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Sony Update Bricks Playstations
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."
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".
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.
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.