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PlayStation 3 Hack Released Online

Posted by Soulskill on from the let-the-games-begin dept.

itwbennett writes "On Friday, George Hotz, best known for cracking Apple's iPhone, said he had managed to hack the PlayStation 3 after five weeks of work with 'very simple hardware cleverly applied, and some not so simple software.' Days later, he has now released the exploit, saying in a blog post that he wanted to see what others could do with it. 'Hopefully, this will ignite the PS3 scene, and you will organize and figure out how to use this to do practical things, like the iPhone when jailbreaks were first released,' he wrote. 'I have a life to get back to and can't keep working on this all day and night.'" Reader MBCook points out an article written by Nate Lawson "explaining how the hack bypasses the hypervisor to gain unrestricted access to memory. It seems the trick is to use a pulse to glitch the hypervisor while it's unmapping memory, leaving a favorable page table entry."

4 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Does this open the floodgates? by decipher_saint · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I often wonder if part of the success of the original XBox was it's "hackability".

    Anyone care to weigh in?

    --
    crazy dynamite monkey
  2. Re:This guy is a hack, not a hacker. by Sir_Lewk · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Trying and failing where none have succeeded before does not a "hack" make.

    If indeed he simply duplicated what someone else has done before then that does diminish this acheivement, but I have heard nothing of the sort, you are an AC, and have not provided any citations.

    Your ad hominem attack, and your unprovoked lashing out at game piraters makes me think that you have a personal stake in this somehow. Without citations, I'm going to go ahead and say you are full of shit.

    --
    "linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
  3. Re:Summary of what I've seen so far by Sir_Lewk · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Presumably getting the keys and pirating games is not the only thing someone might want to do with a PS3.

    Unless the keys are somehow related to allowing linux to use the GPU, which I have not seen indicated anywhere, then anyone bitching about how this hack is worthless because he still can't get the keys seems terribly singleminded.

    --
    "linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
  4. Re:What could this mean for Blue-Ray by Rennt · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Much like DVD before it, the law may have been sufficiently designed to prevent distribution of an open source player, but Blu-Ray encryption is not an obstacle to developing one.