114w ago - Today Sony's Senior Director of Corporate Communications & Social Media Patrick Seybold has announced a settlement in the GeoHot PS3 hacking case, with the ruling issuing a permanent injunction against George Hotz barring him from hacking or collaborating with efforts to hack any Sony product moving forward.

To quote: Joint Statement

Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) and George Hotz (Hotz) today announced the settlement of the lawsuit filed by SCEA against Hotz in federal court in San Francisco, California. The parties reached an agreement in principle on March 31, 2011. As part of the settlement, Hotz consented to a permanent injunction.

Both parties expressed satisfaction that litigation had been quickly resolved. Sony is glad to put this litigation behind us, said Riley Russell, General Counsel for SCEA. Our motivation for bringing this litigation was to protect our intellectual property and our consumers. We believe this settlement and the permanent injunction achieve this goal.

It was never my intention to cause any users trouble or to make piracy easier, said Hotz, Im happy to have the litigation behind me. Hotz was not involved in the recent attacks on Sonys internet services and websites.

In the action,...

117w ago - Update: Some more legal doc updates have now surfaced, which include GeoHot's laywers response refuting Sony's claims (via Groklaw) that the "blickmaniac" PSN account belongs to him.

ArsTechnica is also reproting that GeoHot's PS3 SCEJ manuals remained sealed, that he couldn't have known of SCEA to set up a PSN account and that the PlayStation 3 serial numbers don't match.

Today many sites are reporting that Sony has allegedly found George Hotz's PSN account under the nickname of blickmanic which would subject him to their TOS, that the PS3 hacker is currently fleeing or vacationing in South America, and finally that GeoHot may have intentionally removed integral components of his impounded hard drives prior to delivery.

To quote from EscapistMagazine.com:...[/B]

153w ago - Today George Hotz aka GeoHot has announced he is retiring from Sony PS3 and Apple iPhone hacking, citing that the demand for updates from end-users will never stop.

In his exit from the PS3 scene, GeoHot left many legitimate PlayStation 3 users without OtherOS and without the promised 3.21OO PS3 Custom Firmware.

The good news? Others whom GeoHot shared the PS3 METLDR info and LV2 dump with are currently using his work to continue hacking the PS3 console, with rumors from IRC (for what those are worth LOL) indicating a public "end-user" PS3 hack may arrive before September 2010 from their camp.

Unfortunately though, just like the past Dark_AleX and "M33" PSP releases, an incoming PS3 hack will probably be from a fictitious group and won't include anything useful to PS3 Devs such as dumps, reversals, sourcecode, etc.

Hopefully once a hole that Sony can't block is public, other PlayStation 3 Devs will begin working on the PS3 though... and sharing all the juicy...

182w ago - This weekend GeoHot, the hacker responsible for several Apple iPhone hacks, has returned to Sony PS3 hacking after his initial announcement a few months back and has opened a PS3 hacks blog (linked above).

He recently made this Tweet:

"I just pulled everything from the USB bus... http://pastie.org/757313 the Cell processor SPI bus, PS3 is going down :-)"

These are the latest posts on his new PS3 hacks blog:

Cell SPI

The Cell processor has an SPI port which is used to configure the chip on startup. Well documented here. It also allows hypervisor level MMIO registers to be accessed. In the PS3, the south bridge sets up the cell, and the traces connecting them are on the bottom layer of the board. Cut them and stick an FPGA between.

Quick theoretical attack. Set an SPU's user memory region to overlap with the current HTAB. Change the HTAB to allow read/write to the hypervisor! If that works it's full compromise...

199w ago - Over the weekend geohot, famous for unlocking Apple's iPhone, has posted a few tweets on his Twitter account that he has began looking into hacking Sony's PS3 console.

He has also dropped by our Forums to enquire about the PS3 Hypervisor Decryption Keys, and has been in touch with CJPC via IRC as well.

To date, geohot has reported the following via tweets:

"ooo got access to a couple more pages of ram...still no hypervisor there tho. it's hiding in the top 2 MB.

anyone know if the 360 guys had a pt hypervisor to reverse?

my goal is to break out of the hypervisor... then see what my morals will allow.

gotta flip one little bit to hack the ps3. unfortunately the ps3 doesn't want me to flip it.

so, the hypervisor is in the first 0x1000 pages of RAM...think I could just pull an address line down and dump? not from kernel tho

PS3 memory map http://pastie.org/589218 ... why did I think this would be useful again? i really want these dumps @ bootloader

it'd be nice if that worked, linux accesses...[/b]