Another one bytes the dust: PS3 cracked

Posted by: Kindred on Jan 26, 2010
For 3 years, 2 months, 11 days Sony was convinced that the Play Station 3 was secure, and it was .. Until the gentleman who was the first person to successfully jailbreak the iphone decided he wanted to give it a go.And well it took him 5 weeks but he did it. He cracked the PS3.

What is significant about this, is that the PS3 was the last of the next generation gaming consoles to be cracked. Sony was very proud of this fact. In thier opinion they had succeeded where both Microsoft and Nintendo had failed. This is actually a fairly good record for a console. If you think that for almost 3 years and 3 months not a single one of the nerds and geeks on the interwebz had managed to break it. That would be an army of people trying to do it.

Reading the documentation posted on the web, this was not an easy hack. It took a combination of hardware and software mods to complete the hack. It started with a hardware mod to crack the security and provide a small hole into the system, that was then abused with a software approach. Which opened the hole to cover the entire system.

With reviewing what little specs there are on the hack, the hacker is not releasing anything yet because it is not stable. in fact it doesn't work all the time. Which to me suggests that there is a little luck in this hack and in worst case situations may only work under certain conditions. I am not sure that is a complete hack. Although I am happy to hand the congratulations for doing this. Even if it is not a stable and reproducable hack it has been done, and it is a step in the direction to a completely open console.

What does this mean for the end user ? what could they gain from a hacked console. I would like to quickly point out that I don't agree with all the uses for a hacked console. It will allow users to run unrestricted versions of linux that will have full access to the hardware available. Which in reality will allow users to do just about anything with the console. This means that they could do at least the following :

1.  Run ps2 emulators and actually run PS2 games, the option of which has been removed from the later models of the PS3 and actually never worked correctly in a lot of the models.
2. They can run more robust media players that will prefeorm better, meaning it can become a better media player. 
3. Yes it does mean that the doors will now be open to have the ability to run pirate games on the console ( Which I really don't agree with, but hey I am one man).

When you consider that when the xbox and iphone were hacked, they led to thriving communities that release custom software and applications for the modded devices, one would like to hope that when this hack becomes public it would create a similar community for the PS3.

For those that are at all interested the gentleman in the spotlight here is George Hotz, he is 20 years old and a drop out from the Rochester Institute of Technology.  Who said you need a university education :) Another impressive fact about George is that he hacked the iphone when he was 17.