Whenever you try to initiate a connection to psn, your ps3 will try to connect directly out to auth.np.ac.playstation.net via https (independant of whether you use proxies or not):
17:23:05.573291 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 64, id 18516, offset 0, flags [DF], proto: TCP (6), length: 60) 192.168.0.xx.64299 > auth.np.ac.playstation.net.https: tcp 0
Now with the new changes to psn store etc, it seems we can no longer connect to the psn network (this has nothing to do with the latest 2.80 firmware changes because it only happened after store was updated/maintenance). After the initial direct connection to https port on auth.np.ac.playstation.net, your ps3's firmware version number is sent which is a different method they previously used which relied on
PS3Update-agent/1.0.0 that was part of the firmware/os.
So here's what it looks like:
PS3 makes a connection to PSN ---> connects directly to auth.np.ac.playstation.net.https, sends fw version, rejects if lower, cuts connection.
If fw was appropriate, connection is granted and it will allow for connection to psn w/wo proxy.
If you sniff and decrypt the ssl data you will also notice that your ps3 version is usually always included into the .xml's. For example:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><profile platform="ps3" sv="2.60"> (This is from
PS3Community-agent/1.0.0) to ensure whether one is using the correct version. I haven't checked
PS3FriendImUtil/2.1.0-000 libhttp/2.1.0-000 (CellOS) yet however. But that's it in a nutshell basically.
Sending of your ps3's version number in the initial connections of any of the ps3 services has always been done with any connection afaik, or at least since I've been sniffing from 2.5+ firmwares. I guess they decided to finally take this route to circumvent people bypassing firmware checks.