iPhone hacker 'geohot' hacks the Sony PS3

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 26 January 2010 15:22

Opinion and Analysis

It was meant to be “unhackable”, but George Hotz, the celebrated iPhone hacker, has finally managed to hack Sony’s Playstation 3.
Well, it has taken 3 years for someone to do it, but hacking the PS3 has finally happened, thanks to George Hotz, or “geohot” – the fellow that hardware hacked the iPhone.

There are some caveats – the hack only currently works with the older “large” PS3 models, and not the “new” slimline model, and there’s no simple download for PS3 owners to apply to their machines, but work progresses.

Geohot says that his end goal is “to enable unsigned code execution, making every unit into a test and opening up a third party development community, either through software or hardware(with a mod chip). The PS3 is a prime example of how security should be done, very open docs wise, and the thing even runs Linux. But it isn't unbreakable :-)”.

That was back on December 26, 2009, but on January 22, 2010, geohot wrote: “I have read/write access to the entire system memory, and HV level access to the processor. In other words, I have hacked the PS3. The rest is just software. And reversing.”

Because of great excitement in the PS3 owning community, and the expectation of some that the hack will allow the PS3 to run pirated software, geohot has had to issue a clarification on his intentions, which he did on January 25.

Here he notes that: “First off, this is not a release blog like 'On The iPhone'. If you are expecting some tool to be released from this blog like blackra1n, stop reading now. If you have a slim and are complaining this hack won't work for you, stop reading now. WE DO NOT CONDONE PIRACY, NOR WILL WE EVER. If you are looking for piracy, stop reading now. If you want to see the direction in which I will take this blog, read the early entries in the iPhone one. Information on this blog is for research purposes only.”

So… while it seems that much work needs to be done on continued PS3 hacking before any hack becomes publicly available to anyone, geohot is hot on the heels of making it happen.

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