Slashdot Mirror
Sony Releases PS3 Firmware Update To Fight Jailbreaks
RyuuzakiTetsuya writes "Destructoid is reporting that the 3.42 firmware has been released for the PlayStation 3, and it has fixed the USB vulnerability that allows the PSJailbreak exploit to work."
Sony's brief announcement of the update refers only to "additional security features," though the EU blog post acknowledges that a vulnerability was addressed. PS3-Hacks.com confirms that the patch is effective against the various jailbreak tools, and they point out a different tool for bypassing the update. Sony told the BBC, "... as we always have, we will continue to take necessary actions to both hardware and software to protect the intellectual content provided on the PlayStation 3."
Huh, that's odd. It was only yesterday that I was being told Sony had lost the PS3 hacking war. Wait a second, this sounds familiar. Did a Texan in a flight suit show up at the unveiling of PSGroove with a giant banner?
My work here is dung.
But if it makes you feel any better, Sony--yeah, you've "won."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's never been really about protecting intellectual content on the PS3. It's always been about how much money Sony can squeeze out of a customer, even after they've already paid for the console. Remember the OtherOS option? Since Sony makes their money from games, a PS3 with Linux installed (whether by an individual owner or as part of some sort of cluster) wouldn't make any money for Sony, so they took away the option, even if the owner bought it just for the OtherOS option.
Same thing with the jailbreaking now. PS3s with homebrew content isn't going to make any money for Sony, so they'll close that option, too. God forbid if Sony ever decides that we don't pay enough for games and starts charging us a dime for every minute we play.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
I have a question: Is there any way I can play pirated/downloaded games off internet and loaded onto PS3 internal disk? with the new software around is there anything I can do? Where can I download many PS3 games?
This must be some new meaning of the word intellectual.
It's a game system. You buy games for it. Get over it.
I can't buy $SomeTitle for PS3 because Sony has turned it down. What should the developer of $SomeTitle do about this?
And in other news, it is reported that the Little Dutch Boy is running out of fingers to stick in the dike.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yeah, because the last hack came out so quickly.
Personally, I'd be happy if people just stopped saying Sony won or lost because reality is nowhere near that simple. Yesterday's news was a setback for Sony, not a loss. Todays news is not a loss for console hackers, it's a setback. Now that the genie's out of the bottle a lot of people are going to do whatever it takes to block updates to their PS3s. Linux is once again possible but piracy is also possible now. I imagine some people at Sony are still pretty shaken by the fact that their unhackable console was hacked.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
" It's always been about how much money Sony can squeeze out of a customer, even after they've already paid for the console."
Let's just compare this asinine claim to reality:
* Sony, just like PC gaming, provides FREE ONLINE to every single PS3 owner.
* Sony provides FREE DEDICATED servers for all major competitive online games just like on the PC
* Sony is developer friendly and completely open to FREE add-on content for PS3 owners to download
* Sony's wildly successful 20 million+ userbase online world, Home, is completely FREE to every PS3 owner
* Sony allows cheap, off the shelf harddrive upgrades
* Sony allows cheap, off the shelf keyboard and mice to be used with the system
Wow, what a bunch of evil gamer hating misers are those Sony guys...
It took them long enough to break the old firmware. There's no reason to assume that breaking the new firmware will be any better.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
A Pandora.
This page suggests that there's a lead time of several months to buy the hardware.
And though Wikipedia has a list of games for the major video game consoles, its article about Pandora lacked such a list. Nor could I find a corresponding with Google games for pandora or list of pandora games. Google pandora release list turned up this list of a bunch of emulators (without any licensed ROMs) and source ports of M-rated first-person shooters developed by Id Software. Do you expect original games with production values comparable to those of well-known PSP games to be produced for the Pandora? Or do you expect people to buy one device exclusively for major-label games and a second device exclusively for indie games?
Seriously, why would anyone want to develop user code for that junk lockout box. Doing so only increases the value of the box for Sony. Sony has burned so many bridges I wonder why anyone would give them there business. Sony is first and foremost a media company and this is incompatible with being an electronics company. An actual electronics company should be on the customers side when engineering the box. These days most engineering on these junk boxes is to prevent function and track users. These devices should not be purchased.
As in "homebrew" pirated games, yes? Do you honestly think more than 10% of the people who "jailbreak" a ps3 are doing it so they can run Linux or play homebrew games on it? Of course not, they are doing it so they can download games and not pay for them. Given the fact that one of the first things that seemed to be released with the new "jailbreak" were ways to play "backups", I think it is pretty obvious what people really want it for. Stop pretending otherwise. Sony is well within their rights to stop people from stealing games. If you are mad at Sony for taking away your ability to play Linux or whatever on it, maybe you should get mad at the "pirates" who feel they are entitled to play games they haven't paid for, because they are the reason Sony has to take away the capabilities.
Just to play devil's advocate here,
I'm really not fond of all the latest sony moves, i miss the other os option just like everybody. but at the same time they are protecting their IP. Because we can claim the homebrew scene all we want. We *know* that most people will be buying the USB dongle to play copies...erm... backups.
I'm not saying there aren't any genuine homebrew and useful mods, I'm saying that most people won't be into that. By stopping us from playing game copies, sony is protecting their IP.
Sony would be way smarter to keep stopping people from playing game copies but at the same time, provide a resource kit for modders to keep on modding. The PS3 is a beautiful and powerful piece of plastic and by providing the other os option (initially) i think sony was in the right track.
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
Until pretty recently, Sony wasn't a very appealing target. For a long time Sony lagged far behind the 360 (at least in the U.S.) and Wii. It's only been in the last year or so that they've gotten enough decent exclusives to finally be on the radar. Combine that with their recent removal of the OtherOS option, and hackers have finally started to actively work on the PS3 as a worthy target. It won't take them years to release the next hack, probably more like months (if not weeks or days).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Sony has been at this war for years with the PSP, and they apparently never figured it out. It wouldn't have been made a priority to develop a homebrew if Sony hadn't removed advertised functionality. I mean SERIOUSLY though, its been out since 17 Nov 2006, no one was making serious effort to hack it until this year.
Once the system has been opened up it can be analyzed in great detail giving hackers many more tools and insight into the system than when it is closed. From here on out, Sony will be fighting a loosing battle. Computer architecture is designed to do what you tell it to do. Up until the hack, Sony was the only one who knew how to phrase the requests, giving then a firm advantage. After the crack, thousands of people have been able to have a good look at the internal workings. There is no way for Sony to get back to where they were, security-wise, without new hardware. The hackers are just going to learn more and more until they can order the machine around as well as Sony.
You raise some interesting points. I hope you're right.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
After the CD rootkit debacle, I will never trust Sony again. They could come to my house bearing roses and I'd kick 'em in the nads.
It's "only" taken 6 months really (since the Other OS functionality was removed and the effort began in earnest) and it's always much easier to re-break these things than it is to break them in the first place.
I can point out a couple examples, one on a Sony system and one on a Nintendo system. Sony allegedly wouldn't let Capcom make a classic-style Mega Man game for the original PlayStation (Mega Man X4 and X5) until it had made a 3D Mega Man game (Mega Man Legends) for the same platform. I seem to remember a Metal Slug game that went Xbox-exclusive for a similar reason: it wasn't 3D enough. Nintendo wouldn't give the developer of Bob's Game the time of day, let alone a devkit.
Plugged the cable and disabled wireless access. We'll see how long I'll 'hang in', but there's certainly no reason to upgrade to 3.42 and given that Sony haven't provided a FW with new worthwhile features in 24 months, I don't see much reason to upgrade 'going forward' either.
Hopefully any future games (say Infamous 2) that req. new firmware can either be patched or a new firmware hacked and then upgraded.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
While I can't stand Sony and wouldn't own a PS3 at least they quickly tackled this. Playing Modern Warfare 2 on the Xbox 360 with all the JTAGed Xboxes running rampant hacking public games on Xbox Live while MS does nothing hasn't been fun this year.
Design a secure game console where the DVD/Blu-Ray access disabled limited in a homebrew mode. With online access and maybe a jailed filesystem for flash access only. (not unlike iOS)
Charge $10-$100 for a homebrew gamedev kit that allows signing of software with your own personal key. No store access or anything of that nature, just straight up binary blob that can be installed on any console while it is connected online, until the key is revoked (like when you violate the terms of service).
Leave the service pretty hands off. Try not to manage it. don't have approval process, or review panels, or anything that wastes money with human staff. It should just funnel money into the company's bank account, the volumes of homebrew devs is so low that breaking even is a problem if managed like every other corporate service/product. (big companies usually/always suck at making money off small volumes)
You give people a legitimate path to do what they claim they want to do. And use the profits to fight the actual pirates.
You and the GP are both so far off base I do not know what to think.
The first one took so long because those who have the skill to do these hacks are not people looking to rip off games. They are people who are driven to take their hardware and do interesting stuff with it. Those people for the most part were satisfied because Sony allowed the "Other OS" option. Other consoles did not. they were hacked, the PS3 was not.
The fact that right after Sony took out the "Other OS" option it was hacked should tell you really fast what is going on. If it dose not I can not help that shortcoming in yourself.
But I think you can see it. I think you are just being dis-ingenious.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
If you had actually read my post, you would see that I specifically mentioned the removal of OtherOS as a primary motivator in hacking the PS3.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
rootkit on CD's - I stopped purchasing CDs
retroactive feature lockout - the PS3 is the last game console I will purchase from Sony, for all its wonder Sony has shown once again that they have nothing but contempt and arrogance toward their customers, a let them eat bread approach, needs to be addressed with a vote from the pocketbook.
As much as it pains me to do so, anyone who will ask me about a game box will get a 'build one' or purchase an XBox 360, I don't see Microsoft as any friendlier towards their consumers but I have seen them act in a fairly straight forward manner regarding DRM and dealing with flawed hardware.
To date Sony has taken away legitimate functionality with the PS3, first with the Linux 'disable' to prevent jailbreaks, which strangely enough, came to be because Sony disabled Linux.
Idiots and fools.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
Sony removed the Other OS option BECAUSE it had already been used to hack the PS3.
The problem with that is that the hole that was found was a software hole. Having opened the system the hackers can easily look for software holes in the existing firmware but not future ones. Each time Sony does an update the hackers have to reveal a hole they've found if they wish to allow people to jailbreak that firmware. Sony have plenty of experience in this from the PSP, there have been many periods during which up-to-date systems could not be jailbroken. They have the added bonus this time that the average PS3 is nearly always connected to PSN and Joe Average is very likely to move to the newest firmware as soon as possible.
The hardware is fairly solid I would say given that after so many years there still isn't a hardware mod-chip, it's not like no one would have been trying.
Didn't this hack merely put the console into development/debug mode? I haven't heard of anyone using the USB hack to so something more "low-level" like restoring the OtherOS feature or allow RSX access in Linux (after all, this USB hack should probably work for those who opted not to update to keep OtherOS). A Sony-created development environment sandbox is far different than a complete hypervisor hack.
Granted, I suppose it may be too early to assess what is really exposed by the USB hack.
Also, MS released group chat (for pay of course, it's a Gold feature) and then lets developers disable it in their games (like Modern Warfare).
Face it, feature sets change for devices over time.
The idea that this hack happened because Linux was removed is absurd. People like to hack stuff. People like to pirate stuff. 360 never had Linux removed and it was hacked. PSP never had Linux removed and it was hacked. DS never had Linux removed and it was hacked.
The Linux sucked anyway, you'd do better to use a netbook.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
No one wants a fucked in the head fanboy like you spewing your garbage on this site.
Get the fuck out and stay out.
I keep hearing this but I finally call bullshit.
Where's the tool chain? Where's the Other OS enabler? Where's Linux?
This hack came from a site that sells MODCHIPS. this didn't come from Dark Alex, Geohot, or anyone else generally involved in the console hacking scene. They released a bootloader for dumped disks. if this came from the mod scene, it wouldn't have cost $150 bucks plus shipping.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Sony removed the Other OS option because they didn't want to maintain the code for the hypervisor.
There's a subtle difference, but, let's face it, what consumers(IE not research outfits looking to break RSA or something) were actually using OtherOS? was it even 1%?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Hilarious!
Some fucking fanboy trying to defend Microsoft garbage online service.
60 dollars a year for lag filled outdated P2P base online gaming. What a fucking joke. No one Sony is destroying the Dreamcast 360 in sales even though it is still 100 or more dollars more expensive even with the millions of duplicate console Microsoft is selling still from the 66 percent RRoD failure rate.
The irony is absolutely precious. Microsoft, the company responsible for PC gaming has the shittiest console online gaming service plagued by horrible lag, host advantage problems, idiotic online fees every year, tiny online game sizes due to the shit P2P networking.
Gotta love being forced to pay 60 bucks every damn year to play lag filled 5vs5 or 8vs8 because the host consoles are flooding their net connections with porn and mp3 torrents.
Sony is teaching Microsoft how to do online gaming right. Why isn't Microsoft learning from Sony?
You can just imagine this assclown Xbot with tears streaming down his face wearing his Halo jammies pounding out his sad little tantrum.
Poor liddle Xbot. How does it feel to have Sony destroying your piece of shit Xbox once again?
But the reason they removed the option from the older consoles which originally shipped with it, was solely geohot's clumsy attempt at pirating the firmware.
I agree with you that it was a niche feature that won't be missed by many people, while a lower price for the console will surely be appreciated more widely.
Well, I have a sinking feeling they had some idea how to patch it so Geohot couldn't get the firmware details and it was either patch the hypervisor and dedicate resources to that or just disable it all together. Given the Other OS removal in the slim, I'm guessing it was a lack of caring.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I take it you've never been to a LAN party
It's hard to set up a LAN party with other family members who either A. don't own their own PC, instead taking turns with someone else in the household, or B. aren't allowed to dismantle it and pack it up, or C. don't own copies of the same games as you.
most PC games don't allow co-op on the same screen anyway.
Why is this the case, now that just about every PC still in use has a USB port for a hub to connect gamepads and a VGA or DVI/HDMI output for HDTVs?
Where's the tool chain? Where's the Other OS enabler? Where's Linux?
Well, given this hack just came out, might it be reasonable to be a little fucking patient? It takes time to bring all that stuff together.
Winning or losing is a very innacurate way to describe what this fight is about.
This is a business model that Sony is protecting, not a couple of third graders arguing over who has cooties.
It's more like Sony is a restaurant that just realized that if someone opens a tab at the bar, they should hold a credit card or driver's license first.
The thing is that while your biggest *market* for a hack to run arbitrary code is always piracy, the producers of the same also tend to be homebrew/tinkerer types. Accordingly, guess what language the hack's distribution is crouched in?
That the "evil piracy" part of it still required you to have an original disc to install from (it's literally just an "Install game from disc completely to HDD" feature) makes it not as bad as it could be.
That the open source implementation of the hack (PSGroove) doesn't support doing even that out of the box (though it's trivial to alter the source to get it to -- you only have to change four values in an array) might suggest something. Yes, PSGroove specifically and explicitly altered the original hack to break the Backup Manager and only the backup manager.
As an aside, a way to get your PS3 to access PSN without patching is already in place, and a homebrew FTP server was also released today.
As for tool chains, an OtherOS enabler, and Linux, the ability to even attempt to homebrew dev for the PS3 has only existed for a few weeks now. Those things take time. Again, an FTP server was released today for the PS3. Baby steps.
The first one took so long because those who have the skill to do these hacks are not people looking to rip off games. They are people who are driven to take their hardware and do interesting stuff with it. Those people for the most part were satisfied because Sony allowed the "Other OS" option. Other consoles did not. they were hacked, the PS3 was not.
Mmmm, I disagree.
Many of us who installed the Other OS option were pretty disappointed with the results -- we thought it would turn the PS3 into a decent computer. In particular, I thought it would be sweet to install, say, an NES emulator or something like that for retro gaming. Unfortunately, when you finally get Yellowdog Linux installed and booted, you find that the environment is sharply restricted -- for example the hypervisor locks out almost all of the graphics capabilities of the PS3, probably so that you can't run games, legit or not.
You heard lots of stories years ago about scientists running simulations and such on the PS3, but yeah.. that was about the only task that Other OS was suitable for. I can't imagine that hackers thinking they could play around inside a next-gen console would be "satisfied" with what they got from Sony. I've never heard of a single person who was. It turns the PS3 into a mostly-headless computer that cost about the same amount of money.
Great. Another update I won't be installing.
The first? The one that removed the Other OS option that triggered this. I still have that option on mine. I haven't exercised it yet, but I want to preserve it, if only for preserving the resale value.
And still I'm considering the jailbreak. Why not achieve even more utility out of my device now that I've been committed to not using the associated service?
I only have two PS3 games. Not much to back up. But it might be fun to tweak them into doing other things, maybe altering them to be more conducive to machinima.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Its just a different cable to buy. A DVI to HDMI cable works great.
NES emulators ran fine on the PS3. Sure, you didn't have 3D access, but 2D games worked pretty well. Played many a game of Nethack on mine.
Combine that with their recent removal of the OtherOS option, and hackers have finally started to actively work on the PS3 as a worthy target.
You and the GP are both so far off base I do not know what to think.
No, if you honestly don't think removing the other OS option was the very reason these hacks started, then you are a retarded moron.
Indeed, the very fact you honestly believe removing OtherOS had nothing to do with this makes the rest of your post not worth reading.
Stupid troll
If you had been following the PS3 thing at all, you would know not a single hack started until they removed OtherOS, so no, that makes YOU so far off base that it doesn't matter what you think, you are just wrong.
+Ignored
Well if the PS3 actually lived up to its touted "It only does everything", then this Jailbreak would not have been needed and all the tools mentioned in the parent, would have been release by Sony or it's partners.
My point was that this wasn't coming from the console hacking community; this is coming from the piracy arm of the "We want open" crowd.
if this was, the hack wouldn't be surviving as a reverse engineer job, it would have been pretty open from the get go. I was refuting the GP's post.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
The backup manager was written with a Sony tool chain, again, if this came from the homebrew scene, why wasn't anyone on building a toolchain so devs could get started ASAP?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I for one would buy a mod chip that would allow me to run Linux on my PS3.
But if it makes you feel any better, Sony--yeah, you've "won."
Me not spending any money ever on a Sony product says otherwise.
Whoever moderated this as a troll can also suck my cock and eat my taint.
You dumb, dumb, sad fuckers are wasting your moderation points modding my posts down, anyhow.
You can all go fuck yourselves with very large chainsaws.
If this was a primary motivator then where the hell is it?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
There is a pretty fair chance that a modchip manufacturer hired one of the better PS3 hackers to pull this off. Heck, more than one such hacker has hinted at having worked on "something", and if you follow the clues it isn't hard to put together one or two suspects.
"this is coming from the piracy arm of the "We want open" crowd."
You're forgetting two things:
So either the original crack was produced by someone with absolutely no business acumen whatsoever, or it was made by someone who enjoyed the necessary work for its own sake and then decided to make a quick buck off his hobby, rather than this being a serious attempt to turn a profit off of pirates. Or perhaps the attempt to cater to pirates was the cracker's attempt to deliberately enrage Sony. Either way, there's really no way to turn a net profit on cracks like this, even before you involve corporate lawyers and/or triads.
Therefore, the most likely source of the original crack is from someone who enjoys working on the PlayStation 3. This brings us to the question "Is this person someone who enjoys coding on the console in general, or someone who focuses on probing the system's security in particular?"
And if it was always about cracking the system's security, why did it "just happen" to take four long years? Why didn't it take three, or five? Why did it "just happen" to closely follow the closing off of other coding opportunities?
So whoever figured this out better out themselves.
I'm pretty sure if they did, that person would be thrilled to have this under their belt.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Sorry but it makes more sense to have rules based on the behavior of the other 999.
where all the games are MMOs thanks to the culture of piracy.
But history has shown this to be completely not the case.
Piracy drove PS2 homebrew(First modchips played PS2 and PSOne burns), piracy drove PSP homebrew(Dark Alex wrote his own compressed ISO format and loader), piracy drove Xbox homebrew(ISO loaders; XBMC came later), piracy drove Xbox 360 homebrew(Drive patching), piracy drove PSOne Homebrew(Mod chips were used primarily FOR piracy).
Piracy comes first then comes homebrew. Whenever in the history of console gaming has it been that the case where homebrew came first then piracy?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Actually, the reason why they removed OtherOS from older consoles was cost of maintaining it. The reason they _gave_ was the geohot hack. As far as I know, removal of the OtherOS did nothing to increase the security of the console, even though that was the stated reason. It was primarily a cost cutting exercise, but they couldn't give that reason to their customers.
As far as I know, removal of the OtherOS did nothing to increase the security of the console, even though that was the stated reason.
Except that it *did* close the geohot hack, which required Linux, because it exploited a bug in the hypervisor. In fact, it was geohot himself who, from his blog, told people not to update to the new firmware until his hack was finalised. Which never happened.
Are you kidding? All of the big publishers have one foot out the door of the PC market, and have for several years, because of the rampant piracy.
Our measurements of piracy rates on a recent AAA title I worked on, were over 90%. If there were more money in the PC market, developers would flock to it -- but consoles are popular, and they *also* have much lower piracy rates.
Believe me, you don't know chagrin until you've spent years of your life crafting a product only to watch it sell maybe 200,000 copies and yet for some reason, several million people are downloading each patch.
To make a AAA game can cost anywhere from $10 million to $40 million or more. It just doesn't make sense to make such games for the PC anymore, because there's an entire generation of PC gamers now who are too fucking cheap to pay for their entertainment, and will just use any excuse to justify pirating it instead.
^^This. And it's even worse, with each new "fix", SONY manages to further box themselves in, further define the parameters of a system that was previously in the dark, from a technical perspective. Each time they try to seal off another hole in the armor, they only end up worse off than if they did nothing at all. Thank you, SONY, for your generous efforts to teach us how your console actually functions.
Moreover, they are effectively showing us the methodology of how they assemble hardware,in general, and are nicely providing a window into how the NEXT console is likely to be assembled, unless they WANT the extra costs involved in redesigning the console technology from the ground up. Such interesting times lie ahead, indeed.
So the PSP hacking scene disappeared after the last firmware that had a kernel mode exploit (necessary to get an ISO loader to work), right? Not so much, in fact Sony closes the current homebrew hole every firmware revision (that's all most of them even do) even though since 5.55 (I think that's the one) they only allow for "legit" homebrew.
Also, it's been a few scant weeks since any homebrew could be created for the PS3, and we only have two examples -- one of them installs a game from a legitimate Blu-Ray PS3 disc to the HDD (this is your big piracy app, and it doesn't mount ISOs or anything like that) and an FTP server.
"Piracy comes first then comes homebrew. Whenever in the history of console gaming has it been that the case where homebrew came first then piracy?"
The PlayStation 3, right on up until they removed the Other OS option.
Piracy is always going to "come first," as you put it, when the first step to running arbitrary code is cracking security. When security needs to be cracked before homebrew programmers are even able to know what they're really dealing with, the only code that will be run while homebrew developers get up to speed is code that already exists: published games.
Piracy is simply the path of least resistance once a crack has been established. It need not be the catalyst for developing the crack to begin with.
Further...
"Piracy drove PS2 homebrew(First modchips played PS2 and PSOne burns)"
In both cases, while there may have been other ways to get sofware into the system, the only firmly established way to get code into the system before a crack was discovered was off of optical media. A console already executes code off of optical media out of the box, that's naturally going to be the first vector to execute arbitrary code, pirated or homebrew, rather than doing the unknown amount of extra work necessary to crack a PS2 to execute code off of USB media, or some cobbled-together serial or parallel cable for the PS1.
ISOs are going to come first because they're the path of least resistance into getting through a console's security.
With the PS2 and homebrew. It was independence. That's when homebrew really went anywhere.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
The geohot hack was never going to be a way to run pirated games. It is only used to examine the hypervisor. You _need_ the GameOS to run PS3 games, and therefore you need to hack the GameOS to enable piracy. The OtherOS system was useless in that regard.
So I say again, by removing OtherOS, there was no increase in security. Hackers are still going to use Linux to examine the hypervisor, because they will not be upgrading their firmware. The regular PS3 user can still make use of any product of that examination, regardless of the existence of OtherOS.
Quick update, there's an open source tool chain now.
http://github.com/ooPo/ps3toolchain/tree/development
As soon as I saw this web column I determined Slashdot Game Story's viewers have to read this: http://hubpages.com/hub/rent-a-laptop-rentals . Renting a laptop is just plain crazy! The money of renting a laptop for just a few weeks will cost you as much as simply going online and purchasing the portable PC!
See how geohot was happy to admit he was searching for the Cell root key and that his exploit could be used to run pirate games.
The point of removing the OtherOS was not to stop hackers from analysing the PS3, it was to remove a convenient way for *end users* to apply hackers' findings on their machines.
Sadly for Sony, somebody found an even more convenient way...
Sorry, I don't get what you call 'evident'. To me, what is evident is that you cannot run PS3 games from Linux, well, unless someone codes a GameOS replacement that runs under Linux, similar to what Wine does. I hope you realise that PS3 games need the GameOS to run. Also, that the GameOS and the Linux kernel cannot coexist at the same time. It's like trying to run Windows and Linux on the same CPU, unless it was possible to run the GameOS in a virtual machine. In which case, you'd barely have any RAM left to actually run a game.
Finding the console root key is completely different to running games under Linux. With the root key, you've got full access to all keys used with the system. You can install packages under the GameOS. You do not need Linux to do anything.
Your article has actually proved my point. The OtherOS was never going to be a way to run pirated games. It is used to discover more about the system, and that information is used to find other ways to circumvent the system. This is why removing the OtherOS has in no way increased the security of the PS3. This is what I earnestly find evident.
It is impossible to run PS3 games from Linux on the PS3 hardware. The technical difficulties are insurmountable. Please, prove me wrong if you can.
1) Geohot himself said his exploit could be used to run pirated games. Is he wrong about his own work?
2) OtherOS was the preferred way for end users to apply to their console any exploit found by hackers. For instance, geohot's hack required Linux (and some hardware). Such exploits could patch GameOS from Linux, to play games in GameOS. The least Sony could do, from their point of view of course, would be to deprive the users of this commodity.
And I would also add, 3) Less OtherOS-enabled consoles in the wild means less curious eyes peeking at Sony's hypervisor bugs.
As for running games under Linux, I do not have sufficient technical knowledge of the console to speculate about the feasibility of such an option. After having OtherOS dumped, I don't see why an architecture with virtualization support couldn't emulate a different operating system, even by ripping and patching the game code if necessary. It's not a matter of running two kernels at the same time, but rather of making one kernel expose the application interface of the other. Or, a jailbroken Linux kernel might even kexec a patched image of OtherOS if necessary. I think the problems would probably derive more from Cell's security features than from technical limitations.
Nice points. Though I would not take Geohot's word on everything. He has displayed admirable skill with his memory glitch to get code to run through the hypervisor, but he doesn't know the PS3 system well enough to make the claims he does. But, don't just take my word for it, also listen to another hacker who has actually used the exploit.
The memory glitch was never going to be used by regular users. It's quite cumbersome, and requires a high level of skill to successfully use. It could have been used to allow the Linux kernel more direct access to the hardware. That would have been some work, but it would have been possible. Still, it's not very practical for your average user.
Less OtherOS enabled consoles? It's too late. They're out there. The hackers have them. The information is free. Disabling OtherOS has done nothing to stop this. Disabling OtherOS has not improved PS3 security one iota.
Virtualization support? Technically possible. Practically, it's useless. I brought up this point in my previous post. You could probably get the GameOS running, but to actually run a game under it, you'd need twice the RAM that the PS3 actually has.