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Sony Halts Sales of PS3 Jailbreak Dongle

Posted by Soulskill on from the party's-over dept.

An anonymous reader tips news that "Online Australian retailer Quantronics has been ordered by the Federal Court of Australia, Victoria District Registry on the 26 August 2010 to halt PS JailBreak PS3 modchip sales and distribution." The court order (.DOC) indicates this injunction will hold until a hearing on August 31. Another reader points out related news that a German website claims to have reverse engineered the hack, finding it to be a newly-developed exploit rather than a clone of Sony's JIG module (original in German). Sony has already been banning users of the modchip when detected.

10 of 179 comments (clear)

  1. Fuck you, Sony by Pojut · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I still buy your consoles and games beause I enjoy them...I can't escape that. However, I will NEVER forgive you for what you did to Lik Sang. You will forever be bastards because of that.

    Oh, and guess what? I buy all your games USED.

    --
    Living With a Nerd
    1. Re:Fuck you, Sony by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You mean his sig? His sig that plugs his site? No one else's sig plugs their site? His sig that you can turn off if you don't want to see it? You mean him plugging Kotaku, like kotaku needs plugging? I'm not sure I see your angle.

    2. Re:Fuck you, Sony by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Think about it. $50 spent on a Nintendo game in 1985 (and there were often costlier games) would cost $98.37 today. Looking at a more recent period of time, a $50 PS1 game would in '95 cost 69.71 today. And yet the uproar over the bump up to $60 for current generation games was immense.

      Physical costs have also plummeted. And the industry has moved to disc-based games. Development platforms cost less (adjusted for inflation.)

      The problem is with games' exponentially rising budgets the industry can't sustain itself.

      Which comes from people trying to one-up each other. It's a bubble, just like the housing market. The industry is doing this to itself.

      As you say, Nintendo saw the writing on the wall and sidestepped the competition. They were agile and continue to make good money. That Sony and Microsoft can't do this isn't really the consumer's fault--yet game devs treat consumers like shit if they even think about buying a game used.

      Here's a tip: the secondhand market actually helps stimulate the primary market. The fact that a gamer (or driver, or reader) knows that they can resell their item makes them more likely to buy it at full price. All the while, the producers are building up cred with the people who can't afford to buy things at full price. One day, they will be able to--they won't have to wait for and fight over used games--and then they will become the new primary customers.

      But more to the point, this is just more buggy-whip shenanigans. The big production studios don't want to change their ways--they want to continue growing and growing and making bigger and bigger games--and they want to force consumers to change their behavior to suit the old business model. It's pretty much bullshit.

  2. Re:Sorry Sony ... by MozeeToby · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Jail Break City, where people who bought your crap can enjoy it how they want

    Unless of course if 'they want' to log into the PSN or play on Sony's servers. Just saying, there's plenty that Sony can do, especially since this is the only hack available and it can apparently be detected server side.

  3. iTunes and Palm Pre by gnasher719 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This reminds me of the situation with iTunes and the Palm Pre. Basically, the Palm Pre had a USB interface that claimed there was an Apple iPod, so that iTunes would transfer music to the device. Then Apple added code to iTunes to detect devices that _claimed_ to be Apple iPods, but were not actually Apple iPods, so this Palm Pre feature broke, and after another round of changing the Palm Pre interface and Apple again detecting it, Palm gave up.

    Now this article proves that a USB device under control of an attacker is a possible attack vector. Which means that Apple was quite right, for security reasons, to refuse connection to dodgy devices. Of course this attack is slightly different; seems they first attacked the USB system software itself by plugging in intentionally broken USB devices, but it is quite conceivable that iTunes could be attacked by a USB device pretending to be an iPod (presumably anything that doesn't pretend to be an iPod, like the broken USB devices in this attack, would never make it to the iTunes software).

  4. Re:France by debile · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Universal health care, cure French girls, good restaurants, great culture (ok ok immigration problems but hey, habla espagnol?)

    France is not as bad as depicted, especially when you compare CURRENT standards of living in the US, not the ones that were true 5-10 years ago

  5. Re:WTF? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You sir are a clueless cretin if you actually believe this dongle wouldn't be on sales had it not been for Sony removing OtherOS.

    This dongle is for piracy, nothing else....

    Simple as that, it does not allow you to boot Linux, and has no legitimate purpose. The backup excuse does not wash either, as Blu-Ray disks are not scratchable like DVD is.

  6. Re:France by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Oh I know, I just like to hate on the French because I am Canadian, thus forced to try and learn the language for half a dozen years of my life despite whether I want to or not (and they're forced to try English whether they want to or not, so its a mutual dislike for each other). I wouldn't normally hold a grudge but the drivers in Quebec (mostly Montreal though) are quite possibly the worst drivers on the planet. The stop sign is just a suggestion over there.

    None of that really has anything to do with France, in fact, I think the French don't like Quebec either, for butchering their language, but its all tomato tomahto in a general sense so all french get tossed in together. Is that fair? meh, C'est la vie.

  7. Re:Sorry Sony ... by slinches · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Uh, you need to sign into PSN to use Netflix

    That's not true. Netflix streaming works without logging into PSN. I have a fat PS3 that I haven't updated (so that I can keep the Other OS option) and I stream movies regularly. Although, I am a bit concerned that they may disable the disks when they release the software version in October. If that requires a firmware update, I may need to jailbreak just to keep Netflix.

    --
    Knowledge Brings Fear
  8. Re:Cute, but that's it by Schadrach · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Seriously? It always looks like this to me:

    There are two groups of people, those who want to pirate, and those who want to develop/homebrew/tinker. There is some overlap between the two, but most of the technical skill is in the latter and most of the money willing to buy something from you is in the former, so long as you are cheaper than the total number of games they wish to pirate.

    If the homebrew guys can do their thing uninterrupted, there's less development put towards making a modchip, but once one is made it has to be presented in a way that makes piracy clear in order to sell enough that the developer recoups his time/effort circumventing protections that are too restrictive to let him do his thing.

    Really, what's needed is a restricted version of the dev kit aimed at homebrewers -- say one that explicitly disables any access to the optical drive or anything else that might be used for piracy, and is signed under a different key to enforce that. Keeps the homebrewers happy, and reduces the talent pool for the "bad" kinds of exploits. All at the cost of letting homebrewers do their thing.