The king is dead, long live the king. After holding out four years, the PS3 has finally been cracked, hacked, and backed…up. Australian site OzModChips.com has posted videos of the supposedly unhackable console totally hacked, copying and running games (euphemistically dubbed “back ups” by people who like to pretend they’re just, you know, backing their stuff up) from the HDD.
It’s not quite the first time the console’s been hacked, of course. Earlier this year, iPhone hacker George “GeoHot” Hotz spent five weeks hacking the console, but disappeared off the scene shortly after telling everyone on the internet he’d done it. Strangers in black coats may or may not have been involved.
Now the guys at OzModChips are marketing a “PS Jailbreak” USB dongle that effectively tricks the console into thinking it’s a dev debug unit, and allowing unsigned code to run and copy to the console. While I think modchipping and piracy in general is the worst sort of pukescummery, one has to admire such an elegant and non-invasive solution to the console’s complex software and hardware decryption.
Retailing at AUS$170 or around £100, however, and with the additional cost of high capacity HDDs (Blu-ray discs hold about 25 GB of data, although most multi-platform games are only 8 GB or so), the dongle isn’t likely to acquire mainstream appeal just yet. Pirates don’t much like spending money, that’s kinda the point. There’s also the possibility of future firmware updates disabling the dongle’s functionality, at least temporarily.
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