In case you were living on another planet or under a rock, it was about a year ago that the PlayStation 3 console was hacked, with major repercussions for Sony and the hackers alike. George Hotz (aka Geohot) found himself in court facing serious charges of circumvention and jailbreaking, while the original sellers of the Jailbreak dongle I don’t think have yet to see the inside of a court room. Sony, on the other hand suffered the backlash of many, prompting a hack on their PSN network, effectively shutting it down for an extended time period and compromising millions of users personal details and accounts.
Well all has been quiet on the PS3 hacking front for quite some time, since Sony effectively changed the master keys they use to encrypt their games. Since the jailbreak could only be exploited on specific firmware, newer games encrypted with later firmware keys could not be played. That is until now. Very recently a small Indonesian team released the Jailbreak 2 (JB2), claiming it allowed users to play all previously unplayable titles from special blu ray discs. While it is not readily available everywhere, the fact it has been confirmed working has massive implications for Sony.
Regardless of the method they have used to make these new games playable, the developers are in the process of reverse engineering the device, potentially allowing it to be ported to other devices. According to many sources some of the developers within the PS3 hacking communities have stated that they already have the new 3.72 master keys and a public payload is on the way.
I’m sure Sony are keeping a close eye on this, but this time are dealing with a very unregulated market in Indonesia, as well as hackers who unlike Geohot have remained anonymous. In this case I think the developers have done s goof thing releasing it to the public. While it has uses that filer over in piracy territory, making it freely available is much preferred to someone profiting from it. The other exciting news that many have been waiting for is now legitimate users who don’t want to give up the ability to have homebrew applications and want to buy new games can do so without having to have another console to get online and do so.
