PS5 Jailbreaks Are Escalating at an Unprecedented Pace
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Not all software, obviously. Apple is notoriously good at producing "black box" products.
Runtime modification and replacement is limited by hardware root of trust, but for sheer source inspection I don’t think they’re special. What products are you thinking about?
On PS5 it's done in couple of seconds.
(I presume the picofly & similar devices are just doing this automatically so you can boot the hardware under user control without requiring other hardware to make the exploit work?)
And you could cheat with games by plugging Action Replay or Gameshark into the serial port which basically just fucked with the game's memory. I don't even know what the serial port was actually meant for.
The rarely-used Playstation Link cable, ostensibly:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Link_Cable
Never used it myself, but it allowed a really weird first-person multiplayer mode in Bushido Blade:
Yesterday's news on the mathematics breakthroughs were a foregone conclusion - there is a lot of hidden overlap between it and RE. RE is just the more obscure of the two, but among my circle of peers, many people have already undertaken (and succeeded) at very ambitious projects. Obvious standouts are things like Modern Warfare which gets mentioned because it is highly popular, but many games have already been reversed by the quiet majority.
I don't see many options for PS/Nintendo. Some form of bespoke-hardware-based lockdown reminiscent of the Cell processor, perhaps. But that is a lot of R&D to spend on something like this. Will have to wait and see.
So, what to make of this? Machines of the future or stochastic parrots? Of course. I'll take two.
The PS5 (and its Xbox counterpart) is more-or-less just a modern budget gaming PC with a little bit of special sauce. The only advantage here is that component pricing may have been locked in before the RAM crisis.
So, if you buy a PS5 now, you should be good
"Piracy is a service problem" - Gabe Newell
Gabes point is thay the balance of the two is overwhelmingly; yes some pirates will always pirate. Most win prefer to buy the game if the terms are reasonable. Being smart enough to undetstand this and run his business accordingly is why Gabe owns yachts.
This quote has been taken too far out of context from the original talk, which is worth viewing.
He was saying that piracy can be reduced by making the product easily available. When it was easier to download a pirated version from home than to drive to the store and back and unwrap a physical CD, piracy was easier.
That is not true today. The easiest path is to buy the game digitally through the service on the device and play it directly. Pirating it is more work and harder to do.
So quoting Gabe Newell in support is wrong. Saying it’s a service problem is also wrong when the piracy route takes a lot more work. The goalposts keep moving around (and I’m sure they’ll move more in the replies) but we have to eventually admit that a lot of pirates are pirating because they don’t want to pay for the game. It’s the most obvious fact on this topic but the comments are always full of mental gymnastics pretending the pirates are noble people doing the right thing.
Could've sworn the original context was that he was referring to Russian piracy, where many of the games are not available there legally at the time, leaving piracy as the only recourse.
- pricing - for some kids some games are just too expensive, and they still want to play, and don't want to be left out;
- platform lock - this is more for emulation, where people don't want to buy a platform to play 1 or 2 IP;
I see Gabe's reference in both of those scenarios, because Steam always had good deals, while retailers didn't.
You might say: "in that case, some people are only willing to pay 0$ for a game, and they shouldn't have access to it."
While I understand it, I bet you a massive chunk of GTA V, RDR2, and soon GTA VI players that have available income now, had their first experiences with the series through piracy.
But I agree there's no nobility, just people that can't afford stuff, or don't value it enough to part with their money, but you can't assume they would be customers at the moment they get a copy.
edit: I looked up some figures and the numbers had a brief dip in 2022 but are continually increasing since. So I would say, games are being played and rising still.