The moment the hack is public Sony will release an update to block it. And so the game of cat and mouse continues.
OTOH who knows how much of the Portal was actually designed by Sony, since it's running Android rather than SIEs usual FreeBSD it might have been outsourced or derived from some generic ODM design.
I bought my PSP at launch and it spent the vast majority of it's lifespan with some kind of custom firmware installed.
I started university the year it launched in the UK but I already had a Japanese import PSP1000 I'd bought the year before.
Studying CSEE a few friends and I were all over the hacking and homebrew and wrote a few apps/tools ourselves.
We spent all of the boring lectures gaming on our PSPs, modifying them, dumping and swapping games etc.
Later we got Compaq iPaQs and modified those, installed Linux etc and dreamed of a Linux phone, then came the first iPhone, I imported one of those the year before it released here (UK) and everyone who saw it in the EE department were amazed.
Then of course came Android, the dream came true. Fast forward over a decade and Google has well and truly put a bolt through the head of that dream.
It was a different time in my life, but I definitely feel it's (tech/gadgets) all a lot less interesting these days.
Meanwhile Microsoft has gone the other direction, opening up many Xbox games for crossplay/cross-save with Windows, partnering with GeForce Now to offer Game Pass games there (in addition to their own xCloud, which is total crap by comparison because it streams from actual Xbox consoles), and they don't care where you end up streaming it to (including web browsers).
Also, have you tried GeForce Now? Not sure if it works on Linux/Firefox. It runs on ChromeOS at least, so if you're okay with that distro, it ought to be a much better experience than GamePass (but only a subset of GamePass games are supported).
They also only agreed to put their games on GeForce Now to be able to buy Activision.
And Windows is still a Microsoft platform. They don't benefit as much from game sales but they do still benefit overall in keeping gamers there instead of migrating to PS5 or Linux.
As a gamer stuck on a Mac, I find GamePass & Steam + GeForce Now offers a better experience than Crossover/Whisky games. It's even better than native Apple Silicon ports (like BG3 or Stray) because the GFN GPUs are so much more powerful, and can use the latest DLSS. My M2 Max doesn't come close.
Proton is pretty amazing (for the few days I had a Steam Deck), but AFAIK it doesn't work on Mac? If it ever gets ported, or if Asahi ever matures enough, I'd love to be able to use that to play other Windows games not on the streaming services.
*the battery ruining was not mentioned in the changelog for the update.
It's also a strangely perverse incentive to stay on an exploitable firmware if you want to hack your own hardware.
It’s always about licensing costs for the manufacturer. Every game or application released for consoles (and phones alike) have to pay a licensing fee to the maintainers of that platform to publish on that platform. If you can jailbreak the device then you can publish software to that device without paying Sony, Apple or whoever else.
The security aspect is just a convenient side effect from locking people in. But if it was only security that these manufacturers were concerned about then they’d have found a way to allow people to tinker with their hardware without needing to crack any security mechanisms in the first place.
You can see this concern for licensing being a big thing in consoles as early as the Gameboy and MegaDrive (Genesis). And back then security wasn’t even a concern.