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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.
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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.
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.
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.
Couldn't you just turn on your aimbot, take down 15-20 cops, and the walk through the back wall and into the street?
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.
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?
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
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
(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.
The original uploads are missing. Good thing it's now on the Pirate Bay.
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6197257/coolstuff.rar