It seems Sony has other fish to fry than patching their PSP firmware, which, honestly, is fine with me. A few months ago, the massive hack of the PS3 led to the discovery of PSP keys inside of the PS3 firmware, allowing us to “sign” our homebrews. This is how most homebrews can run on OFW nowadays, it is not necessary anymore to hack your PSP if you want to run homebrews (and, although this is not widely known, if you want to run backups of official games).

This security issue hasn’t been patched, and allows us to run user mode homebrews without having to look for new exploits with every firmware. Until now, Sony had be diligent about fixing Kernel vulnerabilities though, and it wasn’t possible to install a HEN if you had a firmware 6.37 or above.

Yesterday, developer some1 released a downgrader for 6.38, which finally allows 6.37 and 6.38 users to go back to OFW 6.20 or 6.35, and install a HEN. It is also very likely that we will see a HEN coming directly for this firmware.

Today, Sony announced and released OFW 6.39. This firmware is here to help against the recent hack of the PSN, by allowing users to securely change their password. As expected, since some1’s Kernel exploit was revealed yesterday, Sony didn’t have the time to patch it for a release of their new firmware today. Could have they postponed the release? Very unlikely, PSN users have been waiting for weeks already. Will there be a 6.40 patching this Kernel exploit? I believe so. In the meantime, I am convinced that some1’s downgrader will be ported to 6.39, probably by some1 himself. The question is not “will this happen?”, but “When will this happen?” …what’s your guess? A few weeks? a few days?