Tendo City

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/...3-hack.ars

It all started with someone finding out the actual authentication key for PS3 systems, with the goal of fully customizable PS3 and eventually restoring Linux to it. I'm all for that, but Sony's lawsuit frames it as an attack on "their" consoles (which they stop being the moment someone pays for them and takes them home). After a bunch of lawsuits, it comes down to this. Sony is threatening to sue anyone who's ever posted that key online.

They must be joking. Getting information out of the internet is like getting pee out of a pool, it'll never happen.

Sony's just been a trainwreck this entire gen. They went from top dog to bottom of the heap in one gen and have just been going batshit nuts trying to get back their market share.

This recent hack really has them scrambling. I understand their concern over piracy. It's legitimate, though perhaps overblown. However their recent spat of lawsuits over this have no real basis. Some of the people they're hunting down don't even live in the US, for example. The fact is, there's perfectly legitimate reasons to hack the thing, mostly having to do with the fact that, as they originally actually advertised it, the PS3 is a pretty danged powerful computer in it's own right, and plenty of people would love the opportunity to actually fully utilize the hardware they bought in whatever way they please.

Note some caveats here. While I do think hacking the system is perfectly legitimate, I don't think piracy is. At best, "backups" on it are purely for the sake of speeding up load times, and a few extra steps could be taken on the part of whoever's writing it to, say, sign self-made backups so they can only be played on that specific console. It'd be a "we're meeting you half way Sony" gesture of good will. Further, while I don't think Sony is at all in their rights to remove features from a system they sold to you, or to remotely "disable" a console as they have recently hinted at being able to do, they ARE fully in their rights to ban systems from their online network. In that case, the network is NOT something someone owns, it's entirely Sony's own servers, and the threat of cheating in online games is sufficient reason to ban hacked systems. I would suggest, to the hackers, to simply set up two modes. One mode is the "hacked" do whatever you want mode, but with access to Sony's network disabled, and the other would be "unhacked" normal mode with full online access. Again, it's another "meet them half way" gesture to do something like that. Anyone who takes either of these gestures and attempts to work around them would certainly have very suspect motivations, and both sides can go after such "black hats" as they emerge.

Really, that second gesture I mentioned? That's basically what Linux mode is set up to be. No one was really bothering with PS3 hacking until Sony just up and took it out. Now it's returning but with complete system access (such as full GPU support which Sony's Linux mode lacked). This is the sort of thing Sony really aught to just put back in, an act of meeting people half-way of their own.

Meanwhile:

<img src="http://art.penny-arcade.com/photos/1173457634_d5yix-L.jpg">

Yeah so, on the one hand they're doing incredible things to their next hand held. On the other hand... If it's $500 then no one is going to buy the thing... Unless they do, my "iPad theory of people will buy anything these days"...

Yeah but the iPad is a far more versatile machine than a handheld gaming console with some bells and whistles. People do use them for work, a market that the new Sony handheld isn't gonna have, and the iPad itself is hardly mainstream at this point (I think I've only ever seen one person with one). Sure, the tech junkies might pick one up, but the general populous? Nah.

The hacking crowd's going to be all over this thing though. It's powerful and has a touch screen. At that point, the only thing missing is the software. Sony COULD officially support homebrew, which would make this this competitive with an iPad, or they could just block anything but their games and just lose that market entirely. Considering Sony's choices this gen, I'm pretty sure we all have a good idea which way Sony's going to lean. It'll be quicker to hack this if it really does use a version of Android (aka Linux) as it's backend.