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Comment by leggomylibro | Hacker News Reader

Cool!

It's too bad that the cracking scene seems so vain, though. This article presented three groups:

* One which wants to sell 'jailbreak' kits to enable piracy, while keeping the details to themselves.

* One which had planned a related disclosure window amongst the broader community for two days from now, and seems to feel somewhat vocally that this release is very similar to their work.

* One which seems like they might have flaunted that window a bit for the credit.

It's amazing and inspiring what these people manage to accomplish, but it'd be nice to see less stepping on fingers - imagine what might happen if these groups really cooperated! I guess it's a very reputation-driven scene, but still...

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This has always been the case with homebrew/jailbreak scenes, from the PSP to the PS3/PS4, to iOS, etc.

There will always be squabbles among the different people and groups involved with finding exploits or developing jailbreak/"hack" "kits".

Following from that, there will also always be people who want to jailbreak only to pirate games and there will also be groups who want to disclose the exploits properly, or use them purely for research and non-piracy fun purposes.

These squabbles are as old as home computing.

Just check out the amount of name calling and whatsnot thats put into those cracktros that can be traced at least back to the C64.

To say nothing of internecine squabbles between partisans of various home computers. C64 r00lz and Spectrum dr00lz (or vice versa). About the only platform that everyone can agree on is that the PC suxx0rz.

For example, in the ps3 scene:

Someone developed a exploit, packaged it in usb stick, called it the PSJailbreak, planning to sell it to as a piracy orientated tool. They sent out a few review copies to prove it worked.

One of the reviews obtained a USB trace of the exploit in action, passing it along to a few members of the homebrew scene. The homebrew scene recreated this exploit with an open source implementation (but with the ability to pirate games pirate games superficially patched out) beating the original PSJailbreak to market.

The homebrew scene then set upon developing an open source homebrew devkit.

Many manufactures released their own clone devices of the exploit, the timeframe susgests that they were also working from copies of the PSJailbreak.

It was the homebrew scene who later decimated the PS3 chain of trust, to develop installable modded firmware.

This is just the surface, with personal politics and clashing personalities obscured. The scene is incredibly dramatic and childish.

The apex of the scene's pettiness has to be this http://wololo.net/2015/03/18/total-noobs-response-to-latest-... (tl;dr the custom firmware checks if a certain user is using it, if so it formats their memory card)

To be fair that is pretty funny. If you are going to spite someone...put some effort into it.

I remember that in part of modding the Wii, one of the tools asked if you were going to use the tool to play backups. I took it literally; my plan was to rip my game disks and run them from a USB drive. I answered "yes"...and the tool spit up a message against piracy, and set a flag somewhere in the NAND of the Wii.

I don't remember exactly how I fixed it...I think there was some undocumented way to clear the flag that you could only find by reading the tool's source. It was a good reminder of how much stupid, blind trust I tend to put into random tools from the internet.

The nice thing with the console hacking scene is that the people doing actual useful work and the people causing drama are mostly disjoint sets.

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