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PS3 Hacked?
Several readers have sent word that George Hotz (a.k.a. geohot), the hacker best known for unlocking Apple's iPhone, says he has now hacked the PlayStation 3. From his blog post:
"I have read/write access to the entire system memory, and HV level access to the processor. In other words, I have hacked the PS3. The rest is just software. And reversing. I have a lot of reversing ahead of me, as I now have dumps of LV0 and LV1. I've also dumped the NAND without removing it or a modchip. 3 years, 2 months, 11 days...that's a pretty secure system. ... As far as the exploit goes, I'm not revealing it yet. The theory isn't really patchable, but they can make implementations much harder. Also, for obvious reasons I can't post dumps. I'm hoping to find the decryption keys and post them, but they may be embedded in hardware. Hopefully keys are setup like the iPhone's KBAG."
This whole DLNA (DNLA?) rubbish is gross, it's so backwards.
I don't want to transcode, I just want a damned good media centre (and a gaming machine!) the XBMC devs had started considering work on the PS3 a long time ago but then Sony closed the loophole to access the video card under linux (or rather accelerated mode?) so it was scrapped.
The PS3 is a fantastic chunk of hardware and while I'd really rather not get banned from their system as I have no intention (or time anymore) to pirate games, I'd love to see the machine play back stuff a bit better. (it does fairly well now but it's nothing on XBMC)
The machine has 256mb of system ram, does 1080p output, optical output, 7.1 dolby hardware, wifi, hard disk, USB 2.0, gigabit networking - it's more than enough to do HD XBMC.
Fingers crossed in 12 to 18 months time there's some kind of news.
Linux on PS3 for non-scientific work has been a disappointing experience. There is very little code out there that uses the SPUs (and the PPU stinks for general purpose computing) and the hypervisor prevents hardware accelerated graphics.
While the first issue has to do with the community, the second is a restriction imposed by Sony. Perhaps this hack will make it possible to use the RSX (PS3's hardware graphics) in Linux? Maybe then an SNES emulator will run better on a PS3 than a second-gen iMac.
What is the Linux community's willingness to embrace a hack such as this?
Oh, sure, that's probably true. But if it's made difficult enough, and the vendor is vigilant for hacking, it can be made almost impossible. Take the 360, where just a couple months ago a ton of hacked consoles were banned from Xbox Live forever. Most people just don't bother with hacking because they know that one day Microsoft might bring the hammer down on them for online play. And it works. I have several friends who pirate practically all the media they consume, but they have vanilla unmodded Xboxes and buy their games. Why? Because Microsoft's anti-piracy and anti-cheat has been overall successful, and really the only way you can cheat on Live is with a lag switch, and even that is harder now since most games let people boot obvious cheaters. What has been said in jest many many times here, I say with a straight face. I, for one, welcome our new online game overlords. I don't play online PC games anymore because of all the cheating issues. There are sooo many less cheaters on Xbox it's a whole different world.
Before anyone goes "oh, this is only so people can play copies and cheat".
Read the other comments. See what people would like out of their PS3. They want to do "real" homebrew software, with full hardware access instead of the castrated version Sony "allows". They want to use their PS3 as a Media Center, something that's simply impossible with the current setup.
Give the people what they want and they will not crack your hardware open. Sure, some will do it for the "going to the moon" reason (it's there, and we can), but most will want their box to do what they want to do. If the box does it, no hacking will happen.
I modded my old XBox. Why? Because I wanted to run XBMC. It wanted a way to stream my movies on my HD to my TV easily. The XBox was there, a TV card for my computer wasn't (the SVideo output was really crappy), so it was a no brainer that I'd want my XBox which had logically a good TV compatible output to do the trick. It didn't do it out of the box, so it was modded. Oddly, I never bought a single game ever since, wonder why that could be...
Bottom line, when people "hack" a platform, they will of course strip all copy restriction as well, simply because it limits the ability of the box and it's possible. If you want to keep your users from hacking their box, give the box any ability your users might want to get out of it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.