Right Let's Try This Again: PS3 Hypervisor Hacked
- Thread starter Dragona Akehi
- Start date
Considering PS2 probably sold more software in a single city in Europe then entire Asia (not counting Japan), I doubt anyone cares about those kind of "hotcake" hw sales.spyshagg said:
And not even on this forum can anyone argue that the above was NOT caused by piracy.
pseudocaesar
Member
Not to bring up the piracy issue, this is actually a genuine query. What are the legalities of what that kid does? There is a wikipedia article on him for pete sake, and he openly admits to hacking the Iphone etc, and now the PS3? Where does he stand legally? Why would he be so brazen about his actions?
lowrider007
Licorice-flavoured booze?
onken said:
He just asked what the legalities were that is all, do you know what they are?
lowrider007
Licorice-flavoured booze?
onken said:
He asked a simple polite question and you answer it with sarcasm, it's amazing how rude people are on here at times, but then I guess that just a vice of the internet, maybe I should learn to be more tolerant.
onken said:
Not all hackers give up their anonymity so easily...
The problem with talking about homebrew and legality is that homebrew is a term that covers many many techniques that need to really be examined independently. Some things are definitely legal, some things definitely illegal (at least in some jurisdictions - see mod chips), and some things more probably fall in a grey area in between.
As for what geohot's doing here, and what he did with iPhone, there's lots of debate about it. You can read some of the iPhone jailbreak back-and-forth here:
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/02/apple-says-jailbreaking-illegal
For example, Apple says its illegal to jailbreak an iPhone using a modified OS or bootloader, since said modification is a breach of its copyright. But others say it is legal to do this, that it falls under reverse engineering rules (which is the same reason emulators in and of themselves are legal - although IMO there is a difference reverse engineering something, and modifying it...). Then some more say that it's legal to modify the software yourself but illegal to distribute a modified version of the software (this might be where the automobile comparison comes in - it's of course legal to modify your own car with whatever parts you like, but on the flipside it's probably illegal to copy the car's design, and/or modify it, and then distribute your copies of the car)
geohot seems to be trying to go down the same route with PS3 as he did with iPhone - a patched version of the hypervisor. Same approach I think is taken on PSP, patched OSes. So far I don't think the likes of Sony or Apple have tested the legality of modifying their software in court, but I think they are fairly unequivocal about their opinion on that legality. And I believe some hackers have left the PSP scene because of fear of Sony ultimately biting that bullet and taking them to court...some more retain their anonymity.
Anyway...we could have an interesting debate about these things but I dunno if this thread is the right one for it.
The Faceless Master
Member
1) "Consumer"Eternal Sleeper said:
2) You're just throwing in a platform where "Homebrew" is ... well, already available ... how does your response even make sense???
3) See 1)
Did the ability to play bootlegs on relatively inexpensive CDR's help the PS1 defeat the N64?
Did the almost immediate moddability of PS2 help Sony keep their crown as King of Console Makers?
Did the ability to load a bunch of backups of games you own onto one MicroSD card on DS help it maintain great software sales?
the point is that just about every system except PS3 has had piracy, and some of them did extremely well and others did extremely poorly, and others were somewhere in between.
The Faceless Master
Member
they've banned people before, so they obviously have the tools to ban. now, if what you're really asking is will they be able to detect possible exploits in the future, they should be able to, at least for the first few rounds of cat & mouse.NinjaFusion said:
The Faceless Master
Member
my questions are: why would they bother? is it worth the effort? shouldn't they concentrate on something else?gofreak said:
people cheat their gamerscore on XBL, and in some cases it's VERY obvious, but MS only goes after the people who have really really high gamerscores full of cheated achievements. it's not worth it to them to set up such a system, why would it be for Sony, especially when people can make a new account for free? well, unless they ban consoles. then the walmart swapping starts...
this is the type of thread where we speculate along many paths, this isn't really a wait and see thread. i mean, he hasn't even got hello world running and people are talking about PS2 emulators, XBMC ports with MKV BABY and PIRACYMANIA RUNNIN' WILD BROTHER!!!
The Faceless Master
Member
oh, so you'll pretend it's robust, but i can't pretend that there are weak links somewhere like many previous instances of chains of trust... your position makes sense i swear!obonicus said:
The Faceless Master
Member
consumers would be affected by a company not making games for their console? so basically, Nintendo is worse for consumers than Piracy?Mario said:
The Faceless Master said:
What's my position? All the whitepapers talk about its robustness. Everyone but geohotz talk about its robustness. He seems to think you can simply avoid the whole isolated SPU entirely and run unsigned code via the PPU, but people are understandably skeptical. My position? I don't know, either way. But I'm not the one pretending to know, either.
So either you're saying something trivially true ('if there's a vulnerability it can be exploited') or you're making a more specific statement about the PS3's security system, which you don't seem to know about (and neither do I).
NekoFever
Member
He's not necessarily committing any crime, and the creators of this kind of thing take steps to keep themselves on the right side of the law. Like if you jailbreak your iPhone, they're very careful not to include the official firmware files in there - you have to download them through iTunes yourself - because then it would be breaking copyright law and Apple would be able to go after them. Same situation with some emulators that require an official BIOS, or the original Xbox when apps were created with the leaked XDK.pseudocaesar said:
Then if you were to take that, jailbreak your phone, and install a load of cracked apps, it's you and whoever was distributing the apps who was committing the crime. Sure, his work facilitated it, but you can't sue gun companies because someone shot you with their gun or car companies because someone hit you with their car.
Like people have said, though, it often comes down to different jurisdictions. Modchips are illegal in some territories but have been ruled completely legal others, for example.
The Faceless Master
Member
everyone talks about how great their security is before it's cracked, then they talk about how great it was.obonicus said:
your position seems clear to me based on the wording and tone of your responses and which posts you choose to respond to. it's the same thing the "god hates fags" people do... they point out what god says and then say it's god's position, not theirs.
abstract alien
Member
It's a joke. I mean, I hope it was meant to be a joke...RavenFox said:
The Faceless Master said:
We can debate if it's worth tracking down to the nth degree...I'm not sure. I dunno. I don't really care if people out there cheat their way to ridiculous numbers of trophies. I scarcely care about my own...but if I did, I guess I'd only compare in comparison to my friends who I'd hope wouldn't be cheating.
But I think the concern raised was if Sony would or could track and deal with these things to the degree MS does...which begs the question why not...
I think Sony WOULD be far more worried about other things a patched OS could bring. That would attract their attention...so as a byproduct of such a hack, trophy cheating would also come under their guns. If a patched OS was only used for trophy cheating, I dunno if they'd bother, but it's likely it would be used in an array of other activities that would be less to Sony's taste (I don't just mean the 'p' word).
The Faceless Master said:
Which is all kinda crazy...
onken said:
I honestly don't think what he was doing with iPhone or now with PS3 is illegal. I was just presenting different sides of the story. There's obviously a PR angle to Apple's approach - simply sewing the suspicion of illegality will throw some people off hacking their phones.
I think it is or should be legal for anyone to open up the PS3 or iPhone software and tinker with it, change it if they want.
Think of a book or a newspaper. I can write in a book, scotch out bits, write over others. That's fair use I think.
I think there's only a problem if he redistributed copies of his changed version to others. Same way there'd be a problem if you started printing copies of your annotated version of Harry Potter and throwing them out to people. Which he won't do. I don't believe he did that with iPhone - I presume he either only published details of his work, or released just his own code, but not 'his code + apple code', leaving it to the user as an exercise to get it working on their own systems.
The Faceless Master said:
So you're a true believer, then? No matter the evidence, as soon as someone says something is real you believe? We haven't seen unsigned code run yet, we haven't seen GPU access, we haven't seen SPE access, we haven't seen anything besides his r/w access to system memory.
My position is that you don't know what you're talking about. I hope that part is 100% clear. This discussion has far too much noise without you piping in, stating trivialities disguised as knowledge.
The Faceless Master
Member
nah, i pick and choose who and what to believe, and based on geohot's rep, i choose to believe.obonicus said:
your position seems clear to me based on the wording and tone of your responses and which posts you choose to respond to. it's the same thing the "god hates fags" people do... they point out what god says and then say it's god's position, not theirs.
The Faceless Master
Member
yeah, that's what i'm saying... stopping trophy cheating would be very low on their list and not really worth the effort except to go after the people who make it really obvious.gofreak said:
yep. then again, this is NeoGAF.
H_Prestige
Banned
Found this:
The Faceless Master said:
What is my position? It's bad enough that you keep comparing me to Fred Phelps, but you can't even come out and say it. Do I think geohotz' claim is fake? Nope. Do I think the PS3 is uncrackable? Nope.
Do I think geohotz will be able to just ignore all the talk from IBM about how the system is made safe even if the hypervisor is compromised, just on sheer pluck? Not really. He's a smart cookie, no doubt, but not the only one.
I could be wrong, of course. Maybe Hotz will be the first one to do it, but I don't think he's gotten anything yet and that he's way ahead of himself when he claims 'This hack is enough for homebrew, full linux, and even backups', especially since he hasn't even shown unsigned code running. In fact, I think him claiming the PS3 has been hacked is a bit premature, since he hasn't shown anything, not even 'Hello World' on the PPU.
gregor7777
Banned
What would the point of Hello World be when I can do that now on a Linux PS3? It still wouldn't prove a thing.
gregor7777
Banned
Full linux is nice but you're still badly limited in system memory. A nice lightweight window manager will help a lot there, but expectations should be tempered even if full access to the system is granted.
Lagspike_exe
Member
gregor7777 said:
512MB isn't really that bad...
Solid Moustache
Banned
>Read your last paragraph in your last comment, and you'll see why I'm right.
You can't expect to know everything and dump every piece of code. This hack is enough for
homebrew, full linux, and even backups.
Wow... it's so good I can't believe it... Can any techie in gaf tell me if what he said is possible? (unsigned without accessing the security psu blah blah etc).
It's actually 256mb (at least it's friggin fast)... By the way nice name.
You can't expect to know everything and dump every piece of code. This hack is enough for
homebrew, full linux, and even backups.
Wow... it's so good I can't believe it... Can any techie in gaf tell me if what he said is possible? (unsigned without accessing the security psu blah blah etc).
>Lagspike_exe said:
It's actually 256mb (at least it's friggin fast)... By the way nice name.
gregor7777 said:
Well, if Hotz goes and prints 'Hello World' after all this, I'd give him the benefit of the doubt. Like I said, I don't think he's hoaxing us. Instead, I think he's getting ahead of himself. Even with 'Hello World' I think we'd need to see something using both the SPUs and the GPU to say it's been hacked, because, as you said, you can run 'Hello World' on PS3 right now, if you have a fat. Running a backup would establish the same thing, of course.
gregor7777
Banned
Lagspike_exe said:
I run several linux systems on 512mb, and yeah, they're really sluggish running Gnome or KDE. Don't get me wrong: they're usable (obviously), but if I had to do anything more than testing on them I'd get pretty frustrated.
512 works well for command line systems though. I have both our GAF Killing Floor servers running on a box with ~600mb RAM, plus a LAMP setup.
Right now I believe it is. I think you only have access to the 256 system memory and not the memory the GPU uses. I believe that's locked out, but I think it should be usable if the system is fully compromised. Someone who knows more about the PS3's architecture may be able to clear that up.
Solid Moustache said:
If he can get patched code to run then it's possible. That's what he's trying to do now, to patch hypervisor functions so he can patch out restrictions etc.
However he's not said yet whether he's been successful in doing that. There are meant to be (hardware) safeguards in there to prevent patched code from being run. We shall see...
H_Prestige
Banned
Mael said:
PS2 was never emulated. Only the emotion engine was emulated, but the early models still had the ps2 GPU on board, which is supposedly the impossible part to emulate on ps3.
It's all nice and good but like 360 these are machines that were designed with the idea that they would be hacked. As soon as any exploit is released so that the homebrew community can do anything Sony will probably issue a mandatory update fairly quickly. It take many months for homebrew to develop and by the time it does vulnerable systems will be in short supply and lose all online functionality. It's also unclear how much is possible, unless he can insert something in the boot process (which is unlikely without being able to sign it unless Sony screwed up) then the hack won't be persistent and you'd have to do it every time.
I don't expect this to mean much more than the 360 hypervisor exploits.
If Sony can't emulate a PS2 on a PS3 nobody can. Sony would have a lot to gain by doing this, but they haven't probably because they can't.
I don't expect this to mean much more than the 360 hypervisor exploits.
Mael said:
If Sony can't emulate a PS2 on a PS3 nobody can. Sony would have a lot to gain by doing this, but they haven't probably because they can't.
charlequin
Banned
Mario said:
I agree. Years of sales data reflecting successful systems continuing to put up successful software sales is probably a more effective argument -- there's very probably a threshold over which piracy really does have a significant negative impact on software sales, but what's possible on, say, the Xbox 360 or the Nintendo DS is clearly below it.
Like, at least based on the experience of the Xbox 360, someone would be pretty foolish to abandon the PS3 as a development platform just because a piracy hack was announced, especially if that hack required any form of hardware and/or opening the system to accomplish.
bcn-ron said:
Yep.
Ultimately the biggest piece of DRM in place for home systems is essentially "transparent" and has been more or less steady (for the average consumer) for decades -- your original discs/carts work but copies do not. Outside the realm of the homebrew battle it really has had little effect on end users.
On PC, it's very bad, although being an open platform is a double-edged sword here -- after years, the backlash against this kind of intrusive DRM is pushing a lot more people to realize that light or absent DRM is actually likely to generate more sales than piracy takes away.
Alec
Member
Somnid said:
The 360's hypervisor exploit enables booting of unsigned code. That is precisely what Geohot is trying to do. It's also a hardware level hack, making it difficult (if not impossible) to fix in a firmware update. He won't need to sign any custom code because he can tell the hypervisor to not check for a signature. (Theoretically)
It can potentially allow for homebrew apps to be run on PS3. Far into the future. Maybe someone will port PCSX2. Maybe they'll develop it enough for some games to be playable. Who knows. Enabling homebrew doesn't magically also create all the programs people wish for. So, yes, get your PS2 out of the closet.