Sony PS3 Hack Released

31 January 2010 Comments

Acclaimed Hacker George Hotz announced on his blog last friday that he had succesfully managed to hack the PlayStation 3 to run his own software. Geo Hotz is also responsible for hacking the iPhone no too long ago and has been involved in a game of cat and mouse with Apple ever since.

He’s been spending the last 5 weeks working hard on Sony’s PlayStation 3 trying to find an exploit. Eventually he was successful, and managed to hack the PlayStation 3 “Very simple hardware cleverly applied, and some not so simple software “. The PlayStation 3 traditionally only runs software that has been digitally certified and signed by Sony themselves.

It’s part of the complex digital rights management system designed to prevent software piracy. But this hack from Geo Hotz is the hardest and most important step in cracking the digital protection.

“Hopefully, this will ignite the PS3 scene, and you will organize and figure out how to use this to do practical things, like the iPhone when jailbreaks were first released, I have a life to get back to and can’t keep working on this all day and night” said Geo Hotz on his Blog.

He originally said he would wait until he was certain that exploit was possible for fear that Sony would patch it up. But now he has made the information available to the public on his blog. He decided to release the exploit to see what others could do with it and because he wanted to move on to other work.

“Hopefully, this will ignite the PS3 scene, and you will organize and figure out how to use this to do practical things, like the iPhone when jailbreaks were first released, I have a life to get back to and can’t keep working on this all day and night”

Now that the hack is released we should expect to see more programmers digging into the ins and outs of the PlayStation to see what else they can do with it.

“The PS3 is hacked, it’s your job to figure out something useful to do with it.”

The exploit Hotz has found works with the PlayStation 3’s “Other OS” feature that allows a second operating system to be installed on the machine. This feature was discontinued on the newer PS3 Slim model so I’m not sure whether the hack works on the new PS3.

Sony’s Tokyo based Gaming Unit are now examining the code to see whether or not these claims made by Geo Hotz are true. They have so far refused to comment on the situation until they have finished their investigation.

But whatever becomes of this, I would expect to see Sony release a firmware update so as to patch their machines to prevent pirated games from running on their games consoles.