PS3 Hack Means Nothing, Backups Are Years Away

Desz January 26, 2010 PlayStation 3, Tech

The great “Geo Hotz” who initially hacked the very first iPhone to work on all service carriers, is now making front page news once again. This time Mr. Geo makes news, by exploding the PS3′s hardware and software, in which he described as a “very secure system”. Today he has released the PS3′s exploit to the world. The exploit would give full memory access and therefore ring 0 access from OtherOS. What exactly does that mean? Who the heck knows, but how can you not have faith in the guy.

But, seriously how many people have the knowledge, money and team to pull this off right now? Geo has set the ground work, so all that’s left to do, is the baking, and of course the icing on the cake. But that is easier said than done. Let’s go back sometime when the PS2 initially got hacked. You first needed a chip with 20-25 solder points, then of course came the boot disc, then the game, then the praying that it booted up fine. All this back in 2000 was great, but we still paid the price and ran the risk to brick the system. Eventually a safer, quicker, but most importantly, an easier solution came about.

Now, if the PS3 happens to successfully get hacked to play back up games, which is what obviously everybody with the pirate eye patch is looking forward to, it is guaranteed that the hack would have a hard time reaching the general public for quite sometime. Why? Price! The PS3 uses a Blu-Ray drive, and of course Blu-Ray disc, I’m not sure how many people have actually been to their local Best Buy or even visited Newegg lately, a good burner is still in the $200 range, while the disc may not be as bad, you still pay in average 10-$20 per disc. Now come the compatibility issues, what burner will work, what discs are the best, what additional hardware and software to buy, and so on and so forth.

Yes, the great Geo has exploited something that many have tried to exploit, but we have to be realist, Geo may have the knowledge to make this happen all the way through, but there are reasons, in why Geo is stepping back; the reasons could very well be time and money. While a few may afford the time and the ingredients to continue where Geo left off, most will only read, watch, and hear about the PS3′s hacking stages much like all hacked consoles have gone through before. For the time being, don’t get too exited just yet, let the brains take care of the grunt work, let them go through the trial and error phase, let them make it easy.

Spend the next few years enjoying the PSN, while we still can.

Wow, Onlive team, must be loving life right now.lol!

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KG

Although I agree with you regarding the prices of the blank BDs, however I am sure that the hackers will be able to copy games to the PS3′s internal hard disk either by ripping it directly from the PS3 to the hard disk (via a software installed on the PS3), or by streaming it from PC through the network. This way, they will be able to play around as much as they want for free, and the rest of the world will either have to buy gigantic hard drives to play those games, or wait until cheaper BDs are released in the wild!
http://www.playstationmalta.com Markbusu

This is all a start… I remember watching the Iphone jailbreak interview on FOX… Reporters said that this is good… but this means nothing.. it was too complex and said it would not succeed… look how this has developed now… anybody can jailbreak their iphone with a piece of software..

Geo Holtz has given the tool to start properly working on this. However i WISH it does not succeed, i will never support piracy!
phos

You forgot the potentiality of an HDD usb bootloader. Of course that also includes downloading the extremely large games. ISPs surely wouldn’t be happy with you downloading as much as one does for a game like that.
Dan

There’s an interesting article on Eurogamer from Digital Foundry that explains why even with his abilities we’re still quite a way away from people being able to run pirated software on the system.
kwyjibo

Lol, Blu Ray disks. PS3s have something called a “hard drive”, and I read on the internet, that there’s a thing called “the internet” where you can download stuff.
passerby

seriously, i wouldn’t mind paying 200 dollars for a blu-ray burner and the disks…..what is really stopping me is the time you need to download the game, considering the massive amount of data each game on the PS3 has (e.g. MGS4-50 gig…normal games are around 12-15 gig…) , i don’t think i still have enough bandwidth left to surf the net smoothly and the patience to wait for it to finish downloading on utorrent…..

AND GOOD GAMES DESERVES OUR MONEY!!!
orakga

Yeah, you completely overlook the difference between the PS1/PS2 hacks and the PS3 hack. The PS3 hack is PURELY software-based, whereas the PS1 and PS2 had no on-board HDD-based Operating System that could be soft-hacked. So you’re completely wrong from the start here.

Have you not seen the Wii hack?
How about the PSP hack?
And… the iPhone hack?

They’re all ridiculously simple, and are essentially batch files that run off of USB connections.

And, yeah, don’t forget that PS3s have harddrives, and people can upgrade to 1TB harddrives for around $100 now. This is WAAAY cheaper than how much CD burners or DVD burners cost around their respective times (and even BD burner are cheaper than them now).

http://tqcast.com Desz

wII, 360, psp HACKS may be simple, but dude, you are reading the article, we are discussing it, and while all this is happening, do we have a PS3 Hack now? lol seriously, the article states it will happen, just not anytime soon. Geo might have started it, and now making front page news, but this hack will not reach your town anytime soon.

Yeah PS3 80% software based, yes we all know that, but why don’t we have a PS3 that plays backups yet? that’s right , not as easy as a PSP or Wii my friend. The grunt work is being done as we speak, so sit back and wait it out those few years.

toby

Unless you live in Tokyo or Sweden, Harddrive or Disc Burner, you are not going to be downloading PS3 games any time soon.
kill

reassurance article, they will have backups by the end of the year
Matt

U people who want to do piracy go
ahead but think of it like this…pirate
games = less income to game
industry = less better produced games hence why companies are going bust because idiots are pirating…look at the music industry now there crying out for help to stop piracy everybody else is in the same boat…I might sound sad saying this but its true

http://tqcast.com Desz

Which is why ONLive is loving life right now.

MrDizzla

I hope this guy did not get paid for that article, total waste of space.

This scenario is no different from when the 360 got hacked, how many people initially had dual layer dvd burners?? not many thats for sure. Also everyone knows that the Verbatim discs used to cost a bomb!

The whole reason people pirate is for the fact that who is willing to pay £40-£50 for a game, play it for a few days, then it sits there collecting dust! (waste of money IMO). Thats why I have a Lovefilm Subscription instead lol!

Hacked or not, I don’t give a damn. All I say is congrats to GeoHot for proving everyone at http://www.ps3-hacks.com wrong…

Shove that up your pipe Power Slave! (C.U.N.T)

http://tqcast.com Desz

How do we get paid for articles? Send me the info. No doubt Geo should get praised and we praise him, but you are missing the point, (from this article)

“While a few may afford the time and the ingredients to continue where Geo left off, most will only read, watch, and hear about the PS3’s hacking stages much like all hacked consoles have gone through before. For the time being, don’t get too exited just yet, let the brains take care of the grunt work, let them go through the trial and error phase, let them make it easy.”

Mark

360 got hacked because it has crap, last – gen hardware. PS3 hasn’t been pirated nor will it ever because the tech is too powerful to allow you to run a pirated game. Power of the cell!

My words are fact, this article is technically incorrect.

name

right last gen hardware so thats why the CPU in the ps3 and xbox 360 are near identical?
same architecture PPC.
not to mention the 360 has the more powerful GPU and more RAM.
the only “outdated tech’ in the 360 is the DVD optical drive.

the ps3 is not so future proof either, my 2 year old PC kicks the royal shit out of the ps3.
let alone my new I7 OC @ 3.2GHz, 2 Nvidia 280GTX, asus delux P7 board, 12GB DDR3 RAM @ 1333MHz, 250GB SSD, 2 1TB HDDs 10000RPM PC i built a few weeks ago.
a decent 1K PC can kick the crap out of the ps3, let alone a top of the line latest tech PC.

name

you say hack means nothing game backups are years away even though you say you have absolutely no idea what the hack does.
hypercritical much?
come on site hits cant be that low that you deliberately make yourself look foolish.

and your “its too expensive” excuse is just that, a BS excuse.
assuming you live in the US?
ok, yous must be really getting ripped with bluray burners and disk prices.
i bought a burner last January and it cost me 160 AUD much less than the 200 USD your saying,
not to mention a box of 10 bluray disks set me back 40 AUD a pop not the 10-20 USD your claiming per disk.
maybe you need to do some shopping, or do some complaints because those prices are ludicrous!
plus think about it for the sake of it ill use the prices you gave even though there way more than what you would pay.
15 bucks per disk plus 200 for a burner.
games cost 60 bucks each, so 4 games and you have covered the cost of the burner.
than after that your saving yourself 45 bucks on each game.
worth it?
i dont know about you but i would much rather pay 200 bucks for a burner than 15 bucks per disk, than pay 60 bucks for every game i want.
last year alone i spent over 3K just on ps3 games.
not including psp games, PC games, xbox 360 games, PS3 controllers, new PS3, new PSP, new xbox 360 controllers and god knows whatever else i had to buy for them.
only thing stopping pirates now is time.
getting the root key which you MUST have to run copied games is extremley hard, would take lost of time and a lot of people.
they will get it, its just a matter of time.

http://tqcast.com Desz

Answer this, do you have a hacked PS3? You obviously read the title and not the article dude. So, you think you know what the hack does? Then make A ps3 RUN BACKUPS NOW. Yeah didn’t think so, nobody sitting and reading this might have an idea how the hack runs, works, but there are people that are working on it as we speak.

You can go buy your burner, and cheap blu-ray disc, but you still wont be able to do nothing for a while.

Go have a FOSTER beeerrr for now.
http://tqcast.com Desz

But, do you have a hacked PS3 that plays backups??? That is the whole argument, so answer that mr dev.

Ps3mods

This is an interesting find but until I actually see a working boot loader or backup running, it doesnt mean much. You could easily rent ps3 games and image onto the hardrive if this were possible.
Faisal

According to Hotz, he been working at the lowest level of Ps3 and got read/write access to Ps3 memory. Inspite of this fact, some experts are afraid of the new frameworks that could fill the holes. If I’m right then sony could change ps3′s read/write scheme through new framworks. In this way, I want to disprove the claim that he made by saying that he worked at the lowest level of Ps3 hardware. I think there is another level below where sony can’t change anything. That level should be broken in order to full control over the glorious console.
bigmangriff

I love how people over look the main reason for the article, just to have a reason to gripe. Yes the ps3 has a hard drive and the hard drive can be upgraded to 500gig, but the real issue come that the more devs get behind the systme the bigger games will get, the only real reason ps3 game are around 10-12gig right now is because of the piece of junk 360. Instead of really stepping it up and making a clear difference between ps3 and 360 versions devs are just going for over all sales. When we start seeing more 50-75gig possibly 100gig games downloading to a 500gig HDD is going to be pretty shitty. so the reason for the blu-ray burner and disks. Once we start seeing more for the hacks for the system we could be looking at these size games. But in all let the guys who know what they are doing do there thing and make it easier for us to do and work with it.