Darn shame that none of us thought to attend the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin. Why cover fun stuff, right? Thankfully PSGroove made it out there, and came away with video of a video game console security discussion. The Wii has been “broken” (hackable, in other words) pretty much since Day One; the Xbox 360 has been hackable for a few years now (JTAGing is the way to go these days); and the PS3’s security is dead as disco. This, despite all of Sony’s huffing and puffing, particularly with regard to its stance toward Linux. In other words, Sony’s security can now be considered an “epic fail.” Note to self: do not get on the Linux’s community’s bad side.
The gist of the talk, which is broken into several 15 minute chunks, is that the PS3 can now be hacked with a dongle-less solution, making all of those paid dongle solutions a complete waste of money. The hack wasn’t invented to placate silly kids who want to download the latest PS3 game, but for folks who want to be able to run homebrew code (read: Linux) on the hardware they own.
All of this would seem to invalidate Sony’s original decision to remove the Other OS option for the PS3, fearing that it would leave the system susceptible to hacking.
And now it’s been hacked. Good job.