It appears Sony's bad karma has turned around and bit the company in the rear end. In a court case stemming from Sony's decision to remove OtherOS, Sony is facing accusations of breaking the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The ironic twist to this story is that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is the exact same Act that George Hotz is being charged with breaking.

[b]Here is and interesting Sony’s defense on this matter:[/b]

One of Sony’s defenses is rather interesting, as the company claims that it had no way of knowing gamers who bought the hardware would want to use these functions for the life of the system, and the multiple warranties and Terms of Service all said that Sony had the right to remove functions from the hardware.
[b]From the court documents filed by Sony:[/b]

To establish the implied warranty of fitness existed, Plaintiffs must allege that SCEA had “reason to know” of their special purpose, i.e., to use the PS3 in perpetuity for all advertised features and functions including the Other OS; that Plaintiffs relied on SCEA’s expertise; and that SCEA had “reason to know” of their reliance on the continued availability of all features and functions. Plaintiffs have not only failed to allege these requisite facts, they indeed cannot due to the explicit language of SCEA’s Warranty, SSLA, and Terms of Service. Specifically, because SCEA had the right to terminate or alter any feature or function, it had no reason to believe that Plaintiffs purchased their PS3s particularly with the expectation and belief that all features, including the Other OS, would be available for the “life” of the PS3.

[b]PS3Hax's Take on the matter:[/b]
So in a nutshell Sony is saying that after your warranty is up, they can remove what ever feature they want. If you wanted to keep your OtherOS, they all you had to do was not update, however by not updating you then loose PSN feature, making this a loose-loose situation. It will be very interesting how Sony will defend against this in court. Karmas a bitch isn’t it?

Today German police raided Graf Chokolo's house, and as a result he released his PS3 Hypervisor Bible while other PS3 hackers including Mathieulh are now removing access to their PlayStation 3 hacking work and Twitter accounts on the Internet and going into hiding.

Below is a summary of today's events thus far from PSX-Scene:

It seems Sony is not happy with the long process of using American civil courts to fight off the PS3 hackers, and have decided to step up the war game to the next level, and have now got the German police on their side to raid early this morning graf_chokolo's home and take all his computers!

The following is some of the quotes taken from his blog:

Originally Posted by graf_chokolo - February 23, 2011 at 11:52 am
Guys, SONY was today at my home with police and got all my stuff and accounts. So be careful from now on.

Originally Posted by graf_chokolo - February 23, 2011 at 12:26 pm
Guys, i don’t joke, it’s serious. And to prove it, i kept my word and uploaded all my HV reversing stuff. Upload it everywhere so SONY couldn’t remove it easily. Grab it guys, it contains lots of knowledge about HV and HV procs.

Here is my HV bible: Sendspace.com, upload.com, 2shared.com <- Coolstuff.rar [164mb]

Originally Posted by graf_chokolo - February 23, 2011 at 12:51 pm
IDA database is the documentation, it contains all my knowledge, Linux booting is also there. It contains all the code i used to patch HV 3.41 and boot Linux. So, PS3 devs, grab it and continue my work. It contains just everything i know about HV, storage devices and so on.

Originally Posted by mecenefeaa - February 23, 2011 at 12:52 pm
this is not a scam i emailed graf and he confirmed the posts, and said not to email him anymore, it just seems like a scam due to the way things are playing out, but i swear its 100% not a scam as far as i know

Originally Posted by mecenefeaa - February 23, 2011 at 1:26 pm
I can say with 99.9999999% percent positivity that its legit, thanks graf (:

Originally Posted by mecenefeaa - February 23, 2011 at 1:36 pm
yea only admins like me and graf and dukio can (: and i extracted only like a fourth of the 165 megabyte rar and its lvl1, lvl2, and hv dumping and reversing for 3.15, 3.41 and 3.55 are there, theres more that ill look at later today when i get home, thanks graf (:

Originally Posted by mecenefeaa - February 23, 2011 at 1:49 pm
me too EVERYONE DOWNLOAD so even if Sony removes the files they will still be everywere and so we can reupload! spread it like the keys!!

On the eve of more possible "european raids" now that Sony's war machine is on the move, this just in:

Originally Posted by mathieulh
The ps3wiki is going down (I don't want to be arbitrarily raided by sony) This twitter is also not going to be active anymore.

Sadly, another wealth of PS3 information has disappeared from the 'net, here is what one of the PS3 wiki developers had to say in regard to this matter:

Originally Posted by kdsbest
thinking about selling my ps3 and buying an xbox.. i am an xna developer anyway so this thing helps me more. Sony ripped!

Original Now History Site: http://ps3wiki.lan.st

News Source: Mathieulh on Twitter

Finally, from Dukio (linked above): I don’t know how to say this but graf_chokolo, the man who contributed a lot to the scene has recently been caught off by Sony and the Police. They went to his house to grab all his accounts and stuff, yeah could be anything related to his findings on the PS3 security.

He keep his promised though by releasing all his knowledge on the HV reversing. The uploaded files contains his database which is a series of tools for the PS3's Hypervisor and Hypervisor processes. It will help other devs to reverse engineer the hypervisor of PS3 further. You can find the following (Based on the folders in the archive):

Dump LV2 Reversing
HV Dump of 3.15 Reversing
HV Dump of 3.41 Reversing
HV Dump of 3.55 Reversing
Payloads

On the eve of more possible "european raids" now that Sony's war machine is on the move, this just in:

Quote:
Originally Posted by mathieulh
The ps3wiki is going down (I don't want to be arbitrarily raided by sony) This twitter is also not going to be active anymore.

Sadly, another wealth of PS3 information has disappeared from the 'net!

Original Now History Site: http://ps3wiki.lan.st

Sony Forming Anti-Piracy Program
SCEA looking to bulk up its legal team.
by Jim Reilly

Two new job listings posted on SCEA's website reveal the company is getting serious about PlayStation 3 software piracy.

Sony is looking for a new Senior Corporate Counsel and a Senior Paralegal for Anti-Piracy and Brand Protection. The main responsibilities include "assessing annual SCEA corporate anti-piracy needs and addressing the needs through developing and implementing an anti-piracy program."

"The program to be developed will require a strong strategic online component (taking input from and working with SCEA Marketing, SCEA Strategic Business Development Latin America and SCEA Product Development)," the listing reads.

The jobs also require "collaborating with other anti-piracy organizations, including those of affiliated Sony Computer Entertainment companies, Sony Corporation and the videogame industry's trade association, the Entertainment Software Association."

Other responsibilities ask for "overseeing anti-piracy civil lawsuits and providing support to law enforcement and intellectual property agencies on behalf of SCEA." Additionally, one of the requirements is having "knowledge of online investigative practices and online databases (e.g. how to find owner, administrator, ISP associated with a given domain name, etc.)"

Sony recently took famed iPhone hacker George Hotz to court after he and another group of hackers unlocked the PlayStation 3's security and later published the data online. Since then, homebrew applications to run pirated software have hit the net, and one of Sony's major first-party titles, Killzone 3, was reportedly leaked two weeks before its release.

Last Wednesday, the company issued a statement saying those caught using pirated software will have their console banned permanently from PlayStation Network.

"Circumvention devices and game piracy damage our industry and can potentially injure the online experience for you, our loyal PlayStation customers, via hacks and cheats," Sony stated. "By identifying PlayStation 3 systems that breach our guidelines and terminating their ability to connect to PlayStation Network, we are protecting our business and preserving the honest gameplay experiences that you expect and deserve."

Firmware 3.56 - Backdoor
18 Comments 
by MegyeriJ  on 3 Weeks Ago at 07:52 AM (2799 Views)
just read an interesting post from developer Mathieulh. It seems like Sony has implemented a rootkit into their new firmware 3.56. This is essently a backdoor to scan your Playstation 3 to detect any custom firmware or homebrew applications running on your console, and report it back to Sony.

This hidden code is executed remotely, and apparently, Sony can update the code and add new detection methods without requiring any firmware update on the users side.

He goes on to state that while it may be possible to patch or remove the code with future custom firmware, we will probably lose the ability to connect to the Playstation network, and play online. This is due to the fact that the PSN could easily be setup to detect that the code is running before allowing you to connect.

This rootkit could be Sony's first step in preperation to dropping the ban hammer. Their has been a lot of speculation wether or not Sony could even detect users running CFW, but with this new update, it seems like Sony can, at least as of now.

Wether or not they will start issuing bans is still in the air. Their are a lot of people running CFW these days, and for the most part they are loyal Sony customers. Banning them won't be taken well and Sony is running the risk of alienating a lot of PS3 owners.

What do you guys think?

PlayStation File System Libraries – Add NTFS Support to your Homebrew!
Posted by greg

I’m out of town leaving me PS3-less, so I’m unable to test this… This being a library, PlayStation File System Libraries — libpfsm, that you can use when building your homebrew projects, i.e.) Gaia Manager. And the Gaia Manager source is included and comes pre-modified as an example adding NTFS (libpfsm) support. You just need to build it now and I’m sure someone’ll do that real soon.

What does PlayStation File System Libraries feature?
Support for multiple simultaneously connected devices.
Hot swapping of devices.
Support for multiple partitions (with different FS).
NTFS support
Alternate data streams
Sparse files
File compression
B+ trees directory
FAT support
FAT12, FAT16, FAT32
Long file names (VFAT)

Writing to NTFS formatted volumes is not supported and not planned.

Check the README for everything else.

Download: PlayStation File System Libraries

Thanks to… I’ll never tell. The author wishes to remain anonymous. Cheers!