On Saturday night, the well-known hacker Mathieu Hervais posted on his Twitter that he had found a way to exploit Sony PlayStation 3 firmware 3.56 although he refuses to release the details, as not to anger Sony.
Says Hervais:
I hesitated a lot before tweeting about it, but a bug allows exploiting metldr, the bootloader and 3.56+. I don’t intent to ever unveil it.
So much for “unhackable” ps3s though….
The hacker will not unveil the exploit, but says “this wasn’t about getting attention at all, or fame, this was just done so the right people know this bug is there for the finding.”
Hervais’ decision comes after Sony has taken custom firmware creator Geohot to court, as well as subpoenaed IP addresses of other hackers and even casual visitors of Geohot’s site and YouTube account.
Result for: firmware
Engadget has posted an in-depth preview of the upcoming Sony Ericsson PlayStation Phone, dubbed the “Xperia Play”, which should be unveiled officially at the MWC next month.
The Xperia Play has a 4-inch display with 854×450 resolution and will run on Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Although unconfirmed, the device’s multitouch screen will allegedly be powered by a Sony Bravia engine for smoother video playback.
Under the hood, the device appears to run on a single-core processor clocked at 1-1.2GHz, an Adreno 205 GPU and 512MB RAM.
As is standard, the smartphone/handheld will have 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR, and an FM receiver plus transmitter.
Physically, the smartphone has 4 buttons, Back/Menu/Home/Search, a 1500mAh battery, USB port, microSD slot and 5MP camera which lacks 720p recording.
For now, the site only has a prototype so not all features (especially the gaming aspects) are fully clear and the editor says the firmware is still very buggy, but everything should be become clearer next month at the Mobile World Congress event.
Result for: firmware
Sony has released the latest firmware update for the PlayStation 3, adding nothing.
Says Eric Lempel, Sony VP of Network Operations: “This is a minor update that adds a security patch.”
What Sony will not come out and state is the fact that the update will do little but block potential jailbreakers of the console.
In September, PSJailbreak released the first jailbreak, showing how PS3’s security model was open to be exploited, and Sony was quick to shut down the project. However, open-source alternatives cropped up, giving users a chance to jailbreak their console for free.
Sony has since continued to update the system’s firmware, blocking jailbreakers. Last month, however, a “downgrading” option appeared, giving anyone a method to downgrade their PS3 to firmware 3.41, the last version to fully work with the jailbreak devices.
Earlier this week, video emerged of unsigned code being run on a PS3 with v3.50 firmware, but that has yet to be fully confirmed. It won’t make a difference now as the latest firmware is required to log into PSN.
