm games which I've mostly played already) was just too small to imagine me using it for longer than a month or two.
If it were that easy, all the 2.00 owners would be playing mario right now ;)
Code in user mode can't demand that the kernel do anything. It can ask and see what happens. The kernel will decide itself what it wants to do. There's no direct access to the firmware, thread/process manager etc. from user mode.
I do not agree with funding evil empires such as Sony by purchasing their items and then "cracking" them. Sony will just keep forcing more firmware, and you the faithful consumer, will continue cracking it. In the meantime, you're purchasing new duo sticks, umd vids, and games. Sony has tricked you into becoming a loyal customer by dangling the golden carrot that is their "unbreakable" firmware.
I'll vote with my dollars and not purchase one at all. The GP2X intrigues me though, even though there is some claim that it will be DRM enabled, I believe that to be just an assurance that it will have the capability of playing shitty DRM files (not that I'd have any anyway).
swanker than you
(As a first side note, I think the GP2X is an interesting throw at an open handheld console.)
That was cute, but you forget one major aspect of humanity in general and geeks in particular:
We're lazy.
And that means we don't uphold our principals 100% of the time. Sure, I'm against closed standards. What's that? A dirt-cheap linux box, with a small (for a PC) form-factor, and they're all identical? I'll take three!
What? Microsoft? Bah, you know they actually LOSE money on the X-Box hardware, don't you?
That said, you could hope the geek masses are more educated than the rest of the tarket market for consoles. Even so, we're a minuscule fraction of the effective market.
You should have realized, by now, that the mass-market actually doesn't care about DRM! As long as they can play Dead Or Alive 5 they just bought on their latest consoles, they're happy.
And finally, sadly, if a console is open, you can bet that the openness will be used 95% of the time to play pirated games, not homebrew ones. Quite simply because commercial games are of much higher quality than any homebrews! Why is that? see my first point...
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
Thankfully, there are no games out that force a 2.0 upgrade that I want. I shiver as a gamer saying that. The battle may soon be won over 2.0, but the war will inevitably be won buy Sony when 2.1 is released to fix this. Games will require it, and if you want to play games, you will have to play *their* game of firmware upgrades. It's silly, stupid, and I hate it. I still have the DS, but Sony, please, please, just let us run our homebrew apps. It's a better world if we all get along. Go after the pirates aggressively, fine. But leave us that just want to run a file-transfer program and ScummVM alone. I love your product, please stop fugging with it.
-- I have fans? Wow.
They sell the PSP at a loss.
Even if this is true, why don't consoles get decent development tools after they become profitable? PS2 Linux is out of print, and it doesn't work on the slim PS2. Why can't a console have licensed games for the first couple years and then both licensed games and homebrew later? Even more unexplainably, why are hardly any consoles opened to homebrew once the console maker stops authorizing new titles on the platform? Why don't other console makers follow the example of Atari, which opened the 7800, Lynx, and Jaguar?
Yeah... Did you read the forums posts on the so called "psp-dev" sites? People are asking when will the loaders enable them to load UMD images. Thats all they ask. Very little people actually code anything "homebrew" beside porting emulators (and even that is half assed most of the time).
I'm sure Sony read those forums and it does play a big part in not letting people run unsigned code.
Frankly, I own a gaming console, you know, for gaming. You may notice a highlighted word there. Hint, it's: gaming.
I do not buy it to make some political statement about open vs closed software. I buy it to play games on it. If Sony has the games I want to play, and some hypothetical vendor has this super-open GPL-conform Stallman-approved ESR-blessed platform without many games, you can guess whose I'll buy. Hint: it starts with "So" and ends with "ny".
The whole "feeding the hand that bites us" metaphor is emotional and all, but I don't feel bitten at all so far. I gave them some money, I got some games I wanted in return. If anything, I'm "feeding them" to get more games like those in the future. But more pragmatically, I'm not "feeding" anyone. I'm just acting in my own interest as a consumer, and buying the one that's the better product for me right now.
And if DRM is what it takes to get those games, fine by me. I can still plug the cartridge or UMD in and play the game, right? Well then why should I care what technologies went into that UMD or the loader in the BIOS?
You assume too much that all geeks are like this or that, all are on a zealot crusade against the very idea of commercial software, and all bought an XBox or a PSP just to run Linux on it. Which is just false. I for example am a terminal geek all right, but I bought my XBox to actually run XBox games like Fable or Jade Empire. Even those two alone make it well worth every cent MS got from me. I know only two people who've modded their XBox and that was to add some multimedia functionality and IIRC a bigger hard drive, not to run Linux on it.
Basically rest assured that when you read news about someone's uber-l33t port of Linux to some game console, you're really reading about a small minority that gives a damn at all, and mostly just to show that they can do it. It's the geek equivalent of showing that you can tear a phonebook with your bare hands: it's not actually _needed_ (there are easier ways to destroy a phonebook), it's not what everyone buys a phonebook for, and it doesn't make it a better phonebook than it was before being torn. It's just a way to show off. Unlike tearing a phone book with your bare hands, though, pretty much noone else gives a damn about it.
Now lot more people will care about it if it lets them pirate UMD games and play them off the memory card. (That was the main reason people modded their PS1, PS2 and XBox, btw: to be able to play pirated games.) But even then we're talking freeloaders, not people on a holy jihad for the glory of OSS. Rest assured that _all_ they wanted was to let someone else (e.g., the rest of us paying customers whose money keeps those devs in business) pay the tab for their gaming, not to make some "free as in speech" political point.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
As I was saying before, I bought it to play games on it. Sony didn't have to "trick" me into anything. They just had to have the games I want to play. That's all.
Yeah, if all you wanted from a portable console was to run some old emulator on it, the PSP might not be the one for you. But then you know what? Go buy whatever console lets you run those, and quit whining already. Does the GP2X let you run those? Well, good for you, then. Get one of those, then, and give it a rest already.
No, seriously. It's not like we don't already have enough Nintendo fanboys ranting and raving about how the PSP is T3H 3V1L!!!111, stiffles innovation, makes God kill small kittens, etc, and how about all of us who bought one are some servants of the Antichrist. I don't need yet another group telling me that I'm some kind of a tricked victim, just because I wanted to play Lumines, Mercury and the racing games.
Get this: most of us actually knew very well what we were buying. There was no trick, there was no broken promise, nothing of the kind. Sony didn't dangle the carrot of "but you'll be able to run a NES emulator on it" in front of us at any point. They only said there'll be games and UMD movies for it. That's all. And I fail to see how buying one for those counts as being "tricked". Did any of Sony's patches make it no longer play UMD games or movies, or what? Well, wake me up if they ever do that, because only then it will count as being "tricked".
And generally, WTF? I thought we were in the "Games" section, not in the "let's whine about proprietary stuff" section. Did this story get posted in the Linux section too, or what?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
That's all fine and dandy except that falls within the 5% (and I think that's highly generous) of homebrew users. Most people will just download isos from some 0-day warez site and play them on their system, completely ignoring all the homebrew software out there. And the few people enjoying homebrew don't make up for the much larger number of people warezing commercial games. Sure, the PSP didn't run pirated PSP games yet AFAIK but it runs emulated games, some of which (GBA, for example) are still being made and sold so "it's abandonware, noone cares" isn't a valid argument.
Sony probably doesn't care about people playing illegal roms but they know that it competes with their licensees and makes the platform less attractive to potential developers. And less licensees == less profit.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Now, I'm all for hacking your PSP into whatever you want it to be, but it's not like Sony's pulling a bait-and-switch. They wanted this thing to be a tightly controlled console that only ran their approved code, and it's been that way since day one. If you bought it with other intents in mind, then hey, have fun making it meet them, but it's not like you can claim that Sony misled you.
I know this probably isn't what you meant, but it does carry that implication.