Can't catch a break. /sadface

Just before the new year, a group of hackers dubbed 'fail0verflow', (feel free to find out more about them from their twitter, as their site is "down".), finally cracked the PS3 shell during the 27th Chaos Communication Conference.

How big of a deal is that, exactly? Calling it a "fiasco" would be a severe business understatement; "Financial shitstorm" would be closer to the truth. Since we're speaking on behalf of the truth, and incase you didn't watch the video above, I'll quote George 'Geohot' Hotz, as he points out a very undisputed truth:

"They shouldn't have called it an exploit- It's not an exploit. It's an epic fail by Sony...Yeah, they gave us their private key, basically. If you watch the talk they leaked their private key mathematically. So we don't have to exploit anything, we just sign things."

Bet there a lot of unwarm and unfuzzies at the Sony labs. :(

To give a simple explanation: cracking the PS3's firmware in this manner has allowed pirating games to be possible. This was, from the outset of the PS3's release, practically impossible as Sony made an extremely secure console where the 360 and Wii had already failed. I should point out: the intention of fail0verflow was not to begin pirating games, they do not endorse that behavior, they were simply replacing something that was taken from them: an option.


What option could be so serious that hackers would spend lifeforce to retain it? The option to flash the HDD with "Another OS". For a lot of people who actually cared about this option, that meant Linux...which means a lot, to a lot of people.

But Sony had no foresight and chose to remove that option without a lot of reason or warning. Pissing off, like, a million nerds. Oops!

The PS3 is, and has always been, an underdog, whether anyone wants to admit it or not- Sony has lost a lot of money and interest. It would seem one of the last hopes they had was their honest user base, (honest by virtue of legitimately purchased games), and now that's shot because the information on how-to jailbreak a PS3 has been distributed for the sole purpose of being able to boot Linux; but I'm sure thats not going to happen, sadly.

Well, it doesn't really stop there.

According to CVG jail-breaking the PS3 has also allowed people to manipulate the trophy system. Again, what does this mean? It means that community based competition (I.E. keeping track of how much of a game I've completed versus my friends), is completely shot. The trophy system was already so badly mishandled to begin with, and was actually tacked on after the popularity of it was proven on the Xbox360, that a large social portion of what-gaming-is, is sullied for Sony.

Thats a long way to go, just to say Sony's in trouble on multiple fronts. SCEE has made a truly fantastic system, but its full capabilities have barely been utilized as of yet, and, in my opinion, is seriously coming in contact with competition from smartphone games.

Hello there.

Is it vindictive that a group of hackers took advantage of Sony with their own information, because they felt slighted? Or is it consumer base taking control?