Hacker News Reader

Comment by nkg | Hacker News Reader

Is it me or Sony has become good at protecting its software ? I remember a time when every new console would be hacked within the year it was released.

View on HN

If anything the PS4 is a downgrade from the PS3 here. The PS3 ran everything in a hypervisor.

I guess if people want this to happen they should goad George Hotz by telling him he can't possibly beat the protection.

George is banned from exploiting Sony products

Isn't everyone?

Not like he is. If memory serves, if he tries to break a Sony device again, he faces massive fines, etc.

Do you have a good link for some backstory on this one? I'm not sure how that could even be possible in the legal frameworks.

Terms of the settlement: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/sony-hotz-settlement-detai...

Holy crap! Thanks!

That's insane. I'm not a gamer but it looks like they just published how to "hack" the console and they were hit with that. That's crazy. In the span of a minute, I can think of a dozen better solutions to this.

If I'm reading properly, they didn't even do anything that I'd call wrong. They found an exploit and published it. I suppose the DMCA and "circumvention tools" come into play - but that only points to the absurdity of the situation (at least in my opinion).

Sony threw everything at them: DMCA, CFAA, copyright, California Computer Crime Law, even violating the PSN TOS.

I support IP rights, as a general rule. However, they sure get abused. I'm kind of annoyed about this, even though I have nothing to do with it.

If you break my system, thanks for letting us know. It'd be great if we could pay you to help fix our system and make it more difficult to break in the future.

I'd not take them to court. I'd try to hire them. Hell, I'd give them reward money - even if they didn't want to be hired.

Intellectual property is theft.

Sure, inasmuch as taking labor without payment is slavery.

Would you think so if you poured your soul into writing a book, only to have it copied and distributed without your permission, for someone else's profit?

It's not exactly like that doesn't happen under our current system.

So everyone working on books, movies and computer games is a theft apparently.

Not everyone wants to give their work for free, dress in coloured cothles, sing about peace and love and grow tomatos in a community.

No. Intellectual property is a legal concept supported by a framework of laws and regulations. In itself it doesn't constitute theft. Exactly how the laws are used or abused matters. Intention is everything. From one end of the spectrum of having all your productions distributed everywhere rendering you unable to sell it even for a pittance to coming down massively with locked down systems and lawyers and costly lawsuits to intimidate and harass people into buying your product over and above its subjective value... we need a balance like everywhere else. Absolute statements rarely cut it.

We all don't know the details of the settlement, but we DO know George can sing about it. PoC's in rap would be nice.

Guy is too busy raging about self-driving car regulations and making ODBII dongles.

The hypervisor for the PS3 wasn't designed to be secure. It was reference hypervisor from IBM if I remember correctly and designed for scaling environments up and not security isolation. It was full of holes. At least FreeBSD starts out as battle tested verified OS of sorts unlike the PS3 Frenken-OS.

PS3 for the most time allowed people to legitimately run an other operating system on it, so these was less of an incentive to build ‘jailbreaks’ and cracks.

Keep in mind everything is online now. In the olden days you didn't need things like patches or firmware updates. Once a console was hacked you were golden.

I don’t know much about it, but some other users were implying that they now use freebsd when previously they rolled their own OS. If that’s the case, it makes sense.

The PS3 appears to run a fork of FreeBSD:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_system_software

This is why you don't trust Wikipedia. They're just using a couple FreeBSD subsystems (net & fs AFAICT), sort of like you would with a rump kernel.

Their kernel is so far from FreeBSD though that it doesn't even have a fork(2).

http://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/LV2_Functions_and_Syscalls

PS3 was out for ~3 years before it was hacked.

It wasn't worth hacking the PS3 because of OtherOS. They removed it, it was hacked.

As far as I remember, as soon as it was hacked they removed OtherOS, not the other way around. This was like version 3.50 or something? Long time ago.

No, OtherOS only existed due to it allowing for different import tarifs. The CISO who told Kaz that he's a mad bro for wanting to remove OtherOS support was fired.

Psx, PS2, Wii, PSP have been hacked to their bone, it was a great time because of the community it had created. All these people focused on finding exploits and sharing the most obscure techniques to restore a bricked device! I don't see this anymore. Maybe they are mining bitcoins or playing Candy crush.

The Vita was harder to 'break' than the PS4, apparently. It's only recently been pwned.

In that time computing devices were rare.

Now everyone has a quite a powerful computer in their pocket.

If you want to make apps it's all there supported with a ton of documentation.

xbox one also hasn't been hacked.

Whats xbox one?.. :)

Are u an idiot?.. :)

Commenting like this will get you banned here, so please read and follow https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html from now on.

I normally would have banned a new account that posted like this, but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15529586 looks pretty good, so we'll assume you want to use HN as intended. Please do read those guidelines though!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com