It's true that the Sony scene has absolutely been at a boom lately. Between dongle-free patches popping up on a daily basis, firmware keys being decrypted, kernel and user mode exploits along with a whole bunch  of loaders, it's hard not to wonder what the heck is going on with Sony. My colleague Tom recently posted an article claiming that Sony is doing everything they can to stop homebrew and piracy on their consoles, but let's be honest who is he kidding? If they were truly invested in protecting their property, we wouldn't be seeing these new developments as frequently as we do.

Before I begin my dissection of Tom's argument, I will say he did a wonderful job setting up the playing feild for the task at hand. As he has said in the previous article, hacking Sony consoles has historically been pretty simple to do between plug and play modchips as well as software hacks. That much I absolutely agree with. Their  past efforts have been more than spotty, but have their recent consoles done any better to soften the blow?

Absolutely not. Let me first start off by examining the PS3. It's Sony's flagship console; and as such I will concede that they have done a little bit of service to keeping things protected. After all, the homebrew scene really is only effected by those very lucky few that are able to have their systems on the right firmware, and a new fully usable exploit hasn't been found or used with the masses for quite some time.

My major problem however with how they handle the PS3 is just how much freedom they seem to be giving to those that do have that right version number. If you take a peek at any website  that religiously follows the scene, you'll see the massive influx of patches that become available every single day for a variety of different titles. We're not talking about just old games either, because hackers are now beginning to find ways to make fixes for games released as recently as two weeks ago. Clearly those with a little bit of coding experience have found a simple methodology to play or even steal the console's premiere titles, which shows that just adding a firmware restriction simply doesn't cut it. Heck it never even cut it in the PSP days either.  In addition to the plethora of games that modded consoles have access to, there are also a few promising exploits related to possible kernel access as well up to the most recent firmware release. If the right person can capitalize on these, who knows where the scene could be headed.

Lastly and most disasterously in my opinion, we have the portables. I honestly don't think it's even worth me going into huge detail on how badly Sony dropped and has continued to drop the ball with the PSP. ISO Loaders and homebrew ran completely rampant for users of the company's first foray into mobile gaming to the point where sales were hugely impacted.

That being said, it doesn't seem like things are going too much better for their Vita. You may have read in Tom's original post that the folks over at Sony seemed to be doing quite well with their quick response to the Monster Hunter exploit with version 1.81. You can imagine my luck when I went to Wololo this morning and found a video of that exact supposedly impenetrable firmware playing gPSP through Neuer0n's famous loader. Upon analysis, it appears the update only functioned to block that specific exploit, leaving the door wide open for any other possible security holes. The fact that they spent so little effort in solving the problem just shows general laziness in protecting their investment. Not to mention they didn't even make a single move to rip Monster Hunter from store shelves, so now any prospective hacker can hop right on the train provided they don't oblige to a completely useless update.

That's really just the tip of the iceberg too. With the possibility of UV Loader looming on the horizon with its supposed user mode exploit, we may even see more developments for Vita in the future. There's also those dreaded videos of ISO loaders to atone for too. I'm not necessarily an expert, but this sounds like it's far from keeping the scene tied down. Oh, and those "automatic updates?" Circumventing those is as technically simple as leaving your console disconnected from the web, though I imagine hackers will in time get more creative.

So ladies and gentleman of the jury, you ask where Sony has been? They're right in front of you asleep at the witness stand while hackers probe at their goods. As far as I'm concerned, this court is adjourned.

CG
"The Black Hat"

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