PS3 sleeps with the fishes... or does it?

You’ve probably already heard the PS3’s been hacked. Hacked how? Well I’ll spare you all the technical details (also because I don’t really know it all myself), but basically whenever a piece of software is approved for the PS3 it’s given a certain code. This code tells the PS3 that it has been approved by Sony itself, and should consider this software ‘legit’. This code has been deciphered and is in the hands of everyone now.

What does this mean?

Mainly a few big things; Lets go into them.



Creativity/Convenience:

If there is one big complaint I have of Sony it’s this: You know what we want. We talk about it in Podcasts. We talk about it all over forums. We even send you emails asking for these things and still we get no response. Because people get tired of waiting for you to do things and because you take things away that were originally there, we are left to our own devices. We’ll devise other ways to get PS2 games to play on a system that originally played them. Cross game chat is too difficult for you? Someone else will fill that void. Linux support disabled from the PS3? Whatever dood.

You bet your ass there are programmers out there that’ll figure that stuff out and when they do they’ll release it to everyone for free. They’ll also add little programs that would make your “it only does everything” seem actually true.

Another great thing that can come of this is games. No no not pirated games (we’ll get into that in a minute) home made games. Have you ever heard of Sonic Fan Remix? You should have, we linked it. It’s a fan made Sonic the Hedgehog game created by, you guessed it a few fans. Can you imagine if these guys set their minds to making a great game that will run on your PS3? Creative minds like this don’t need Little Big Planet 2, they need this.

Last but not least Emulators! Yeah yeah we all know it’s weird territory talking about emulators. I mean technically it’s piracy, but to be honest how much of the Super Nintendo market are emulators ruining? We all love those NES, SNES, Genisis classics. Soon we’ll have all those emulators working on the PS3. NeoGeo, Dreamcast, and even PS2 emulators are iffy because they seem to be trying to release those too now.

Cheating/Hacking:

With it’s heart laid bare it is also quite a sad thing for the non hacking/cheating gamer. Just like this guy who ‘jailbroke’ the system there will be other programmers out there that will want to do things as a test of skill. This will ultimately lead to cheating on the PSN network. If you care about leaderboards, or an enjoyable experience when playing Call of Duty online then you’ll be disappointed to know that a lot more people will now have an aimbot.

Do you pride yourself on your trophy number? Abandon hope my friends. There is already a program in circulation that unlocks all trophies for whatever game you want (it’ll even stagger the times for each trophy). Programs like this that ruin leaderboards and other satisfying aspects of gaming will not be few and far between. I expect wherever it is possible to prove your digital penis is bigger than someone elses there will be hacking involved.

Piracy:

Illegitimate software is another thing. When a server is set up for a certain game they set it up for a certain amount of gamers. If the amount of people playing reaches even near the roof of that number things start to lag. So not only are people going to not pay the people responsible for making the games you enjoy, they might also overrun the servers ruining the experience of the people who actually paid money for it.

One of the more sad possibilities for the PS3 with piracy in mind is... well look at the PSP. The PSP is a great system that has been overrun with piracy and it has suffered a lot. Developers won’t even consider developing games for it (the PSP) because they know that there is so much leakage. No matter how great the game is. No matter how hard they work it’ll never see the profit it deserves.

To Arms!

Sony is doing all it can to combat this, but it’s already too late. Sony is suing Geohot, one of the programmers responsible for the jailbreak, and in response he released the codes out to everyone. To my understanding this isn’t something they can just fix either; They’d have to literally recall every PS3 in circulation which isn’t going to happen btw.

What can you do?

Don’t cheat. In fact because this is going to be an ongoing war between hackers and Sony, it’s probably best to just steer clear of any and all homebrew. Given the information that we have, it doesn’t seem likely that Sony can do anything about it but it is possible that they can detect it; Maybe they’ll start banning people from PSN. Maybe they’ll start bricking consoles (to my understanding that’s against the law though).

Those are my thoughts on the subject, but maybe I'm overlooking some things. Please let us know in the comments what you think, because I’d really like to hear it.