The post-festive season is traditionally a period utterly devoid of decent gaming news, but hacker collective fail0verflow’s recent PS3 “master key” hack has managed to pull the news feeds through the radio static.
Over at MyGaming HQ, we’ve been following this story through seasonal hangovers with some relief, but to recap in brief – the PS3’s security has been demolished, and the PS3 console is now able to run custom and pirated software.
The big question has been regarding Sony’s inevitable response. For a week or so, the company remained completely silent on the topic, before eventually submitting a vague public statement about “looking into it.”
According to a report on Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry, it’s theoretically possible that Sony could completely disable and permanently ban any hacked PS3 console. Apparently, at boot, any console connected to the Internet swaps information with Sony’s servers, which could – hypothetically, at least – include updates about recent applications.
This could in turn identify compromised consoles, and – so say the tech wizards at Digital Foundry – “the company even has the means to irrevocably disable your console should it so wish, and if that happens, it will remain non-functional whether you’re online or offline.”
Whether or not Sony will resort to such dramatic (and almost certainly controversial) measures remains, of course, a matter of speculation for the moment. Microsoft routinely issues bans of modified Xboxes, permanently preventing these from signing into Xbox LIVE, and effectively disabling online multiplayer and access to the Xbox LIVE Marketplace, so there is a fairly solid precedent for this course of action.
It’s also quite conceivable that any such course of action could and would be promptly circumvented in future firmware modifications from the hacker community anyway, leading to what we’d call in the vernacular, “an epic cycle of fail” or perhaps just “lol.”
Discuss Sony’s hacked PS3 on the MyGaming forum.
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