The vita scene’s been boiling today, reaching levels of religious crusade between some veteran devs/mods of our own website, and the new team in town, team Koala.

Team Koala has come up with a way to let people install “region locked” applications such as Netflix on accounts that are not supposed to let them run, such as a Japanese account being able to install and run Netflix on the Vita. Pretty convenient for those of us who, for example, imported a vitaTV (which is locked to a Japanese account) and would love to get Netflix on it.

People later on got shocked that we didn’t publish anything about this thing yet, when every other scene site has talked about it by now. It even got worse afterwards:

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still not any post or news at wololo #sadface #irony <3

— KOALA (@KoalaVita) May 5, 2014

 

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http://t.co/Pxw1qMLP2V became the most stupid forum EVER. http://t.co/igFNoFaznl. well i just tweeted full games working on my account…

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— Nasser Abdel (@Nasser_Luffy) May 6, 2014

Don’t get me wrong, some of the mods here at wololo.net are pretty tough when it comes to claims like this: we’ve been debunking fakes for years now, and some of us have probably become aggressive over time in their search for the truth.

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@KoalaVita if you’re a real hacker show me unsigned code running, not glitches and bugs that everyone knows about

— Acid_Snake (@AcidSnakeDev) May 5, 2014

So let’s set things straight:

• We at wololo.net are not saying the “hack” isn’t true. Several of us have actually been able to reproduce it fairly easily on our end, so we can actually confirm this: there exist easy ways to install free apps such as Netflix on a Japanese account, or free JP apps on a non Japanese account, as revealed by the Koala team. What we are not agreeing with however, is calling this a “hack”. In particular, the overall usefulness of this is debatable, but I’ll get to this in a moment
• The mods, bloggers, members of the community here are entitled to their own opinion. When, for example (I swear it’s a random example) Acid_Snake calls you names, he is using his freedom of speech and does not represent this site’s opinion in general, or my opinion in particular. I usually give people the benefit of the doubt. However, in my experience, people who have a real hack in their possession are able to explain it cleverly and calmly, even when their opponents are aggressive. I must say I haven’t seen that from Koala’s team so far.

We have an article ready that explains the whole process, as we believe the Koala team has done it. We believe this trick will only let people install a very limited subset of free apps and demos (Netflix, JP eReader,…), which, really, besides the excitement of tricking the console, and the possibility to install Netflix on a vitaTV, is not going to be extremely useful. I, for one, believe the “Netflix on Vita TV” thing is awesome enough that it deserves an article on its own, but I would not call this a groundbreaking hack.

The thing is, hackers on the Vita scene have known about this kind of trick for a while, and there are good reasons they do not brag about it: they think it is useless in itself, but could be useful as part of a bigger thing.

In particular, we believe this trick cannot be used to pirate commercial games, or run unsigned content (homebrews)

One of the members of the Koala team has contacted me to tell me the statement above is false, and that their technique indeed lets them run commercial games on PSN accounts that haven’t purchased the game. This would be a whole different story, and I have accepted to become a tester for that. At the time of this writing, I am waiting for them to contact me about the testing.

If Koala’s team statement above is true, we are talking of something of epic proportions. (Note that I’m not saying it’s necessarily good)

This is why I am holding on on publishing our article explaining the Netflix trick, as I am giving the Koala team the benefit of the doubt. To be perfectly honest though, the general atmosphere on this side of the scene is that this is just the simple trick we’ve been able to reproduce independently (Which, again, is still cool, but not revolutionary), and that the claim of “running commercial games” will prove to be false.