A Week In Comments

Is a man not entitled to handsome figurines without them being strapped to a bomb?

No, says the TSA, it still might be dangerous.

No, says the terrorists, they belong to us.

No, says CATS, someone set up us the bomb.

I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose…

Kotaku.

A site where the suspected “terrorist” would not fear the masses,

where amusement would not be bound by petty legalities,

where manliness would not be constrained by the color of his DSi.

And with the your thoughts of this story, Kotaku can become your site, as well.

There was an interesting slide in a presentation at 25c3 a few years ago done by Team Twiizers (the authors of the original Twilight Hack for the Wii, plus many subsequent Wii homebrew applications) that showed multiple devices and the “motivation” behind hacking each one of them, as well as additional ramifications of the hacks themselves.

Turns out very few devices have been hacked purely to pirate games or content. Most were hacked in order to run homebrew and install things like Linux (if the hardware is powerful enough). Piracy tools came only after they were hacked (in the chart, “piracy” was a very common additional consequence).

Most of the “smart” hackers, the hackers that write the exploits, the hackers that crack open the hardware and dump the memory, the hackers that actually have the knowledge to find a method to execute arbitrary code on a closed platform, simply don’t care about piracy. They just want to run their own software on a closed platform and share their method with the world. Once a method to execute arbitrary code is found, however, it usually becomes much easier to enable piracy on a particular platform – and less experienced coders who are motivated by piracy jump in. I won’t go into specific examples, but I’ll just say that the Wii softmodding scene was a great example of this.

You know what Sony did when they enabled OtherOS support? They closed the “smart hacker” hole. There was not enough motivation to do hardcore hardware hacking on the level that Team Twiizers went to to exploit the Wii. You could already run Linux. You could already execute your own code. Sure, you didn’t have access to the GPU, but that wasn’t a tremendously huge deal anyway. This, combined with a strong security architecture, helped the PS3 remain unexploited for over three years.

The Wii fell, and the 360 fell, but to this day it is still impossible to run a pirated game on the PS3. I believe that this is, at least in part, because of the PS3’s OtherOS support.

Finally, however, someone is trying. Geohot is a genius when it comes to hardware exploits, and he went to great extents to find the exploit that finally broke the PS3 (to a certain extent). I don’t know if anyone that experienced has “tried” to break the PS3 with that much effort before. His motivation wasn’t piracy, he simply wanted more access to the hardware than what Sony provided with OtherOS and their hypervisor. You can’t run pirated games or install a custom firmware yet, but it’s only a matter of time, and Sony knows it’s only a matter of time.

So they closed it. This was a very risky move for Sony. They promoted the PS3’s OtherOS support extensively. After geohot revealed his exploit, they sat down and decided that the benefits of disabling OtherOS were worth the risks (prevention of mass piracy versus some community backlash). That means they knew that the hole that geohot discovered could easily lead to piracy. Who knows what will happen now? I think this could very well lead to a “custom firmware” battle once more refined, software-only exploits are found with the help of this exploit, perhaps exploits that do not require the use of OtherOS.

In that case, Sony should prepare for hell.

Your father’s PlayStation Move. This is the weapon of a motion gaming Sony fanboy. Not as clumsy or random as a Wii; an elegant controller for a more civilized age. For over a thousand generations, Movers were the guardians of peace and justice in motion gaming. Before the dark times… before Natal.

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