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Sony Update Bricks Playstations

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the when-upgrades-are-downgrades dept.

Stoobalou writes "A controversial update which was seeded by Sony in order to remove the ability to run Linux on the Playstation 3 games console has caused a storm of complaints. The 3.21 firmware upgrade, which removes the security hole provided by the 'Install Other OS' widget used by lots of educational institutions and hackers alike, also removes the console's ability to play games... turning it into a very expensive doorstop."

9 of 510 comments (clear)

  1. Par for the course? by bjourne · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So is there any console or other electronic gadget you can buy nowadays which does not include forced locked own firmware updates that has the possibility of breaking it? Both Xbox360 and the Wii are just as locked down as the PS3.

    --
    Football Odds
    1. Re:Par for the course? by elrous0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      No, there is one word to explain that: blu-ray. It's the same reason there as very little DVD movie piracy in the mid-late 90's (very few people had burners and security cracks yet).

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      SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
    2. Re:Par for the course? by tagno25 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I cannot brick my Android phone. Event deleting the firmware it still boots to the flash loader.

    3. Re:Par for the course? by marcansoft · · Score: 5, Interesting

      And yet the PS3 isn't tougher to hack in the way geohot has (certainly not given Other OS). Look at geohot's hack: it's a simple RAM glitch, much like the one tmbinc pioneered over 2 years ago on the Wii ("twiizer attack"). Now that hacks are out for all consoles, we can compare the relative difficulty. Compare the PS3 (plaintext hypervisor in RAM, no hashing) to the Xbox 360 (encrypted hypervisor in RAM, hashing, encrypted executables). Both consoles have good security, but the PS3 hack is significantly simpler than 360 hacks from a technical perspective (drive hacks notwithstanding - that's a whole different ballgame). That's also confirmed given how little time it took geohot to get it to work, even though he was completely unfamiliar with the PS3 when he started a few months earlier. Even the Xbox1 LDT bus tap by Andrew "bunnie" Huang was orders of magnitude more complicated, and yet he pulled it off in 2001.

      As a console hacker myself, I know quite a few others, and I can definitely say that interest in hacking the PS3 was near nonexistent before the Slim came out (sans Other OS), except for a couple Linux folks trying to poke holes in the hypercall interface to get access to the GPU.

    4. Re:Par for the course? by marcansoft · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I can only speak from my experience in Wii hacking, but I can safely say that the dude who "developed" wii softmod piracy on the Wii did so by duct-taping together existing homebrew in a very poor way. He can barely reverse engineer software and he hasn't contributed a single breakthrough to the hacking community - all he does is leech off of homebrew and present his duct-taped solutions and GUIs as breakthroughs. At the same time, he doesn't understand the implications of what he does, nor does he properly comprehend the system architecture, and he also doesn't bother with safety. This conspires to make Wii softmod particularly dangerous to the uninitiated, as you're almost guaranteed to permanently brick your Wii if you blindly do stuff, and still dangerous even for experienced pirates, as some of his tools just flat out randomly brick consoles for no reason at all.

      The day he preannounced his USB loader for the Wii (something highly predictable, as someone had recently released high-speed USB drivers for homebrew), I decided to carry out an exercise and see how long it would take me to build the core functionality by doing what he does - duct-tape together existing modules and tools. The answer is that what is widely considered to be his major breakthrough amounts to 6 hours of actual work, plus polish and a bad GUI. I had a video proof-of-concept going before he even had a chance to release his loader.

      It might be different on other consoles; that I do not know.

  2. Just like every other FW update they do by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yes, every single system update brings out dozens of "complaints" how it bricked their system. You'll note the very low number of posts against each of these user in the forums too, creating their account to troll or complain is the question? You get the same thing when major games are released. Trolls or genuine reports has never been determined because no one ever follows up the complaints with real people to determine validity, but nevertheless, people write these problems "stories".

  3. This always happens by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Over the life of my PS3, updates have commonly caused severe issues. I've had to reformat the hard drive several times and I even had to send it in to be "repaired" after updating. Sony really needs to work on not breaking their own system.

  4. Is this even legal? by Dialecticus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I wonder whether the intentional removal of a major feature which was present at time of purchase, and which for many was the primary reason for said purchase, is in any way actionable.

  5. My $0.02 by Pojut · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Our 250GB PS3 Slim has been fine after the latest update...no freezing or game launching problems. I can't RTFA due to work filters, but I would imagine that this update wouldn't cause problems with Slim PS3s anyway, since out of the box you already can't install Linux on there.

    Can anyone tell me if TFA says anything about Slim PS3s?

    --
    Living With a Nerd