The PS5 Has Been Jailbroken
glitched.online
glitched.online
> PS5 User: hey can I install a SSH server on my PlayStation? > Sony: NOOOOOO YOU CAN'T DO THAT THAT'S' ILLEGAL WE'LL SUE YOU FOR VIOLATING TOS
> Steam Deck User: hey can I install a SSH server on my Steam Deck? > Valve: It's already included. Have fun.
Apple's macs are also fairly open. You can install your own bootloader, and boot whatever you want on them. There's a secureboot, but it can be disabled.
Of course, apple's iPhone are very similar.
I think I can see why it hasn't been used much, especially given that UWP app framework has been deprecated not that long ago.
Still a pain in the ass, and I never did it because there’s a big button that _does_ erase all your data in the process of switching that you can click by accident.
EDIT: After reading the Wikipedia page like the two people that replied to me, it is now clear to me that a meme is not necessarily a joke.
A meme is NOT necessarily a joke. An "internet meme", a subset of memes, is generally a joke, but "meme" itself is a singular unit of culture, and includes many non-funny things
I would argue also that all jokes are memes: that all jokes ultimately have a core meme to them.
Yup. It's not a coincidence that it sounds like "gene". The idea was precisely to treat it like that - memes get passed from generation to generation, get mutated, mix with other memes.
> We are all pawns, controlled by something greater: Memes. The DNA of the soul. They shape our will. They are the culture — they are everything we pass on. Expose someone to anger long enough, they will learn to hate. They become a carrier. Envy, greed, despair… All memes. All passed along.
Yes, as per Richard Dawkins.
Wiktionary documents this usage since 2018:
> (Internet, slang) A myth circulating as truth, such as ineffective practices presented as effective.
> it’s a meme degree
> jogging is a meme
Or disinformation:
A: $GROUP_I_DONT_LIKE is doing $BAD_THING
B: dude, that's literally just a meme
Also jogging is quite literally a meme, from the 60s and 70s. That's when the pairing of the term and activity became popularized and spread through the population.
Basically, it's the smallest unit of cultural information. In the same sense as Gene it's the smallest unit of genetic information.
That's why it's pronounced Meme as in Gene.
None of this necessarily implies a joke.
For better or worse, that ship has sailed. Convincing people otherwise is going to go about as well as convincing them to not use "literally" in a figurative sense.
That's not a fair assessment. Linux used a whitelisted shim, which only included accepted entries in an easy-to-edit/hack EFI variable. Imagine writing your secret password on a normal VFAT partition that any OS can boot/read/change. This is the equivalent.
The proper way is to enroll the private keys with the bios, and sign the payloads yourself (or let your distribution handle that), which is way more secure and can be automatized if you select the custom secureboot.
Happy to be corrected if things have changed since the last time I looked at things.
But a method of doing that wasn't included in the UEFI standard for obvious Microsoft reasons, so few vendors support it and those that do usually don't do it correctly, let alone in a standardised way.
Not always possible. Depends on firmware support and we all know how shitty proprietary firmware can be.
When you control the keys, SecureBoot is a good thing at least as good as encryption!
There are things that are fair to complain about, but on this, I don't see how Microsoft or anyone could have done any better to be playing nice with Linux while helping customers.
I have computers that don't have this feature.
> When you control the keys, SecureBoot is a good thing at least as good as encryption!
I agree. It's all about who owns the keys to the machine. If we do, then it's all good.
2022 - Year of the Linux Desktop?
last week i installed the same OS on an old machine for a relative, on a "fresh SSD" so no dual boot nonsense and it had problems right out of the box. Like memory leaks and printers wont install because apparently sane-devel cannot be found by HP install utility. Long story short, the printer is still not installed on that machine, it works but i had to install some alternate software like system monitors instead of supplied ones. Dunno, maybe that one was a dud but i definitely feel the pain points as are being described across the spectrum. the problem is, if i cannot set up the machine in say half an hour without any tinkering, that is a win and i expect someone else to follow the on-screen commands but we do have a lot to cover and that is not in a bad way. i am a full time linux user so i am a part of this community but its not prime-time ready yet. I have installed windows 7 thousands of times, it always works. unless there is a hardware issue, out of the box the system works. that is not true on our side.
i have to say it but the last years linus-linux challenge needs to be appreciated and we need to do more tests like these and keep fixing those small and big issues.
As for why, here is one example: backing up and restoring saves and other game data.
That's why...
"All-in-one portable PC gaming"
There is a great interview with one of the designers of the Steam Deck here that covers this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdX11KOP2tg
Seems pedantic, but I think it's important to the discussion in the way we think about the Steam Deck.
> Let's see if we can get back to good computing and gaming, where you give up a little convenience for a ton of power and possibility.
This doesn't make any sense to me. Please explain.
And then eject the CD-ROM drive.
Anyway the fun thing was combining it with the (surprisingly not locked down) netsend command, so my little remote execution script would pop the cd drive tray open, and then they would get an “alert” from netsend saying “Feed Me!!!”
I wasn’t the sort of kid that pulled a prank like that on a teacher or the whole class, but it did get some laughs with the small circle of fellow computer nerds that would spend lunch or afternoons in the library using the computers to fool around learning Visual Basic, or play 90s online games, or for the few that new me… play proper LAN games… since I was the gatekeeper of by way of my perpetual habit of trying to lift the hood and work out how everything was setup, so I found all the fun network admin failures like group policy mistakes that left the empty second hard drive on a batch of computers as public read/write for anyone with local admin permissions on any computer on the network, or setting a local machine folder I had sufficient permissions to, to be network accessible if you had the machine IP, or telling them which computers I had left the burned cd copies of the games in (which were fully portable!, bless the pre-network connected DRM days)
Ahh youthful fun!
The whole drive??? Man, you guys played hardball.
By not forbidding things like this, it can become more than just a gaming console. For example, you might end up buying one second-hand with a broken screen and using it as a home server - it even comes with its own UPS battery!
First thing I thought reading this headline... "That's a few thousand metric tons of e-waste that won't be going into a landfill soon".
I've little interest in gaming or PS5 hardware TBH. But the entire conceit of locked-down appliances that could be reused as general purpose devices, but are deliberately hobbled, is abhorrent to me.
IN 2022, with what we know about climate change, pollution and e-waste, locking devices is simply spiteful and must be made illegal.
Well done to the team that cracked PS5
This is delusional. In the real world a jailbreak won't meaningfully extend a consoles lifetime.
>But the entire conceit of locked-down appliances that could be reused as general purpose devices, but are deliberately hobbled, is abhorrent to me.
People aren't going to take PS5s and reuse them as general purpose devices at any meaningful scale.
People are not going to take PS5's and reuse them but if it was legal to build products around PS4's reuse you can bet your ass a sizeable amount of PS5 users would love to make use of their old hardware. It would take a while for killer apps/products to release but stifling it before there's a chance seems like a huge waste to me.
I understand your pessimism but in this case I ask you to dream a little more.
The fact that people aren’t already doing so with regular general purpose computers seems to entirely discredit this theory, no?
There's a massive second-hand market for many general purpose computers. Plenty of people, myself included, buy used hardware almost exclusively.
Beyond that, many people are creating home theater PCs, home labs, home automation systems, arcade cabinets, custom car audio head units, drink robots, and more using commodity hardware. Often times these are reused hardware, which cuts the cost on hardware by a significant margin.
Just because you don't see it happening doesn't mean it's not happening.
If you've ever used Kodi, it started as the "XBox Media Center" project. So Kodi would probably not be what it is today without people jailbreaking the OG XBox so they could use it for a media "PC".
People are still playing Quake Arena, Doom, and other og XBox games on real hw, thanks to jailbreaking. With root access users are able to patch the games so they can be pointed at community servers to replace the deprecated XBox Live servers that used to power the online multiplayer.
Similarly, we're seeing a bunch of games from the last couple of generations that reach out to company servers that are now being shut down. Jailbreaking provides life extension in some of these cases as well.
The PS3 was built on very exotic hardware, PS5 is just a regular x86 computer.
Playing with Linux on a PS3 at least had a bit of a novelty factor, with PS5 there’s none.
Did those PS3 supercomputers end up being a good investment? Probably not.
> If you've ever used Kodi, it started as the "XBox Media Center" project. So Kodi would probably not be what it is today without people jailbreaking the OG XBox so they could use it for a media "PC".
The market has moved long past that. The OG Xbox had something to offer that you couldn’t easily get elsewhere, that’s not the case anymore.
> People are still playing Quake Arena, Doom, and other og XBox games on real hw
A handful of hardcore enthusiasts.
In our analysis at the time, it was an economical supercomputer that could hit our needs. It doesn't have to be the best investment, just a decent one at the time. You seem to entirely discount the fact that sometimes the journey is just as important.
In this case, half the purpose behind the grant proposal was education and outreach engagement. The novelty of using PS3s was enough to get some traction with local highschool students and introduce them to computing topics in new ways.
> The market has moved long past that. The OG Xbox had something to offer that you couldn’t easily get elsewhere, that’s not the case anymore.
And who's to say people experimenting with the PS5 won't be creating something new we'll be talking about in 10 years? These are powerful machines, why artificially restrict what they can do?
Homebrew alone gives people ways to play with hardware they wouldn't normally be able to experiment with.
> A handful of hardcore enthusiasts.
~5k active participants in the Insignia community is more than a handful. Sure, it's not hundreds of thousands but it's not exactly public yet either. And there are thousands in similar communities for the PS Vita, Nintendo 3DS, and Wii to name a few. Either way, these communities directly demonstrate that jailbreaking hardware does indeed extend a console's lifetime.
I don't. I very much acknowledge that the PS3 was a very novel piece of hardware, but the same doesn't apply to consoles in general.
>And who's to say people experimenting with the PS5 won't be creating something new we'll be talking about in 10 years? These are powerful machines, why artificially restrict what they can do?
They might, no doubt. But there's nothing novel about developing on a PS5, at least the original Xbox offered a unique form factor in its price bracket.
>Homebrew alone gives people ways to play with hardware they wouldn't normally be able to experiment with.
Yes, but PS5 hardware is just regular PC hardware. It's not exotic and exciting like the PS3 or Xbox were.
>~5k active participants in the Insignia community is more than a handful. Sure, it's not hundreds of thousands but it's not exactly public yet either. And there are thousands in similar communities for the PS Vita, Nintendo 3DS, and Wii to name a few. Either way, these communities directly demonstrate that jailbreaking hardware does indeed extend a console's lifetime.
These are communities consisting of some thousands of people, but we're talking about hardware that sells 100+ million units.
I don't mind the idea of a closed platform for 5-10 years. But I do feel there should be legislation to sunset all devices as open. It's a shame we still have reverse-engineering efforts on 40+ year old computing devices.
https://phys.org/news/2010-12-air-playstation-3s-supercomput...
You can kick off download of a game through the official app. Which will also notify you when the game is ready to play and then when it is fully downloaded. You can also see which games you have installed already and free up space by deleting some of them. And the last thing, you can also use the app to download the recent screenshots and video clips you took of your gameplay on the console.
All of this works from anywhere, as long as both your phone and the console have access to internet (they dont need to be on the same network though).
What kind of new-fangled hack is that? Here in Switch-land we just use a bit of tinfoil for our piracy needs.
I believe the hardmod is a voltage glitching exploit, as described for the Vita here: https://yifan.lu/images/2019/01/Injecting_Software_Vulnerabi... . It is able to inject code through the onboard memory then load a payload from a memory card rather than USB.
I didn't borrow it, I bought it. I pay for the power that lights it up, I pay for the network it connects to, I get to say what it does and when and how.
Yes it was advertised as a gaming console, yes it came with some games installed and it's very good at that, but it's also a whole-ass computer with the potential to do whole-ass computer things. I'm offended by having a computer sitting right there that can't be used to do some task that it might otherwise be capable of.
We'd never stand for arbitrary restrictions on other everyday items. Imagine if the can of soda I'm drinking could only be used as a drink. Oh you spilled some chemicals on yourself and you want to use this to rinse off quickly on your way to the shower? Sorry, drink output can only connected to mouth input, too bad about your arm. Like, what?
Objects are versatile and using that versatility is the essence of humanity. It's why we have opposable thumbs. It's why we're the dominant species on the planet. Backsliding from that in the name of copyright or some shit is inane, counterproductive, and offensive to the very core of my being.
I wonder if you misunderstood the GP's question.
I don't think they were asking, "Why, as the manufacturer, should we consider your desire reasonable?".
I think they were asking, "As a fellow computer user, I'd like to better understand something interesting, and it sounds like you might be up to something interesting."
For Sony's customers, part of the appeal of a console is the locked down nature. Cheating in multiplayer games is far less prevalent in newer consoles because of this, and even when the consoles do get cracked wide open, the barrier to entry is usually high enough to make cheating a pretty rare occurrence. This is all accomplished without making the user install a kernel-mode driver on the same computer they likely use to file their taxes.
I'll also point out that unlike what the GP insinuated, Sony won't actually sue you for running an SSH server on your PS5.
> Sony won't actually sue you for running an SSH server on your PS5.
But they might ban your console or try to brick it in some way. (i've heard of network bans but not bricking.. but I wouldn't put it passed them)
You own the device. Whatever you do with it is up to you. (Despite their whining about how "you only own a license to posses the device")
I can also easily transfer files between systems that way. I do this with my phone, it's so easy to connect via the network and copy files, no need to deal with USB stuff. Ever tried to transfer a video or screenshot from PS4 to any other device? Easiest method I found was making a PSN chat group, asking the other person to leave the group and then using it to share the data to myself so I can see it on my phone at a lower quality. It's so stupid.
I started playing games back when you had to mess with and resolve IRQ and DMA conflicts in DOS so I love having a console I can use as an appliance. You don't need SSH on every internet connected device you own.
Other devices do need some level of local access because bad software is often the limiting factor of usefulness.
You can use SSH to run commands to automatize things, for example turning off the console, launching an update, installing new software, etc, while not being in front of the TV.
Finally you can use it to diagnose problems on the console, for example you can connect to run a diagnosis, from which you may find out that the hard drive is causing problems and you should replace it, or the console is overheating and thermal throttling, etc.
Not even talking about tinkering in general as that one should be obvious.
Do want to clarify, I personally don't think it's the right play overall, but it's the play Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have been making for years. Now let's look at Valve.
Valve took their distribution platform, which already runs in lawless country on the largely unrestricted platform of PCs, and made a console experience for that with Steam Deck. Valve isn't incentivized to lock down the Deck any more than a PC is locked down, which is to say not very much at all. As a result, they can much more easily advocate for Right to Repair, modding, software customization, the works, because their existing market dominance as the biggest PC games distributor gives them that weight to throw around.
I'm happy that Valve isn't locking down Deck to customization in anticipation of shifting winds to get folks to target the platform, but we really can't call this an apples-to-apples comparison. Two very different companies with two very different histories of deal making with game publishers having latitude to do two very different styles of hardware control.
They got me. I went and bought a new TV. Not a Sony, but aggregate demand still affects prices.
An IGN article breaks down the replacement kit parts that were, presumably, offered with a profit baked in. https://www.ign.com/articles/ifixit-replacement-parts-steam-...
This is only the case for when the console gets released. The hardware stays fixed through it's life span and the cost of old tech either gets more efficient, the manufacturing process becomes more efficient, or the parts get cheaper. (With exceptions to disasters that spike ram production or halt chip production)
Hardware Refreshes: I'm sure someone is going to mention that. Those are pretty much entirely new console releases .. but you rarely ever get to take advantage of the new performance improvements.
No one, not even Sony, can build PS5-class hardware and sell it at a profit for $500 at retail... not at launch time, and not on the last day of the product life cycle. Attach rate isn't everything in the console business, it's the only thing.
https://www.polygon.com/platform/amp/2014/5/23/5744344/ps4-a...
> From a profitability perspective, PS4 is also already contributing profit on a hardware unit basis, establishing a very different business framework from that of previous platform businesses.
[1] - https://www.pcmag.com/news/sony-says-499-ps5-no-longer-sells...
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/playstation-5-refresh-boas...
There were consoles, for example the original Xbox, that while inferior to the counterpart had success only because the modding community and homebrew software that you could have used on them. To the console manufacturer opening up (like how Microsoft is slowly doing) to homebrew software is in the end a good thing, not a bad one.
After it took Sony way too long to get PS3 sales profitable, they said "no more" and made sure PS4 and PS5 sales were profitable within a year of release, just like the PS1 and PS2 were.
Xbox is sold "at a loss" only because Microsoft is still accounting for the massive cost incurred by RRoD failures, not that they're losing money per-unit.
Nintendo only ever sold the Wii U and 3DS at a loss for any real amount of time (and the Virtual Boy was a money pit if you count that.)
So yeah, that's basically only true for the 7th gen consoles, because the PS3 was overdesigned and Microsoft was willing to spend money like water to break into the market, then not sour their lead because of RRoDs.
Or rather it's weird to call the platforms plagued by barely legal artificial deprivation of digital liberty 'lawful'.
It seems like the biggest reasons we have such restrictive business deals around media (movies/music/etc) is because of the gigantic publishing companies that got the chance to grow throughout the media boom and who are now absolutely terrified by the fact that they are not needed.
As gaming budgets and revenue have been increasing over the past couple decades, I think what I just realized is that we might be seeing game publishers following the exact same trajectory.
That in another decade or two it could be game publishers who are sitting on top of piles of contracts, using their lawyers to try to sterilize the gaming landscape because they are terrified of losing their positions. They could even make deals with “the old guard” and lock down all entertainment under one umbrella...
Terrifying thoughts.
Disabling Linux, as I remember it, basically instantly got it jailbroken.
Suddenly not just pirates out to save/make money, but hobbyists too, wanted to break it.
(I imagine, I don't have any info to suggest they actually had to literally jailbreak their PS3s in order to build their supercomputer, but just making a jab)
If it's good enough for the USAF, it should be good enough for hobbyists to have a go around with it!
Every business I have ever worked at has either been built almost exclusively on Open Source software, or a bank that ran almost exclusively on Microsoft.
We're not just pirates and hobbyists!
Sony typically sells consoles at a loss and makes profits from the game sales. The likes of USAF, researchers, and other companies were buying PS3s in bulk, and using OtherOS functionality without utilizing the primary use of PS3s: games. Often these projects didn't need any GPU power, and OtherOS had nearly full access to the CPU (iirc it had access to the main PPE and 7 out of 8 SPEs). Thus, Sony likely was not making enough money from the consoles USAF et al. bought.
I enjoyed many hours of gaming on the PS2 and I bought it (in part) because I would be able to install Linux on it. I still managed to become a Linux guy today, in spite of the rug by Sony, and I suppose there's nothing overtly wrong with clarifying with an update that the primary intended use of your product is in fact its primary intended use, but as a hobbyist (dang it, now I've gone and done that again)...
My guess is that they don't want to say the quiet part out loud: i.e. they took away OtherOS because they weren't getting the tariff exemptions they wanted and they don't actually want people using these devices for non-royalty-bearing activities (e.g. piracy and homebrew).
There are also several publicly available tools that can be used to pop printers, and use them for other bad things, but it's not an area I have spent much time in other than from a blue team/IR perspective. Printers, like alot of other hardware, are usually poorly maintained, but at least patching has mostly gotten easier and most infrastructure scanning tools will report vulnerabilities and weaknesses in them now.
The USAF also has Kubernetes in F-22s from what I understand now
If pirates managed to get from Linux to pirate copies running, then that's not the same exploit as getting from no-Linux to Linux.
If it were, then there would be no point in Sony blocking Linux.
So the no-Linux to "full" surely must have been invented post-Linuxblock?
They disabled Linux because it got jailbroken and that was how they jailbroke it. If they didn't jailbreak the PS3 they wouldn't have disabled Linux. I think it was GeoHot who cracked it, I think it was because they used the same cryptographic key for all machines or something like that.
This isn't a story of how taking away freedom from users resulted in piracy, this is a story of how piracy took freedoms away from uesrs.
https://atunnic.gitbook.io/tnpsh-wiki/welcome-to-wiki/ps3-hi...
September 1st [3.00]: The PS3 slim is released, the first model without OtherOS.
December 26th [3.15]: GeoHot pulls information from the USB bus regarding the Cell processor's SPI port and a theoretical attack vector.
January 22nd [3.15]: GeoHot gains full access to the system memory and processor.
April 1st [3.21]: OtherOS is removed from all PS3s.
August 19th [3.41]: PS Jailbreak dongle is announced and confirmed working.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1225990
> This has to be in direct response to George Hotz (geohot)'s PS3 exploits.
Edit: I found:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1227084
> This appears to be in response to the announcements of PS3 hypervisor exploits that rely on the use of OtherOS (specifically, Linux), since in the past Sony has insisted that they had no plans to ever deprecate Linux support, let alone force it in this manner:
https://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/cbe-oss-dev/2009-August/0...
2. You got your facts/timeline wrong. GeoHot didn't publish his hack until after OtherOS was disabled.
Turns out I really don't. The other person posted the timeline. GeoHot pulled it because they allowed OtherOS. They obivously found out some how, removed it and then GeoHot announced the bug. Maybe GeoHot did responsible disclosure?
This is a story to a company overreacting and taking away freedoms because someone gave people too much freedom and the company didn't like that.
Fine documentation of the process and the (limitations of the) exploit.
Looks like the other thing they could do for this particular vector is prevent https requests from being intercepted and replaced - why should the user be permitted to override certificate errors in this case? Doesn't make sense.
That seems like the wrong main focus for a security project. I'd have preferred if the "most important" thing was to provide a secure browsing experience, but, to each their own...
They are specifically calling out that it's not ready for prime time, and that it will have an impact on users. In practice, many very effective security controls for browsers (and other software) get tuned down or disabled by default because they break too much of how the web works (SameSite cookies are a good example), or because it creates friction in customer acquisition or growth.
I don’t think I’ve ever opened a web browser on a console except on dreamcast for the novelty of it.
Funnily enough, I think the CVE they're saying it is is wrong? The link to the project zero itw tracking page is for CVE-2021-30858 which is an IndexDB UAF, which is a completely seperate bug; the MITRE tracking page for CVE-2021-30858 just has the boilerplate "a malicious page can cause an exploit" from Apple, and doesn't say if it's for the IndexDB or FontFaceCache bug, so I think the Jailbreak people are just confused on this one.
> As per the above + the hypervisor (HV) enforcing kernel write protection, this exploit also cannot install any patches or hooks into kernel space, which means no homebrew-related code for the time being." [1]
So yeah, it's not a full jailbreak yet.
It actually leads to frustration as an ISP employee; we get reports of end user devices getting slow speeds and the built-in PSN speedtests can often give us bad results (eg, a customer might be rated for 100x100 and the PSN test yields 20x5) -- running a browser-based speedtest we might be getting full speed to the device indicating a PSN issue. Removing the browser takes that troubleshooting option away from us.
Switching to Ethernet bypasses this issue but I’m unaware if this was ever fixed.
Ohh, I love that wording so much
I still remember the dirty COW exploit on Android and it was useless because all you are getting is root in some heavily restricted namespace.
Game consoles are some of the most secure and heavily exploited systems around, since there is a very strong financial incentive to secure them and a strong incentive to break 'em open (compared to almost any other consumer tech).
Yes yes, systems should not act like that, probably means everything is too tied together. But real world systems do act like that, especially in things with not too high stakes and with high focus on shipping stuff quickly.
Yeah, that makes sense. I'd have thought it would be better to have an ephemeral debug client that's deployed from remote if you have the key to the big lock, but perhaps that's for the PS6.
> Plus if someone manages to run custom code, having the debug options or not becomes irrelevant.
Agreed, but it might be harder as they have to write custom tooling to inspect the system.
[0] - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/xbox-apps/devk...
The PS5, on the other hand, basically uses medium-range off-the-shelf computer components. Its most powerful feature is the extremely fast SSD, but that is not very useful for a compute cluster. Nowadays anyone wanting a compute cluster would just fill a server rack with GPUs and be done with it.
https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-20:20...
That only applies to a handful of companies, no? And even then, the gatekeeper can take "appropiate measures to protect the integrity of the operating system".
It can, but usually doesn't do anything but make your system less secure. I'd have no problem with anti-cheat systems, but they by and large don't work.
Escape From Tarkov had a big issue with cheaters because they would farm ingame currency, then sell it for real cash (Real Money Trading - RMT). This was literally a job for these people. Everytime they got banned, they just bought another account (~40$) and kept farming. If a support person bans one such person per two hours (at a generous 20$/hr Russian salary), the company literally makes money off of cheating.
I get why Free To Play games have cheater issues (even though for example Fortnite is raking in cash), but for pay to play games, I just don't get it.
If you attended Kernel and Hardware hacking courses at security trainings, you're likely sitting next to either some cheat developers, or some anti-cheat team members.
When the xbox360 was jailbroken a lot of games were immediately ruined, at least until Microsoft figured out how to ban modded consoles from online play.
Yeah, which is why if you go on subreddits for any major multiplayer game that supports crossplay between PC and consoles (like COD Warzone), you will see a lot of people recommending to turn off crossplay to avoid dealing with cheaters, because pretty much all of them come from PC.
I usually have no issues playing with crossplay enabled on release of a new game, but a month or so after, I end up disabling it most of the time for that exact reason.
>PC players play on jailbroken (in a sense) machine.
PC games also ship with anti-cheat. Why ship anti-cheat to a console that's supposed to be secure?
That game (fort nite) seems to have interesting change in visuals, random NPCs walking around and different looking characters natively. I wonder how much of that is an attempt to tamp down on cheating.
Breaking this would require an exploit in the bootloader.
You could also directly download any game from the eShop CDN witbout buying it (because the only authorization method was a key per game, not bound to a user, so freely shareable for modded consoles) until like a year before the eshop shut down.
Now with the switch they send tons of telemetry and ban at the first suspicious report. I haven't heard about non modded switches being banned though.
Switch jailbreak usually involves blocking Nintendo servers when booted into the modded OS to prevent bans (since CFW is not permanent on the switch for now)
Hmmm... when I bought the PS5, for a few days everything was fine. Then it started to have garbled sounds whenever It booted up. If I power cycle the monitor the sound issues disappear.
Couldn't bring it back to its normal state. Maybe just some quirks with the monitor... maybe someone is sitting inside my PS ;D. Monitor has no issues with the Xbox.
That kind of news always increase sales, so they can benefit from it if they damage control correctly, a new model is just around the corner, so it's all good i guess
We’ve seen similar tactics for gaming anti-cheat purposes for quite some time. Companies like Tesla have threatened to disable services to discourage reverse engineering and software modification.
Still the reverse engineers, by and large, do not go online. If they update it's from a pre-downloaded firmware. So there is not much to ban.
[0] https://www.desinerd.co.in/howto-avoid-nintendo-3ds-ban-wave...
For instance it might still phone home and install a new firmware/software image.
This might be the bigger task than the actual jailbreak
Going through the hassle of wasting time and nerves to pirate games that are very cheap to get after a few months after release or in sales is beyond my comprehension.
First thing it downloaded a 10 or 20 Gb patch...
Here is one website keeping track of it happening to various degrees: https://delistedgames.com/
Sometimes the game simply disappears from the store front but you can find it in your library. Sometimes it disappears from your library too, and you can request it via some process (https://delistedgames.com/get-your-games-back/). Sometimes you need to write the company in order to get a new key to whatever platform it is still available.
And sometimes it's just lost, with no recourse.
If you buy a single player game digitally you should continue to have access to it for the life of the console as long as you aren't banned for doing something like disputing a credit card charge. (Which admittedly is a concern.)
Nobody bought P.T.
The Scott Pilgrim game was delisted on the Ps3 when the license expired, and I can still download and play it today. Being delisted just means new customers can't buy it.
There's no way Sony's terms of service allow developers to pull games from the library after purchase, that would be a remarkable business failure on their part given how much leverage they have in negotiating the TOS with developers.
I returned a faulty game as is my legal right under UK law, Steam said they didn't allow that because they had their own much more restrictive rules. Eventually, I raised a PayPal dispute and PayPal choose to refund me (the amount was ~£1). They retaliated with restrictions to my account ... such restrictions as retaliation for fair exercise of rights granted by law is something that needs addressing.
I've noticed that game libraries, like Steam, now explicitly try to remove consumer rights with a click-thru pseudo-contract that directly contradicts UK law (roughly 'you give up rights to a refund'; whilst the Consumer Rights Act explicitly applies to digitally supplied goods).
Just thought this was a related point of note. Suppliers of intangible media have a little too much free rein.
I have hundreds of video games. On steam I think it's over 200 titles. I can't tell if something I purchased ever disappeared from there. What I do know is I have lots of titles on my account that aren't sold on Steam anymore. Some GTA games with the original soundtrack, several EA titles that used to be sold on Steam once upon a time.
Is there a way to use this site to check my gaming accounts to see if I lost any games?
I am amazed at the number of high quality games on there for a relatively small monthly fee. Buying one new game at full price is the equivalent of around 6 months of game pass. So for the same price I can either have 2 new games a year, or have access to hundreds of games.
Subscription services like that make piracy completely redundant. Game pass is spotify for games, and I haven't bought or pirated music since I started using spotify
Meanwhile, Sony's missing many landmark titles from two generations, and your only option for playing PS3 games on a PS5 is streaming.
PS3 had a shaky launch precisely for that reason, it launched at 599. The PS4 launched at 399 (a hundred bucks cheaper than the Xbox One btw and one the reasons it got a massive lead since the beginning)
Not to take away from Microsoft's achievement (and commitment) here, but of course much of that is dependent on remote servers to supply the necessary patches, or in some cases going so far as to just treat the original disc as a DRM dongle that enables an entirely image to be downloaded.
This is backcompat that allows you to play titles from the last twenty years right now, and that's still a huge improvement over anything Sony or Nintendo have done in the last generation or so [1], and reflects the degree to which Microsoft sees that as a killer feature of Steam. But it's not super likely that this will still work in another twenty years— the only archival-quality solution is keeping the old hardware working or hoping for the best with emulation.
[1]: But do note that a Wii U can natively play Wii games, and can be jailbroken to natively play Gamecube games, since all three systems are iterations of the same underlying platform. The launch versions of Nintendo's handhelds always supported at least one prior generation of game card/cartridge as well. And of course the initial "fat" SKUs of PS2 and PS3 could both play the generation of games immediately prior— and none of this required internet access.
We like this so much we sent an older Xbox One to a third friend with the idea to get him to buy Game Pass so we can all play together.
I dread the end of this early growth period for Game Pass.
In the West maybe. To keep up with Playstation example, in my country you can buy 6 new PS5 games with the minimum salary.
I'm not sure that says much either way.
https://www.bal.com/bal-news/singapore-minimum-monthly-salar... says min salary is 3k sgd
https://store.playstation.com/en-sg/concept/10000956 says Gran Turismo is 98 SGD
so I am puzzled
Btw, Germany also didn't have a minimum wage until fairly recently.
I know there are cheaper alternatives, but gaming branded hardware is far from being cheap. Specially middle-high GPUs.
And for most people that want to upgrade their computers or a specific item, they prefer to buy something that will last at between 3 to 5 years.
A stand, chain lube + cleaner, tubes+tube patch kit, chain brush, floor pump, chain drive tool, cable cutter and a set or two of wrenches/screwdrivers cost you more then a 200/300 euro switch plus at least one 60 euro game?
And you bought these? You didn't inherit all this stuff from your grandparents together with an "Oma fiets" or two when you born?
jokes aside, I do imagine that you might have more specialized tools. specially if you're working with some of the older sport bicycles that need love.
Sure, you can choose to buy a PC... but that's not a requirement (or indeed a preference) for lots of people in the hobby.
It's cheaper to fly to America and buy game consoles or PC hardware and fly back than it is to buy them in Brazil. Just be sure to hide your price tags from customs (or have a nice little bribe ready)
I learned a ton of English, strategy, stress management, shortcut keys, programming and whatnot from games. Some games also took a lot of my sanity, sleep, relationships with living beings, etc. :)
Don't feel bad enjoying a hobby. The universe is your playground.
If you enjoy a hobby then it's not useless, enjoying it is the point of a hobby! So enjoy playing video games, growing houseplants, playing golf or whatever hobbies you have without feeling guilty about not producing as much as you could.
I don't know about you but I started programming because of Minecraft and learning about running a business by playing prosperous universe and this gave me some insights that make me suspect that money and it's non neutrality is the biggest unrecognised problem in economics. Remember economics 101 doesn't even have the concept of money or time. In fact econ 101 is an utopia that we want to reach, not how economics works in practice.
Positive reinforcement is worth more than people complaining that you are wasting your time by doing the wrong thing. People on HN say you should be curing cancer instead of building a factory in factorio. The former is a poorly defined multidimensional non linear search space with high chance of failure, the latter is a well studied problem with tutorials and guides. That is negative reinforcement.
Getting free games per month or even getting access to a back catalogue of games with Game Pass or Playstation Plus is a monthly $9 to $15.
That's less than people pay that smoke.
Or maybe you want to do machining(high end hobby), now you need a garage which will cost you ten thousands of dollars or you rent one for a hundred or maybe four hundred dollars per month. Then you need machines which cost more than 5k dollars and you guessed it, you will require multiple machines like that.
In Bolivia when I was teen, I loved to go to the markets and buy pirated PS2 games. Each one would be about 10 bolivianos. (Around $1.50 ish?)
Without these pirated games myself and all of my friends and people I knew would not have been able to play games period. Imagine buying a $60 + import tax for ONE GAME on a Bolivian salary? Ludicrous.
I'm very happy the PS5 will finally open and allow gamers in third world countries to play. The PS3 and PS4 to my knowledge never had that freedom the PS2 did back in the day.
Also note that there are thousands of games that are free to play on PCs. There are even lots of old commercial games that can be downloaded for free now, legally.
Just because you can't afford a particular game doesn't mean that there aren't other options. As a teen I couldn't afford every game I wanted either.
It's not just about saving 50 bucks every now and then. At least for some, it's about satisfying intellectual curiosity as well.
If you wait until later, the units in the shops will also have patched firmware.
https://ctf101.org/binary-exploitation/return-oriented-progr....
https://trustfoundry.net/2019/07/18/basic-rop-techniques-and...
This is important as modern no-execute et al. prevent you from simply dumping arbitrary code into memory and running it.
Consequently, modern exploits tend to look like: (1) figure out how memory is laid out, or close enough, (2) calculate where a useful function is, that you can call with arbitrary parameters (aka a gadget), (3) abuse that function to do your bidding by controlling its parameters and the instruction pointer.
(2) gets around your inability to write + execute code directly, because the system is by definition already set up to allow built-in code to execute. And that built-in code generally does lots of useful things (like reading and writing memory).
ASLR makes (1) harder, but fundamental efficiency reasons at the operating system code level mean than usually "everything" isn't fully randomized.
> Consequently, modern exploits tend to look like: (1) figure out how memory is laid out, or close enough, (2) calculate where a useful function is, that you can call with arbitrary parameters (aka a gadget), (3) abuse that function to do your bidding by controlling its parameters and the instruction pointer.
This is all correct, but generally a gadget is what a snippet of assembly / machine code that you call to get the CPU into a state to call a function. So its less a function and more a set of instructions (anywhere) that are useful.
So for example, you might have a gadget to set specific registers with values off the stack so you can call malloc with the correct size, etc.
Now get the hell off my lawn you whippersnappers, before I throw my teef at you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadget_(disambiguation)#Scienc...
The idea being that a code "gadget" is something similarly small and innocuous-looking that turns out to have far, far more powerful effects than anyone would guess just by looking at it.
I believe the term either originally came from, or was at least popularized by people wanting to escape Apple's "walled garden", which is also viewed by some as a jail.
Jailbreaking means taking control. It means unlocking the computer within so that it becomes a true general purpose computer. It means being able to run your own software, not just what they approve. It means being able to circumvent their DRM if you want.
Modern game consoles (but lots of other devices, including Apple's iOS, which used to have one of the most restrictive environments to develop applications on - it's slightly better these day - as well) restrict the sort of code you're allowed to run on it to only what the manufacturer allows you to run.
"Jailbreaking" in this context means that you can bypass those sorts of restrictions, with the implementation of what that entails differing per device.
The alternate term you often hear used for this sort of hacking (and slightly older since it predates the iphone) is Homebrew.
I've head of them but have never seen one in a store.
Yeah they recently released old games on PC but there is a large collection of exclusives either out or coming soon.
also, do you not purchase modern cars? nvidia graphics cards, all sorts of devices? :)