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Comment by zagrebian | Hacker News Reader

That reminds me of a video that I watched a few months ago about how an earlier generation of PlayStation got jailbroken very late in its lifecycle because Sony decided to disable Linux (or something like that, I don’t remember). As long as that feature was available, nobody cared to hack the console because they could do what they want, but as soon as Sony pulled the feature, the console was hacked in a very short time.

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PS3.

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.

Yeah, hobbyists like the US Air Force Research Lab

(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!

Oil & gas companies as well, for their drilling and prospecting simulations.

Seriously a bit miffed at the characterization of people who have bought a piece of hardware to install Free and Open Source Software on it (and then been absolutely rugged by the manufacturer) as "pirates out to save/make money, and hobbyists too"

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!

I think USAF and other companies were likely part of the reason Sony removed Linux support. Generally, a PS3 was a lot cheaper than the equivalent PC/server.

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.

IMO that is Sony's problem, selling special purpose hardware that could be general purpose but locking it down so that your business model is secure... after the point of sale... seems a bit sneaky.

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)...

There was actually a class-action lawsuit about this, but Sony played a lot of games to keep the rationale for locking out OtherOS out of the discovery process. It wound up being just another one of those kinds of settlements - i.e. a large-sounding number being awarded to so many plaintiffs in the class that its basically pennies per person.

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).

Now, if only someone could figure out how to make a printer useful in ways other than putting ink to paper in the same manner

idk, after 20 years of experience in the security field, I have seen more than one enterprise printer put to other uses by bad guys :P

Bad guys playing Doom by chance?

As fun as things like that are, AFAIK most of those types of PoC exploits are done using SOHO printers. There are two specific cases I am thinking of, one where a pile of extremely confidential data was captured by pulling documents that had been sent to a printer for printing or faxing; in that case it was an insider who was copying docs they shouldn't have access to. In the other case it was a pretty nifty attack where the attacker was able to pivot using credentials taken from a printer to access other systems.

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.

I suspect Monopoly is a better game model.

Sony loved those labs. They were pushing an idea at the time that it was legally not a game console but instead a general purpose computer, which helped them with import tariffs in a lot of jurisdictions. It's also great marketing. "You can have the power of a super computer under your TV".

Source regarding USAF having PSPs?

Just google USAF PS3, it was called the Condor Cluster and it was big news in 2010 when the PS3 was still new. It has also been covered more recently.

The USAF also has Kubernetes in F-22s from what I understand now

Wikipedia has a list[0]. Obviously this doesn't include the unknown ones.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

It's the other way around. Linux was removed as a reaction to it being used to jailbreak the PS3 and allow piracy.

Well then that must be another type of jailbreak.

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?

I remember it very differently.

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.

Your memory may not be as good as you remember. This history wiki doesn't seem to imply any causality between the jailbreak and the removal of OtherOS.

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.

I tried to google it, but on hn there wasn't much discussion about it. 13 years ago.

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...

1. Sony having a predictable reaction to piracy is not (and would not be) the same as "piracy took freedoms away from users".

2. You got your facts/timeline wrong. GeoHot didn't publish his hack until after OtherOS was disabled.

> 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?

Oh my, no, there wasn’t any “responsible disclosure,” but rather some serious animosity from Sony. They sued Geohot, and won an injunction against him hacking on any Sony products.

Thinking back on it, I don’t think geohot ever even disclosed the specifics of the bug, or publicly released any PoC before Sony sent the lawyers after him, and he was legally (and morally) prevented from hacking on Sony products after

No...

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.

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