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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."
The most obvious reason to develop for a home console in this day and age is money. Quite simply, video games on consoles outsell games on PCs by a very wide margin. With the video game market poised to top $10 billion in the US alone this year, it should be fairly obvious why a developer would choose to develop for consoles instead of the PC - sales are higher than on PC, piracy is almost nonexistent compared to PCs, and consoles are both more popular and visible as gaming devices than PCs. You can argue that everybody plays Flash games on PCs and that the PC gaming market is larger than the console market, but I would argue that for people who actually pay money to play video games, consoles are the go-to destination. Some developers are unconcerned with programming as a political statement and just want to develop something that will pay the bills.
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Sony haven't lost. The Xbox 360 has suffered from similar attacks and demonstrated that online patching works. Very few people bothered to perform the hacks during the short time windows in which they worked and even fewer bothered to keep them hacked rather than upgrade or play new games (which require upgrades). The result is that actually finding an Xbox that is still attackable is a heck of a lot easier said than done.
Some people who follow tech news closely will choose to step off the PS3 train at this point and take the ability to play pirated games released up to this point over the online services, multiplayer and new games. Chances are, most people won't.
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.
I think you miss the point entirely. Considering a market were piracy goes unpunished, etc as you indicate is, IMO, sheer lunacy. Either that or I missed the part of the conversation where Sony trying to lock out the jailbreak was being done because the jailbreakers are advocating such a market place.
From what I have seen, (I am part of the PSP jailbreak/homebrew community), most people want to do this becauseof one of the following:
Basically, to me, it seems to get down to most people wanting to do this to be able to have control over a physical item they bought. I am not sure why corporations want to be in such control over the pieces that people have physically purchased. If they modify the product they purchased in a way you don't like, then don't let them connect to your content distribution network (PSN in this case). If they want to modify a game they purchased in some way you don't like, don't let them connect to your multiplayer server, otherwise, their mod is none-of your-business and non-impactive to you (however, you should still be interested in it, because if it becomes popular, it may give you ideas of what you consumers want, and allow you an new channel for revenue). If they illegally distribute the copyrighted material that you so diligently worked on, and is a stream of profit for you, then use DRM like steam uses (Steam's is DRM done right IMO...It allows the flexibility I want, doesn't get in the way of me enjoying a game, and still prevents me from distributing it illegally...(but one might argue, that since it is generally priced decently, and doesn't hinder my enjoyment, I am less inclined to pirate anyways...but I digress).
In theory both communism and capitalism work...so lets learn from the failure of communism and stick to the conditions of the theory in practice. That is, start listening to your consumers, stop manipulating the system (both sides) to make it more advantageous to one side (i.e. the consumer gets 100% free reign, or the producer gets to control everything and charge exorbanent amounts)
I may be dreaming, but dreams cost nothing