It’s been a couple of months since Sony were in the limelight for all the wrong reasons, with the PSN going down and the Global Hacking scene blowing up.
Many were branding hackers as the bad guys, and while in some cases this is true, sometimes hackers just want to see how far they can push a piece of hardware – to make it do things they were never intended to do.
One of the most high profile hackers was geohot (George Hotz), who is famous for hacking the iPhone allowing jailbraking and unlocking for use on other networks, though possibly even more high profile was his discovery of the master key for the Sony PS3 which allowed the side-loading of homebrew applications, which led to him being sued by Sony themselves.
However, none of the above stopped Facebook employing geohot recently, though what he actually does there is a little bit of a mystery.
So all has gone a little quiet on the PS3 hack scene since Sony started throwing lawsuits around and banning users with hacked PS3s from PSN (which some believe led to the hacking of PSN). There was also the PS3 updates that stopped back door entry into the PS3, stopping the loading of Homebrew software.
Well, today I decided I would visit a site that was at the forefront of the PS3 Hacking scene, and to my surprise there have been some massive advances made in the PS3 hacking world.
The last software version that was hackable was v3.55 of the PS3 software. After this Sony released version 3.60 which they said was un-hackable.
This was indeed the case for some time; there seemed to be no way to break into the software to reload homebrew software. However, there is now a way around this (or rather there will be very soon).
The PS3 is up to software version 3.70 now and Sony are seemingly happy at the moment as this cannot be hacked. How about a dual-boot PS3 running both Game OS 3.55 and 3.70, allowing you to switch at will between a homebrew capable software version and a PSN valid software version.
This would rule out the chances of being banned for using PSN on a hacked console, as you could use the official software version for online play and then switch to the homebrew software for other hijinx.
There are also possibilities of hot swapping hard-drives one with software version 3.55 and again another with 3.70.
This functionality will come in the form of the E3 Flasher; a piece of hardware that will plug into the PS3 allowing for the changes to be made. The price is set at $88.90 USD and this is not the first jailbreak device from E3 as they previously released a dongle for Jailbreaking a previous software version.
You are able to pre-order from Acekard.ca and there may be a little bit of modding required depending on the PS3 model you have.
So will you be taking the plunge and performing this mod, making your PS3 unstoppable? I can tell you I am seriously considering it.
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