PlayStation 3 exploit released, hackers rejoice
By Ross Miller 
posted January 26th 2010 6:54PM
posted January 26th 2010 6:54PM
In case you ever doubted his feat, or you simply wanted to recreate for sport, iPhone hacker extraordinaire George "Geohot" Hotz has released the exploit code he devised for properly hacking the PS3. This should give any aspiring minglers full memory access, and while he's only tested it with firmware version 2.4.2, he "imagine[s] it works on all current versions." A guide might follow sometime in the future, he says, but if you're really antsy to get your coding kicks, we wouldn't wait up.Update: EuroGamer's got a pretty thorough piece on what Geohot is claiming to have accomplished and what it means to the community -- and as Joystiq points out, until we see some "Hello World" proof of concept program, we don't quite know the extent of his claims. The guy's got a helluva track record, at least with iPhone, so we presume that's next on his and the community's list of to-do's.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
wow, can't wait for this to travel down the geek food chain
@brrip
how does he do it???
@dark star - He's a Sith Lord! The darkside of the force flows strong within him ;^/...
@dark star
This is George Bush's fault!
@brrip
I just took a peek on the ZIP file. I downloaded it and there are some pretty vague instructions.
The exploit focusing pulse a contact point on the circuit board. What does he mean by "pulse"? Do I put what kind of voltage through it? Positive or ground? Better yet, what model of PS3 is this? It's edited in paint and saved as JPEG and it makes the colors screwed up.
Long story short, the exploit is too vague and all it does is some RAM access in OtherOS. The PS3 is still pretty safe unless someone uses the code.
Just in time to ruin my PS3 before the release of MAG!
@credo LET THE GAMES BEGIN! >=]
to hack or not to hack?
@Quetzalcoatl
that is the question
@Quetzalcoatl
I DUNNO, LOL
Sony will be all over this like sprinkles on ice cream....
@SolidSnake. More like Steve Jobs on that guy who just blew the secret on CNBC
@PATRICKmcnicholl
Agreed.
He wont be able to get those bloodstains out of his carpet for a while......
@SolidSnake
Whose carpet? The hacker's or McGraw's?
@onlymyrailgun
Well, I hope to god nothing happens to Geohot, but that other dude will get what is coming to him.
@Solidsnake
One word.....Chipotleaway
would be nice to back up these expensive games. Although I'm sure there will be a few self righteous nerds that proclaim that they want to hack the system for web browsing and useless stuff. That's what PC's are for, lol.
Self righteous nerd reporting in. Actually you can make backups or pirate all you want, I don't care. I just want to have access to the SPUs and GPU in Linux!
@starkruzr
Agreed. Having no working compiz sucks.
And imagine that power, a 512mb ram, 8 thread machine. Like a $400 mid-range desktop computer it could be.
@starkruzr
SPE access has always been there in Linux, I'm amazed to this day that people don't realize this.
@starkruzr especially since the linux boot screen even shows it has SPE access, for him not to know this means hes never used linux on PS3
This is what I been waiting for to buy a PS3. Hopefully the XBMC guys are aware of this new development platform.
@Ridgecity Exactly what I was thinkin!
@Ridgecity
The XBMC Devs dont care about XBMC on the PS3 or the 360
I'm personally going to be staying legit with this one as if it's anything like the PSP it's going to be hell to keep it going...
somewhere out there a very angry japanese CEO is throwing chairs, dualshocks, and leftover sushi from lunch at a group of extremely frightened developers :)
@skyblaze
LOL that made my day.
I can see Hiro from Heroes quivering.
@skyblaze maybe they will threaten him like they did with DarkAlex.
@skyblaze
Nope i think that the CEO thinks that it is time to call in the JAKUZA, man i hope that poor lad doesnt get killed
@Feda
yakuza*
@mrqs
im mmore afraid of the jakusa
One you hack, you never go back.
Once*
Way to ruin it me..
Now, can they start working on PSP-3000 and PSP-Go? I wanna install some homebrew stuff!
@ai4281 You can already homebrew the PSP3000 as long as you have an older firmware
Dumb question from a dumb reader: this means what, exactly?
@kevout
pardon my ignorance also, but I'm just as uninformed as you are. Does this basically mean that one could run other games from other systems? Previous PS titles? Ruin the online gaming experience for you PSN users?
@DAATMAN with now it means nothing. in 6 months it will still prolly be nothing. but yes as long as this exploit dosent just give lv1 access then this will lead to some pritty sweet homebrew. like ps2 on the 40 gb ps3's
apparently this hack requires disassembling your PS3 and poking at the motherboard. unless something much easier and less damaging comes around I don't see this being anything like an iphone or psp
@babycakes
"apparently this hack requires disassembling your PS3 and poking at the motherboard"... at the moment, yes, but this was to get full r/w access which was not possible before. Now it wont be long to get a extensive understanding of the software to look for specific holes.
Note to self: Do NOT update PS3 anymore until we get some custom firmwares rollin!
@iHakr
MAG requires a mandatory 3.20 firmware upgrade.
Love,
Sony
Finally we can get back the GPU acceleration that those sillies at Sony removed in a previous firmware. Lucky I have a phat PS3 too as I'm guessing this won't work on the slim due to no Linux support.
@richb93: Hotz claims that it propably never really was blocked by the hypervisor, and that the problem just lies with the 2d driver of linux.
We could use an opensource variant of the driver which would work on a Nvidia 7900 as the RSX is based on that chip, so it wouldn't need that much fixing (at least to get the same results as the current opensource drivers, which itself has only partially 3d)
if hacked, wonder if soft mod of PS2 game is possible or not.
@yauchildchew
afaik, ps2 games can be played (on compatabile ps3's) with some kind of swap-magic trick
@yauchildchew Not easily. Even the PS3s that have software BC rely on a PS2 graphics chip. The originals had both the CPU and GPU, but the software BC had only the GPU. They killed BC to save from the cost of including the GPU.
Its MIGHT be possible, but its a hell of a lot more difficult.
@yauchildchew
PS2s are really, really cheap now. Just buy one. It's so much easier. They aren't big or anything. It's a shame PS3s lost this capability, I admit, but I don't think hacking one to play PS2s will be as smart a use of your time as getting a used or new PS2.
Another point, backing up PS3 games is going to be a tremendous hassle. Burning them or storing them on hard drives will get costly. I thought blu-ray games had that coating that made them extremely scratch resistant. I tripped on a game and my foot actually drug it on the floor for about a foot, and it still plays like new... granted it was Fallout 3, which already was kinda glitchy, but I think there's less and less reason to "backup" games.
If you're backing them up to sell them, or to download them from TPB, you're a jerk.
@(Unverified) not really. Most ps3 games are released on both consoles so they are the same thing, just that blurays have dummy data like Wii games. If they were pure game data a bluray could fit 5 games easily.
Should I be scared for my ps3?