Open Source PS3 Jailbreak Released 226
tlhIngan writes "Despite all the lawsuits and injunctions by Sony to keep the PS3 Jailbreak out of modder's hands, it appears that a third party has made a clone. The best part is, it only requires a cheap (approximately $40) development board by Atmel, and the requisite software is open-source. Get the Atmel code from GitHub and apply a small patch which will enable backup play (the code by itself only lets you run unsigned code, the patch allows for BD backups). The code is GPLv3. It would be highly ironic if someone ported this to Linux USB Gadgets, then you could use a Linux device to jailbreak your PS3, to which Sony removed Linux functionality. An Android phone would be suitable."
Re:Hehehe (Score:3, Interesting)
False dichotomy. Why can't I also hate Nintendo?
Re:simple solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, and another solution: Mark updates with an expiration date such that the unit will refuse to run if its firmware is too stale.
If they ever do that, I will have to kill somebody. Besides the obvious reason, I have a driving wheel that won't work unless the system date is set before 12-22-08. The bug has been there for well over a year and there's no sign its getting fixed.
Consider that the one and only reason I bought a PS3 over a 360 is to play GT5. See how well that decision worked for me?
Re:Hehehe (Score:3, Interesting)
I more or less agree with you on this, but the slashdot demographic is still quite diverse in many ways. We have Apple fanbois, Windows fanbois (AKA trolls) and others. We have people who practice what they preach and others who preach but fail to practice.
Personally, my boycott of Sony is for reasons of quality that goes back a very long way. The only Sony device I ever owned that was any good was my camcorder... I still have it but haven't used it in a very long time. All other things ended up failing just after the warranty expired. And they are just JUNK. My Clie's battery stopped working rendering it useless. I was given one Sony laptop and later bought one of more modern hardware components which then introduced me to the compatibility and performance hell that is "neomagic" or something like that... a really crappy video chip set that, if I recall, is related to the GMA500 video chipset that Intel will never and can never fully support under Linux. That was quite some time ago and I started hating Sony for that back then and since that time, nothing has shown me that they have done anything to improve their image ... quite the contrary, the rootkit incident was icing on the crap-cake. This "removed linux support" matter was just another "I told you so" thing as far as I am concerned.
I will never buy a Sony anything.
Everyone who sets aside their good senses so that they can play some games are doing themselves no service at all. I'm anti-microsoft, but I still have XBox360... actually, two and an original XBox... all that so I can play with my sons. I can't bring myself to own a Wii... it feels stupid. And if I want exercise, I'll ride my bicycle -- it's more fun.
Anyway, most people here are pretty weak when it comes to character and standing by their positions. I say this because of all the "types" of people I see here on Slashdot, I can't say that I have noticed many Sony fans or even Sony apologists. So either they choose not to speak up or there are a lot of people who prioritize games over good character or good sense. (This, by the way, partially describes addiction and other mental inconsistencies like religion... seriously, how can you have a rational and logical mind and still leap to answer life's questions with "god magic"?)
What about the PSP? (Score:3, Interesting)
It would be interesting if this thing was ported to the PSP and the PSP could be used to unlock the PS3
Re:This exploit is beautiful (Score:4, Interesting)
I have blue screened my development workstation before because I had a bad descriptor that the Windows Audio driver tried to parse and it brought down the kernel. So I knew this sort of thing would be possible. I think attacking the USB host controller driver is going to become a much more common method of infection in the next few years.
But to get that far...you need dedication. You need to love the hardware. When you see it, it's like the matrix...behind the 1s and 0s and circuit board traces, there is a setting, characters, and a plot.
From there, that's how you can see the attack on the heap. That's actually the most complicated part, in my opinion. You are trying to fool the kernel into handing you a certain portion of memory. It's like social engineering...and that's what makes it hard. The kernel is interrogating you, and you have to give the right answers. Not only the right answers, but the answers must be corrupted in just the right way.
Everything from this point can be built on the work of someone before you. Pretty much all exploits eventually launch shellcode somewhere. They all need some way to launch the shellcode, and hooking a system call (in this case, free()) is a favored way to go about that. Then you need some way to do the hook, which in this case was the smashing the Heap.
So you sit there and think...how do I drop shellcode in? What function do I hook? How do I hook it? Dots appear...and then you connect them, and you annotate the connections, and you go back and you start from scratch again because you see a better way, and then finally...it all comes together.
Re:Hehehe (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, the single reason I can think of is hating Microsoft more than Sony.
Hmmm, I'm no MS fan for sure; I hate the way they design and write programs. But none of their evil has been directed towards me, whereas Sony rooted my PC and really fucked it up. My daughter bought a CD at the now-defunct record store she worked at, and trusting that a big company like Sony wouldn't deliberately put malware on their products, ran the programs.
ALL of my music recording/burning/ripping software was trashed; my P2P apps were trashed, my CD burner was rendered read-only. None of this software would uninstall or reinstall. Sony pwned me good.
And I am not a pirate! Fercrissake, she fucking BOUGHT the CD from a music store. This is Evil with a capital E. Maybe two or three Es. Those bastards should have gone to fucking prison; if I did that to their computers you can bet your mom's ass I'd be in prison.
When I reinstalled Windows (running '98 back then) I discovered that I'd lost my CDs holding my audio and video drivers. The audio driver wasn't available over the internet (that I could find viewing at the 640x480 not having a video driver limited me to) forced me to "upgrade" to XP (and I never saw much functional difference between XP and 98 except they moved everything around), costing me a hundred bucks, and I had to buy a USB sound box. And spend all afternoon installing XP and all my apps, some of which wouldn't run in XP.
As much as I dislike Microsoft, as evil as they may be they've NEVER gone to those depths of evilness, at me anyway.
These days, I do hardly any gaming so as soon as I can get Linux installed on my netbook I'll pretty much be MS-free. If MS came up with an app I felt I really wanted or needed, I'd buy it in a heartbeat, but no way could I ever trust Sony again. Shit, I trust Evil-X more than I do Sony, and that's saying a lot! If Sony sold cookies I'd suspect they'd tainted them with rat poison just in case I was a pirate.
And, for a game box, there's always Nintendo if you hate both MS and Sony.
Re:Hehehe (Score:1, Interesting)
There really is no company that you can expect quality from across the board. I've never bought Sony products, but that's simply because I don't believe in buying brand name products at inflated prices, not because I have some personal vendetta. I have not heard of any reason to doubt the quality of Sony's PS3 and it is priced competitively (ignoring the Wii of course), so if I were in the market for that sort of thing the sheer fact that it was made by Sony wouldn't stop me from purchasing it. I question that it's a sign of character to choose not to support quality products simply because it's made by a brand who has burned you in the past. I have yet to see a brand that hasn't flopped, and flopped bad. So basically your just choosing to support another brand based on the sheer fact that you were lucky enough to not get burned by them. I've known a lot more people who have gotten burned by MS's gaming consoles than by Sony's. I've had numerous students come up to me asking for advice about their overheating, and eventually broken, Xbox's. If your example of "character" just sets you up to be bent over by a second company, your eventually going to run out of options. I believe it would be a much better show of character to actually research your options and choose the best one regardless of company.
Re:This exploit is beautiful (Score:2, Interesting)
You'd be amazed what a bounty for getting OtherOS working again gets you.
Re:This exploit is beautiful (Score:1, Interesting)
It brings a tear to my eye too, but not for the same reason. Sure, I'm glad the thing is jail-broken, but for fuck's sake... a buffer overflow? These kinds of bugs were completely solved in principle in the 90s*, so every time I see one of these I die a little inside. It also means that the exploit relies on a bug in the platform, which is philosophically inelegant, since that means that it cannot really be used as a data point to corroborate the "if it exists it will be hacked" attitude; additionally it means that the next firmware update this won't work any longer.
* VB (to name just one example) only used counted strings and checked arrays.