Speculation About PSN Outage Turns to Custom Firmware
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Which would cripple the sharing of games, something practiced at one point or another by pretty much every single purchaser of video games. And by anyone who's ever shared anything, if you think about it.Onyx Oblivion said:
Also, Xbox Live limits it by a small amount, and only to downloaded things. Basically, each digital purchase assigns a license to your console. Anyone can use that license at any time on the console, but it will only work on the console. If you, say, wanted to download an episode of South Park on a friends console by just re-downloading the episode using your profile on his console, then it wouldn't work. It would only work if it was your profile, and signed into XBL. You can transfer licenses between boxes, but only once every year or so.
Let's not forget however that if George Hotz hadn't hacked the PS3 in the first place, Sony wouldn't have over-reacted and removed OtherOS. The PS3 began to suffer a bombardment of hacking once OtherOS was removed since before hand there was no reason to do it.mjc0961 said:
While it may have been hacked eventually, let's not forget that it was something like 3 years before anyone decide to do it.
My condolences to your PS3 and your Dead Space 2. Ever consider cracking it open to get at the disk tray to recover your Dead Space 2?Sniper Team 4 said:
You see, this is what I've been told by game devs, they don't like the modding so that piracy is possible. And I even swore and oath to never ever ever pirate a game. So if you think "HACK THE SYSTEMS! JAILBREAK THE CONSOLES! FUCK YEAH!" you should look at the fucking greedtards that want to do that for piracy, which is the larger motive for hacking from what I see because you actually gain something from it.
So basically, I give Sony a D- for handling this. But I do understand why they did that, they did say that an external threat penetrated the network, that didn't mean hackers. So guys, keep open minds. And I hope Sony figures out a better way of handling such things in the future. There's a first time for everything.
Lets scuttle their ships.Sangreal Gothcraft said:
So the boat had a leaking siv and they took it out of the water to prevent it from sinking. Makes sense, but still sucks that they had to take it down.
I see quiet a few mindless hate spewers here. Its funny to try replace "sony" with "microsoft" or "ea" or any common target and see just how generic and undirected most of this insult flinging is.
I see quiet a few mindless hate spewers here. Its funny to try replace "sony" with "microsoft" or "ea" or any common target and see just how generic and undirected most of this insult flinging is.
Hmmm, anyone else saw this codename rebug website? This story looks very legit according to all the information and DL links they have on that website. AS for myself, I am a PC Gamer and don't care much about consoles, but this is about the same as having the Master Key on Steam. What ever that PSN Dev network is, I think it should be unique to a profile and hardware ID. Done (assuming that's possible).
Umm...the game sharing I'm talking about is ONLY about downloaded games. This isn't about trading discs with your friend, here.Irridium said:
Oh... seems I misunderstood.Onyx Oblivion said:
Whoops.
But still, Microsoft has a decent system in place. Man thats weird to say... "Microsoft" and "decent system". Heh.
Anyway, limit the licence to one console. Anyone on that console can use it at anytime. But to use it on another console, it must be the profile that bought it that uses it, and it must be online.
Sony hasn't done that yet. Hell, it's not even profile limited.Irridium said:
If there is another profile on that console. it can use it. Get trophies and everything, too.
Here's how it basically works:WanderingFool said:
You have your PSN account. You can activate that on up to 5 Playstation systems (right now, I think it's just PS3s and PSPs; you can do 5 PS3s, 3 PS3s and 2 PSPs, and so on, but 5 is the max). Activating the system to play content purchased with your PSN account will allow anyone who uses that PS3 or PSP on any profile to access that content, regardless of what PSN account they happen to sign into. That may be restricted if the game has extra DRM, like some Capcom titles, but there isn't any extra DRM, that's how it works.
You can also deactivate the account on a console so that if you're going to sell it, or it had some kind of hardware failure that lets you turn it back on (your disc drive dies, for example), it won't be able to play your games anymore. You also get one of those 5 activations back when you deactivate a console. So say you have a PS3 and a PSP, and they are both activated. You would have 3 activations left. But you don't play the PSP and you're going to sell it. You deactivate your PSP before you do so and now you have 4 activations left.
This nice for legitimate customers for obvious reasons: if you have different PS3s in different locations (like a kid whose parents split up and spends time at each of their places) you can play without worry, if you have a system that bricks and you can't get it back on to deactivate it then you'll still likely have other activations left so you can start playing your content on your replacement without having to deal with anything beyond just downloading all the content again.
However, you can obviously use all 5 of your activations if you get 5 PS3s that YLOD for example. In that case, you do have to call customer service to get the activations reset, and if you haven't done anything nasty like gamesharing, then it generally goes smoothly (from what I hear anyway; I've never had to do it myself). And if you have gameshared, they see that and apparently tell you too bad, no more activations for you. Which doesn't matter because even if you could get some, your account is now on the fast track for a ban anyway.
Now for how people abuse it. Like I mentioned above, once you activate a system to use your PSN account's content, that system can play it regardless of who is or isn't signed in. So what people do is trade account logins so they can log in, activate the account on their console, download content from that account, and then log back into their own accounts and play the other person's stuff online and get trophies in it and everything else as if they had actually paid for it. As long as they leave the other PSN account activated on their system, they just got a bunch of free stuff.
Sorry to hear that. If you like, I know a good repair shop:Sniper Team 4 said:
http://www.videogame911.com/
Had my PS3 fixed there twice now. Both times they did a good job. Not a bad price, as well as fast.
As for PSN, I just wanna re-download my Klassic Reptile skin/fatality, but Sony's gotta do what they gotta do, and they better do it well, so I'll wait.
I know, right? I love how people masquerade behind being anti-corporate, when really it's never CEOs or big wigs who suffer from losses or things like this, it's always some low level person living on shitty wages who gets canned behind this bullshit whenever a company has problems or loses money. But then again the people who do this shit are usually spoiled middle class brats who think paying for things and doing an honest day's work is something only poor people have to do.ThisIsSnake said:
Let's not forget that GeoHot actually hadn't gotten anywhere with his very small hack of Install Other OS, and that Sony could have avoided all this by just patching whatever it was he used to do that first hack that didn't even do anything. And yeah, I know that the reason that the hacking started after Install Other OS was gone is because they didn't need to hack it before. That's another reason why removing it was very stupid on Sony's part: now all the decent hackers, the ones who just want homebrew and NOT piracy, had no Linux to play with and thus turned to cracking the system itself, just like so many other systems before the PS3.Adzma said:
Let's not forget that it was a series of mistakes by Sony that put them in the position they're in right now. Giving hackers a sandbox and then taking it away, leaving them all bitter? Mistake. Having really weak security on the platform despite claiming that removing Install Other OS would make things tighter? Mistake. Treating all hackers like the enemy instead of working with the good ones and only going after the ones who just want to use hacking to pirate stuff? Mistake. Sony should have done this [http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/18/visualized-the-glamorous-lifestyles-of-wp7-jailbreakers/] as soon as GeoHot managed to do anything with Install Other OS. Instead they've pulled features, sued people, and now they've had to shut down PSN for a week and who knows when it'll be back up. Let's not forget that Sony's handling of this situation has been extremely poor since day one.
Nope. I'm saying that you're completely missing the point of every single thing I have said. And now I'm also saying that it's obvious that you're another person who doesn't know the difference between hackers and pirates.tony2077 said:
It's a little more involved than simply being a situation of pirates figuring out how to download free games from PSN. (note all the posts here concerning game sharing and how low priority it seems to be). Rather it is the route that the "hackers" used (and yes they are hackers and not simply pirates). If this speculation is correct (and honestly it does seem to have a ring of credibility to it) then yes this would be considered an external assault. It isn't some sort of credit card trick. They used a hacked firmware to access the private and trusted developer network and spring through that into the more protected public PSN via a back door. From a security standpoint that is really really scary. Who knows what sort of data has been breached? Granted hearing this I am less worried about actual end user CC information. But how many games in development and testing were compromised? How many internal business documents? Payment or contract information to smaller developers with games on PSN? How much were they actually able to get into via that developer network? Just because all most nitwits did was figure out how to download free copies of Angry Birds and MW2 map packs does not mean that that's what the brighter ones limited themselves to.snfonseka said:
It actually explains the silence a little more than most of the other scenarios discussed earlier. Chances are they are still investigating how deep the penetration was and what was exposed. They simply do not know, and at the same time do not want to sensationalize the breach or encourage others to investigate any such paths until they know exactly what happened. The fact that they do seem to be saying a little ore to the developer houses says a great deal. I am hoping that they are discussing any specific data breaches of issues with their third party development partners directly as they find them. But all sorts of contracts will prevent either side from ever discussing such things with us. (I mean just imagine the shear chaos that could occur should it be announced that a legitimate COD:Black Ops 2 Alpha was downloaded as part of the breach and is now in the wild.)
As someone else so eloquently said it "This is why we can't have nice things!"