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Police Raid PS3 Hacker's House, Hacker Releases PS3 'Hypervisor Bible'
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from PSGroove.com:
"Graf_chokolo, who has contributed countless things to the PS3 scene, had his private home raided by police this morning. They confiscated all of his 'accounts' and anything related to PS3 hacking. Some of you may remember that graf_chokolo promised if he was pushed, that he would release all of his PS3 hypervisor knowledge to the world. He kept good on this promise, releasing what is being dubbed as the Hypervisor Bible. 'The uploaded files contains his database, which is a series of tools for the PS3's Hypervisor and Hypervisor processes. It will help other devs to reverse engineer the hypervisor of PS3 further.'"
I think Sony is only a few months away from being told exactly the same thing by the US and EU governments. i.e. Just as cellphones can be jailbroken, so too can consoles.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
Something may need to be done, but does that "something" preclude people from using a product that they purchased by busting down their door and stealing all their equipment? Remember back in the old days when people would take things apart just to learn how they worked? Old toasters, microwaves, circuitry sets, etc. It really seems like we're forgetting that whole aspect of learning.
DONT buy sony. dont let anyone around you, buy sony.
Read radical news here
I don't agree with the way Sony is doing it, but at least they are doing something. Some of the multiplayer games are completely unplayable as cheating is rampant. Something needs to be done as they're ruining the games for honest players.
Server-side checks: You don't have to Like Blizzard's "got-to-be-online-to-play" for Starcraft II, but notice: no cheating, with 1000000+ connected users and a easy to hack platform (PC+Mac).
If your game uses p2p connections and no gameplay server, some care in designing the protocol will make it much harder to cheat. Deterministic sync'hing with input passing, for example, will provide you a no-cheating solution. There's many other options.
Problem with cheating is that about no one in the industry cares about quality. Don't go justifying Sony's action on gamer's cheating. Find something better.
Those exploits have nothing to do with the hypervisor being compromised. They have been around long before these cracks and are the fault of the game developers. You can fault Sony for not being more proactive in cracking down on such cheaters, but you can't blame these guys who are cracking the system wide open. Though obviously they're not helping on that front either.
The entire fiasco with people getting arrested for modifying their own property is due to the DMCA's circumvention clause. Because the DMCA casts doubt on basic ownership rights I think that the base law is flawed.
If I want to buy a cheap super-computer or mod my Xbox 360 into a media center that should be a given-right: I bought the hardware so go to hell without my Freedom to Tinker.
Shh.
I'd rather the enjoyment of people games be ruined than have a state that kicks down doors because a person too apart a bit of kit they own.
P.S.
>>>Something needs to be done as they're ruining the games for honest players.
I agree and banning modded consoles is the solution, NOT shipping people off to jail for 5 years. Sony's approach is extreme overkill for what is, basically, just a toy. It's akin to locking-up someone because they modded Optimus Prime with electronics to self-transform, and then shared the plans online. ("Oh no! Got to lock him up for modding our toy!" - Hasbro.)
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
For Sony it's not really about cheating, it's about getting their royalty every time a game is sold. It's the same reason why "Other OS" wasn't allowed full access to the processing power of the PS3. If writing games in Linux had become a viable option on the PS3 then at least some companies would have considered distributing some of their content that way, saving themselves a huge margin. Incidentally cheating will always be an issue if your game's server trusts the client excessively anyway.
>>>Some of the multiplayer games are completely unplayable in the opinion of commodore6502 and are thus clearly must be unplayable to everyone
Fixed that fixed that for you, for you.
NEVER to buy anything made by Sony
They could also just require you to be logged into their service to play multiplayer; forcing people to be online for singleplayer is a retarded policy. Some of us are regularly in hotels and we don't always have a network connection (and if we do there's no guarantee the connection is any good), or your provider might have some big outage etc etc.
Forcing people to be online for an offline game or offline play is just a big no-no.
You don't really understand the full nature of cheating. It's easy to stop some things, but if someone has a wall hack or aimbot, no amount of server side checks will distinguish that from a skilled player. That is, unless the server just precomputes all sound and graphics and sends them to the client, rather than telling the client exactly where sounds are to originate from, or where enemy player models are.
which is totally what she said
Was it really necessary for the police to wear Riot gear and Bust down the door? Did they think this gamer was going to beat them with a ps3 controller??? I bet they shot his little dog too (standard operating procedure).
Jeez. All they needed to do was knock and say, "We have a warrant to search your home," like polite servants. - Stupid SA
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
This is the entirety of the original source material for this story:
"SONY was today at my home"? That's not how raids work. In the US, Sony had to go through some rather extensive legal action to be able to get a TRO on geohot, and now they've convinced the German police to raid some random hacker's house out of nowhere? He's also not even one of the more prominent people involved, and had very little to do both with the core hacks and with subsequent piracy tools - he mostly worked on his own on hypervisor reverse engineering and there's just about nothing they could charge him with. This would also be the first action taken by SCEE regarding this entire issue. And you'd expect someone other than graf_chokolo to notice, publish, or somehow independently report the raid. Not to mention that if you're raided, the first thing you do is talk to an attorney, not post a care package online (as "proof"?). None of this makes any sense.
He did mention that if he ever got a takedown notice from Sony or something along those lines, he'd release his hypervisor disassembler database. I think it's more likely that he got tired of waiting and just made up an excuse.
http://grafchokolo.com/ps3-development-page.html
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
Then I retort simply -- how then can *you* tell the difference between an aimbotter/wallhacker and a skilled player? If it's not just an entirely subjective "he's too much better at it than I am", then shouldn't you be able to gauge some kind of metric to weed them out?
At the same time, shouldn't it be simple enough to publish an update to the game that includes some kind of anti-cheat code, rather than "I assume that the client is always right and completely honest at all times"? I thought "never trust the client" was the first rule of security for games like these?
Moral of the story...
If you found some really good info on cracking a bit of hardware, you had better create a pseudonym and set up a way to hide your tracks online before you release the stuff. Hide who you are, use open relays and proxies outside of the country, do uploads or connects only from public wifi points... You have to hide like a spy because the corporations control the police and government and can get the cops in full SWAT mode to bash down your door and hit you in the head with a rifle butt several times.
Honestly, STOP this stupid "for my rep and street cred yo!" crap, release anonymously and cover your tracks. stop putting up neon signs for the corporate and government goons to come and get you.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If it's a big no-no on the PLAYSTATION 3, then why isn't it a big no-no on the PC?
You've got me. I think it's a big deal on the PC, too. I get connected to Steam every time I start it whether I'm in offline mode or not, what a gigantic piece of shit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why d'ont you go after the people who download illegal software then?
The magical number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Um, no it's not. While I agree with the first part of your statement, an Optimus Prime toy doesn't yet have a built in commerce engine, play 1000s of movies or provide additional revenue that Hasbro bases their financial projections on to remain a profitable company.
FTFY. "Buy the new Optimus Prime EX Super Toy with up to 500 lines from the Transformers movies!
Base toy comes with five lines, additional lines sold separately, use of addon voice packs requires continuous connection to wireless network to validate content, see our website for more detail.
I think the more important question is....what laws did the guy break in the first place? Did he break ANY or is this just another case of the idiotic way americans bow down and worship business?
Uhhhh, do you REALLY think that was an actual photo of this particular raid, and not just some stock photo of a police raid? You really think they planned this raid, then brought in a photographer to do an artsy photo with a lensbaby, and then released that photo to the press?
I just want my Linux partition back without having to give up the PSN. Cheaters suck but really its no better than trying to play against the 18 hour a day basement dwellers.
Did taking about that toaster or microwave to see how it worked enable people around the world to download free toast that someone else spent tons of time making?
That would be great! World hunger would be more or less solved. But that's bad because capitalism is obviously good (just like scarcity)!
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
The stupid thing is the double standard regarding this sort of thing. Books are released all the time that go into detail about how to hack various OSs, systems, platforms, etc, all under the guise of "prevention," and I don't see anyone kicking down the doors of those publishing companies or the book authors...
There is something very wrong with the legal system in this country...
Here's an idea: don't trade your freedom just to gain access to video games. Don't fall for the bait and switch. You can play games on your desktop, which as far as I know is not designed to restrict your use of it.
Palm trees and 8
No, only nine people are presently empowered to have the final say on what the Constitution really means. That's not even remotely the same thing. Over the generations those nine people change, and the collective interpretation of the Constitution changes with it. Even within the Supreme Court, there are plenty of disagreements about what it "really means" - hence the large number of 5:4 decisions.
I am very wary of a blanket statement such as yours - it smacks of idolatry. You speak of it as though the Constitution had only one possible correct interpretation: one True Way. Human endeavors don't work that way.
The Constitution is not some mathematical proof that contains a unique truth so complicated and abstruse that only nine people could possibly decipher it. Lots of people know plenty about the Constitution and what it means. Citizens can read the document and investigate precedent; lawyers are trained to do that; some judges and scholars make a career of it. To a certain extent, every judge in every jurisdiction can profess to know the Constitution. Occasionally, lower court judges' interpretation of constitutionality is overturned by higher courts, and that can eventually make its way up to those nine people in the Supreme Court. It is not like every matter relating to the U.S. Constitution ends up in front of the supremes. The fact that only a tiny fraction of cases end up being heard by them is a testament that, in fact, more than nine people know what the Constitution really means.
Couldn't you just turn on your aimbot, take down 15-20 cops, and the walk through the back wall and into the street?
And even then, I think there are many cases where they shit on the spirit of the constitution in order to push their agenda anyway (eg - I do not think the tax laws we now have are the same as the founding fathers intended)
Federal tax law might not be the best example of defecating on the Constitution's spirit. The Constitution was amended specifically to allow an income tax.
I'm tired of this ignorant response. Hotz has nothing to do with the hacks you may or may not be seeing in games. All he has done is returned the PS3 to it's originally sold capabilities, which allow you to run alternate operating systems and various bits of homebrew or other creations. He is no more responsible for someone using it deviously than Intel is responsible for any activities you conduct on your Intel-based computer.
I'd rather anything, than for government agents to be doing the bidding of corporations in what should be CIVIL cases.
There is no evidence that the police "busted down" his door. I did a little googling after I read the previous comment that referred to that and discovered two things. First, the site linked in the summary is a site that doesn't actually go out and find news. They just report stories that they find that are of interest to their readers. Second, none of the other sites which reported on this story contained such a picture, and all of them talked very generically about the police raiding his house and seizing his equipment. This means that there is no report local to Graf_chokolo of the police conducting a SWAT style raid. As a matter of fact, from the tone of the other reports, I would have to conclude that the police showed up at his door with a warrant and knocked.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Welcome to the Incorporated States of America. The Pledge of Allegiance will now be an EULA that school children will be forced to scroll through and click "Agree" on every morning for 12 years.
Fuck them all. Get a PC. Even running Linux (!) you can play so many games for so long, day after day, completely wasting every spare hour of your life. Medical technology will never advance the human lifespan long enough such that even Linux gaming (and c'mon, it's not like Linux is the gaming platform) can ever be exhausted by any one person, even if that person drops out of school and work completely and takes meth all the time so they never sleep. It is so ridiculous to whine about non-evil game platform unavailability when even the most meager non-evil platform has so much to waste your time on. ;-) Fuck Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft. The world is bigger than them.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I have to say, I am not impressed by this. At the end of the day, it is a CIVIL matter. From the look of that copper (an employee of the state!) bashing down the door, its the type of thing you see on police camera action.
BTW Sony, kiss my ass with your attempted take downs. Information wants to be free ;) Lets see your effectiveness against TPB
It's available as always from our friends at the pirate bay.
I am going to find out which constabulary this is, and write a letter of complaint of the police using heavy handed tactics in non criminal matters. It's almost as though they are sony's personal army.
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
You're a tool and a fool. Free toast? You're comparing some bits and bytes - imaginary, abstract nonsense, to real world, concrete possessions. For me to get some free toast, someone, somewhere had to grow some wheat (or other grain), someone had to grow some sugar, someone had to mill the flour, and refine the sugar, someone had to bake that bread - all real things, over which real people sweat, in order to produce a tangible product. Those bits and bytes? Holy mother of God - I have an entire OPERATING SYSTEM which is given away free (gratis), not to mention that it is also free (as in, unencumbered by patents, copyrights, yada yada yada) Now, if my superior (superior to the most common proprietary system) operating system is so very dirt cheap - how in hell do you justify any claim that people downloading bits and bytes are STEALING something? Grow up, dude. Abstract ideas are exactly that - ABSTRACT. You think of something and share it with someone, it's no longer yours. Ideas are viral. You cannot prevent me doing something with your bits and bytes, because once I see/hear/comprehend them, they are as much MINE as they are yours. You get credit for originality, nothing more, and nothing less.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
at least apple does not get the cops to bust some a** over Iphone and mac os x hacking.
No they only took the big guys to court over loading mac os x on a pc and even then over seas they will have a even harder time wining a case over the same thing and as for the iphone the dmca says you have the right to hack a phone.
Money must be involved somehow right?
Police don't care about this kind of crap do they?
When they pull someone over and see one of those CD holders on a person's visor they don't care that its all pirated music.... so how do they care about this PS3 stuff?
Does Sony make a huge donation to their department?
Was it a court order?
Is anyone else scared that companies such as Sony have the power to make the police do their bidding and break into peoples' private homes?
What the fuck is going on in our country?
Politician's Fallacy:
Support my political activism on Patreon.
The government's sole purpose is to enforce corporate contracts. Government were created by high seas pirates who conquered the coastal areas to give themselves some form of "legitimacy" and regulate their trade. They became the corporations that rule today. They are the government. We have not progressed. The plunder continues as it always has. Capitalism is piracy committed with a pen, enforced by the gun.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
You know, tests have been done with martial artists.... they demonstrated an interesting one in a show "Fight Science".
Very simple, you give a person a bunch of targets, with little LEDs, tell a subject to hit each target as the lights come on.
Compare the results of a trained, practiced martial artist against someone who isn't, and the results are striking. The martial artist was hitting the target BEFORE the normal persons limbs were even in motion!
Similar things in video games, you process visual information, and translate it into action (in this case, button presses). It should be no surprise that practice can make one person far better at these things than another, or that some people are better at these things than others.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
That's all quite pragmatic, but the lesson that I took away from this story is that we MUST stop permitting our governments to stop acting on behalf of corporations, and FORCE them to act in the interests of the people, or else we will simply continue our slide into Fascism. If we examine history, fascism leads to stagnation in technical development which leads to military conquest... And not in the direction the fascism would like.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The police don't determine whether you've done something illegal. The courts do. But I am on your side that whatever crime he's being accused of is clearly non-violent so having the police bash down the door is silly at best and probably quite dangerous for everyone involved.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
+1, and in addition, what about the PS2 emulation that isn't? And what about the 60 meg original I have sitting around as a doorstop because I'm tired of paying Sony $150 to fix their faulty equipment then have it break again immediately?
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
(2) developing tools for cheating in-game, ala aimbots that're easily adapted to new games,
Well, what did I as a PS3 gamer do to deserve this? This is precisely the reason why hackers are despised right now by most PS3 owners.
I couldn't care less about them making emulators, games, knockoffs or even copies of games, installing linux, xbmc or using the console for other awesome stuff, but what I do care about is that my gaming experience is being affected by what they do. I am not Sony, nor am I fan of Sony. I choose the PS3 because I like to play games without hassle once in a while, and in my experience, Microsoft is by far the more evil company.
So, about retaliation:
(1) Fight the DMCA. This is the real problem, isn't it?
(2) Stop buying Sony products.
(3) Stop whining. You (american hackers) knew full well that this was illegal in your country and didn't give a shit about getting caught.
The police did the right thing. This guy is obviously a gamer, which means he is an expert in all forms of combat, including multiple styles of hand-to-hand martial arts, every weapon under the sun, and black magic.
I put on my Robe and Wizard hat. :-]
Inane Comments are Generously Disregarded
Probably because some of that lost revenue is from people who would have been customers.
[citation needed]
We all know that some pirates are displacing sales. We also know that some pirates are of the "try before you buy" type who go on to pay because they're socially responsible, and wouldn't have paid otherwise because they wouldn't lay out $50 for a game without trying it first. We know that some pirates will promote the game to their friends, who may buy it. Or make campaign maps or submit bug reports or do various other things that make the game more valuable to prospective customers, thereby increasing sales.
What we don't know is whether the positive effects outweigh the negative. We really have no idea. There is no good way to measure it. But chances are, it's pretty close to a wash.
Then you weigh in the cost of anti-piracy measures. Fair use, gone. Property rights in your own equipment? Sorry, that belongs to corporations now -- Linux is just for hackers anyway. Does the DRM think you're a pirate even though you're not? Guess you paid $50 for nothing. And I hope you like paying the Microsoft tax, because if corporations can intentionally exclude FOSS from being able to play various media, you end up paying big money for what would by all rights otherwise be free. Oh, and losing your ability to control it.
It's just not worth it.
(2) developing tools for cheating in-game, ala aimbots that're easily adapted to new games,
Well, what did I as a PS3 gamer do to deserve this?
Well, you're funding those idiots, but that's your right, and I won't judge you for it. However, its the attackers rights to take their kit apart and share the info as they see fit, and the cheaters right to try to game the system. Sony is the one who should be protecting *you* in a technical manner, and not by simply trampling over non-customers rights.
This is precisely the reason why hackers are despised right now by most PS3 owners. I couldn't care less about them making emulators, games, knockoffs or even copies of games, installing linux, xbmc or using the console for other awesome stuff, but what I do care about is that my gaming experience is being affected by what they do. I am not Sony, nor am I fan of Sony. I choose the PS3 because I like to play games without hassle once in a while, and in my experience, Microsoft is by far the more evil company.
So, about retaliation: (1) Fight the DMCA. This is the real problem, isn't it? (2) Stop buying Sony products. (3) Stop whining. You (american hackers) knew full well that this was illegal in your country and didn't give a shit about getting caught.
This is how society and the market works - if enough gamers are pissed that gaming on a PS3 is a waste of time due to cheaters, then Sony makes less money. If Sony makes less money, then they may look into stopping the cheaters via methods other than simply bludgeoning non-cheaters with the full force of civil law.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
If you think the majority of people buy a console ever expecting "fair use" you're living in cloud cuckoo land. It is almost by definition a closed box, and Sony / Microsoft / Nintendo will do their damnedest to keep it that way.
That's the problem.
Though I doubt Sony would give a crap if someone produced firmware that turned their PS3 into a dedicated Linux box. What they do care about is people modifying their closed firmware to enable piracy, isoloaders, game hacks, PSN hacks, aimbots, trophy editors etc. etc.
I don't think you understand what I'm saying.
It isn't that aimbots and piracy are socially-beneficial things that must be preserved. It's that the measures required to eliminate them, first of all don't actually eliminate them, but more importantly the cure is worse than the disease. Shutting open systems out of popular culture just so we can stop some jackass from cheating at video games is too high a cost.
The original uploads are missing. Good thing it's now on the Pirate Bay.
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6197257/coolstuff.rar