EurAsia News

PS3OS v3.42 released

modrobert writes: "Sony has released PS3 Firmware Update v3.42 via PSN. This release includes 'additional security features' according to John Koller which is a cheerful way of telling you that PS Jailbreak (and the likes relying on the same exploit such as PSGroove or PSFreedom) has been blocked. Needless to mention but here we go anyway; DON'T UPDATE! If you want a safe way to update your PS3 to v3.41 so PSJailbreak works, then try my little tutorial in the forum here. Head over to this topic in the PS3 tech forum to comment or read latest news regarding the v3.42 release. I have updated the Ps3OsRels wiki as usual where the updates also can be downloaded."

Recap of recent PS3 hacking for late party crashers

modrobert writes: "There's a lot of info to process out there for those who just crawled out from under that rock and decided to join the party of PS3 hacking now after they just found out that PS3 can load homebrew and backups, so I decided to do a brief recap of recent events. Please note that this will be 'my' recap so don't expect it to be completely objective, but I'll try my best as usual. Shortly after Team Jungle and Commodore4Eva (C4E) announced they were working on a custom firmware for the PS3 Blu-ray drive back in August 2010; the PS Jailbreak USB solution was announced. The news spread fast all over internet after a few trembling first hours when people suspected a fake. The rumors that it was a fake were debunked by key people like xorloser and a video was posted by OzModChips who actually received samples about the same time PSJailbreak was announced. Conveniently samples had been sent to some big console sites and online shops as well.

After the dust from the first days of turmoil settled with psjailbreak.com receiving so much traffic it was practically unreachable a price list appeared somewhere and USD $125 was the retail price.

I assume that the team behind PS Jailbreak suspected that someone might dissect the samples sent out in order to reverse engineer the design, but I really doubt they expected the whole hacking community on internet to join forces and do it so effectively over a short period of time. I think this was partly due to the high price of the product.

While this was going on OzModChips had to freeze their sales of PS Jailbreak due to a court injunction in Australia and were later dragged to court by Sony where they lost the case.

During this time someone over at gamefreax.de released USB sniffer dumps of the PS Jailbreak traffic and websites with clones were starting to appear daily. This was followed by hints that something was going to be released to the public as announced by Mathieulh and some of the members from Team Twiizers (Wii hackers) started to show up in #ps3dev on EFnet along with the original crowd there from ps2dev.org, and this was followed by the release of the open source project PSGroove (hex dumps here) for AT90USB and releated devices from Atmel which only allowed for homebrew to run on the PS3, not backups (via manager.pkg), but a simple patch took care of that.

Good information now started to appear all over the place, so for those interested in how the original PS Jailbreak works can find an analysis in the wiki here and a PSGroove tutorial. As you can imagine the demand for Atmel USB development boards compatible with PSGroove grew exponentially after release. These were frustrating times and just when people were about to burst PSFreedom for Nokia N900 cellphones was released by KaKaRoTo showing that no Atmel development board was required anymore. Also in effect really showing Sony that their legal action was useless, and too late. The source code for PSFreedom was released shortly after and has been successfully ported to several devices up until now.

I personally believe that the PS Jailbreak USB solution would not have been possible without the PS3 Glitch Hack released by geohot back in January 2010, this is where it all started.

It is high time to round off now as news keep pouring in at an alarming rate about PS3. I hope you had fun reading this and good luck with your jailbreaking! Happy times indeed... :) "

PSGroove ported to the TI-84 Plus calculator

modrobert writes: "We have another winner! ;) Brandon Wilson has successfully managed to port PSGroove for PS3 to the TI-84 Plus and TI-84 Plus Silver Edition calculators from Texas Instruments. For more information, check his website here. "

NOTE: EurAsia forum topic here.

PS3Key production prototype testing

[source: ps3key.com] Hot off the production line, the innards of 16 PS3Keys! Following a series of internal tests on these prototypes, we'll be ready to put this amazing little thing into a nice shell and send out samples to our official distributors.

Here's one partially assembled prototype PS3Key. The release isn't far away now!

PSFreedom for Dingoo released

modrobert writes: "Waninkoko over at teknoconsolas.es has released a port of PSFreedom (by KaKaRoTo) for the Dingoo A320 handheld with JZ4740 chipset. The zImage file included in the package allows you to boot a modified version of Dingux (Linux) which makes the handheld console behave like the PSJailbreak device."

NOTE: EurAsia forum topic here.

PSFreedom ported to Palm Pre

modrobert writes: "Blake_Zero over at psx-scene.com has ported PSFreedom to work on Palm Pre phones. You can find the related files here in the download section."

NOTE: EurAsia forum topic here.

PSFreedom (Jailbreak PS3 with Nokia N900) released

[source: kakaroto.homelinux.net via psx-scene.com] Hi everyone, As promised, here�s an update on my implementation of the PSJailbreak exploit : IT WORKS! I made a video to show you, but I suck at making videos, so we can�t really see what�s going� I�ll do a better one tomorrow. It�s 9:30 AM here, and I really need to go to sleep, I�ll post more about this tomorrow, and I�ll release the code tomorrow for everyone to enjoy, compile, contribute, read, laugh at, etc� So here�s the binary release of PSFreedom (thanks to xnt14 for the name) : PSFreedom driver. I would like to thank 3 people in particular who helped me, encouraged me and helped debug with me : NTAuth, philhug and phire (a.k.a phiren) from EFNet.

So here�s how it works.. download the .tar.gz, extract it, copy the files to your n900 (with scp, into /root), then ssh into your N900 and type : ./psfreedom-enable.sh

Then you can follow the usual procedure, unplug the PS3 from power, plug in the N900, connect the power to the PS3, then press power and *quickly* press the eject button� Then just let the magic happen!

Once you�re done or want to revert back to the normal operation mode of the N900 (or to charge it) run the command ./psfreedom-disable.sh

In the future, we�ll have a nice package to install, a GUI application, I�ll make use of the LEDs to show you the status of what it�s doing, and i�ll have it auto-revert to mass storage mode, so you can use your N900 not only to enable homebrew but also to store your homebrew!

See you tomorrow! Good night!

KaKaRoTo

NOTE: EurAsia forum topic here.

PS3Key feature list announced

[source: ps3key.com] The PS3Key feature list has been announced! Check out http://www.ps3key.com for more information!

PS3Key Feature List:

* USB Plug and Play solution that installs in seconds without any need to open up the PS3.
* Does not break your warranty seal.
* Compatible with all PS3 models, both Fat and Slim.
* Supports all regions: USA, JAP, PAL and KOREA.
* USB device fully updatable by PC.
* Disables forced software updates and will never brick your console.
* Supports most games and homebrew applications.
* Easy-to-use software for backing up, managing, and playing games from external USB Hard Drive.
* Playing games from HDD is much more enjoyable, benefiting from greatly enhanced seek and loading times.
* Supports installing homebrew application on PS3 and external USB media.
* Optionally PS3Key can be supplied with an "open" firmware which does not support backup loading. Users would then have to download a firmware update for PS3Key to get full functionality.

PS Jailbreak exploit reverse engineering

modrobert writes: "Phire with the help of others over at lan.st has written an interesting analysis (mirror) of how the PSJailbreak exploit works. Here's a not so random quote from the post: 'The initial analysis by gamefreax.de suggested that it was a Stack overflow attack. After further analysis it turns out that this exploit is a Heap Overflow attack. The exploit carefully manipulates the heap by plugging and unplugging fake usb devices with large device descriptors until the device on port 4 which misreports its size to overwrite one of malloc's boundary tags.'"

PSGroove released!

modrobert writes: "Just as I finished typing some good news, more comes, hehe. PSGroove for PS3; an open-source reimplementation of the PS Jailbreak exploit for AT90USB and related microcontrollers has been released by Mathieulh and others. According to the author it should work on any of these: AT90USB162, AT90USB646, AT90USB647, AT90USB1286, AT90USB1287, ATMEGA32U4 and maybe more. The Teensy USB board as seen below seems to be the popular choice of hardware to run PSGroove. ;)

A note from the author: This software is not intended to enable piracy, and such features have been disabled. This software is intended to allow the execution of unsigned third-party apps and games on the PS3."

NOTE: EurAsia forum topic here.