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Geohot Brings Other OS Support To PS3 With Custom Firmware
suraj.sun tips news that hacker Geohot is following through on his promise to fight Sony's removal of the "Install Other OS" feature on the PS3. He posted a video of the work he's done so far that shows a PS3 console booting into Linux. Quoting Engadget: "While it's not available to the public just yet, Geohot's 3.21OO custom firmware will apparently be simple to install and, as you can see in the video after the break, it works just as you'd expect and simply restores the 'other OS' option to its previous place. Geohot even says that the custom firmware might actually enable the other OS feature on the PS3 Slim, but he hasn't yet had a chance to try it out."
I hope you are happy Sony.
You made it this far without people building custom firmware. Now you've forced people to find ways to put custom firmware on the PS3. Next up is "indie" games followed by pirates followed by the game industry going back to PCs or over to other consoles.
Too bad. I actually liked by PS3. Hopefully something new will come along soon so I won't have to buy an xbox...
PS3 is a GAME CONSOLE, not a COMPUTER.
Mustang is a MUSCLE CAR, not a VEHICLE!
"Somebody", specifically "Sony".
I'm getting tired of this "But that insolent peasant just wouldn't know his place and show proper gratitude for the scraps he'd been given, so poor Sony was forced to retroactively remove a feature; let us all shed a tear for Sony." crap.
The whole point of the removal was to thwart Gehot's efforts on the PS3 hack.
I'm not 100% on this, but I really don't see Sony taking this lightly. They want to remain unhacked, so this is the way they see fit.
To me, this expands the base of people hacking their console.
Hacking the PS3 to run 'backup' games would be a suitable punishment for sony imho
Which would be precisely the reason they made this change in the first place and does nothing but prove them right.
I'm inclined to believe that the 'Other OS' functionality did more to prevent copyright infringement than it did to assist it.
There are plenty of very skilled hackers out there who have no interest in copied games, they just want the freedom to use their hardware as they wish, or even just the challenge and the kudos for breaking a supposedly secure system. Once the work is done, however, it is often a relatively simple matter for the same exploits to be used by others to run copied discs.
By giving the hackers (used in the traditional sense of the word) what they wanted in the first place with the 'Other OS' functionality, Sony prevented them from needing to bother cracking the security, and that meant that the pirates didn't have anything to build on. As soon as Sony took that function away, we see exploits to restore it - I don't know how much this is linked to the DRM on the game discs, but my instinct would be that some of the work there has already been done now.