As a brazilian myself and as a guest blogger here, I feel I have the responsibility to share what I know, think and feel about it. First of all, a full translation (with some grammatical, semantical, punctuation and verbal corrections) of what this company is claiming:

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“Good afternoon friends, customers and partners. Here we are to humbly ask everybody to please stop asking about our training on our PS4 games installation system, since we are the pioneers here in Brazil to develop and deploy this solution in a 100% working state, without any help from here inside Brazil nor worldwide. We are proud about the huge demand and about how many people have been trying to reach us about our solution. Thanks for all the trust placed on our work.

Sadly we will only share our knowledge with 12 trusted business partners and retailers spread over the country.
About our fees to insert the game on your console, we will be posting the prices next week so everybody can check them out. About our solution, we are only waiting for 3 more retailers to confirm, so we can launch our product. We sincerely apologize to anyone who has been left out, but it’s the only way we can preserve our hard work, since everything that gets too much attention sometimes are bad in the long term for the community.

That being said, thanks for all the love and recognition for this awesome work, that was made for you friends, players, customers and videogame-addicted fellows, kkkk (a brbrhuehue informal laugh).”

Please keep in mind that I tried my best to correct everything that I could from the original, that was kinda messy.

Right from the start, let me say that a REALLY don’t believe in the legitimacy of their claims (at least not that they are the authors), but probably not for the same reasons as most. There are a couple of reasons why I think that this is just a publicity stunt.

First of all, as I already mentioned, the text is written in a very poor portuguese (my fellow brazilian readers will mostly agree). People here in Brazil who would have the knowledge and resources to back such claims up, wouldn’t write this way. It was clearly written by a semi-illiterate amateur. Some parts barely make sense, like how can they be “proud about the demand”? Really? People here with the resources and knowledge to do what they claim would have written and elaborated much better. Also, any serious company would not only post a demonstration video, but would also have used a proper website, not a Facebook page.

It’s worth mentioning that people with the skill needed to do such things are very well paid around here doing corporate jobs and it’s unlikely that such people would want to have their name associated with piracy (not hacking) in that form.

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Another point is that this “business model” is unheard of: to outsource piracy to retailers and openly advertise it. Although piracy is still rampant around here, it’s kind of a gray market . Even people who sell piracy won’t openly advertise that as piracy, they sell it as “brindes” (loosely translated as bonuses). Here in their annoucement they are claiming to do way more than enabling people to pirate themselves, they are charging people to pirate for them, which is a direct violation of pretty much any EULA, unlike modchips and softmods. Sony is officially here in Brazil, so I doubt that they could sell their “product” without a lawsuit or two on their backs. It’s very funny how trying to stop people to pirate their piracy is exactly what would put them in legal trouble.

Now a little more personal note. As I read in a previous article, many people on comments discredited the said “solution” simply because they showed a (stock) raspiberry image and because “Brazil wouldn’t have the resources to make such a thing”.

Although they used a stock image from google (a fact which I bet few people who criticized knew), the raspberry picture alone doesn’t necessarily mean its a hoax, and here is why: Just now, we got an exploit triggered by a multiplayer game, where a PSVITA connect to a previously hacked device. Although it seriously doubt it will ever be done (and that it’s worth the trouble, since there will probably be an update to block such exploit), the hacked “server” device could be replaced by any device running a software that use emulate the packets sent by the server (considering they are not encrypted) by sniffing the packets and reverse-engineering the packets sent back.

Obviously it would easier (and cheaper) to make such daemon to run on a windows/linux/mac, so everybody could download and use it. But remember that we are talking by a company who is trying to make money, so it would make perfect sense for them to use a raspberry (or even an arduino, if possible) to make an appliance just to run the exploit. It wouldn’t be the first known hardware to exist only to enforce some kind of DRM (as many ps3 dongles). So, the same principle could be applied to the PS4, where it connects to a server through some service already available on the console (like Netflix, a cheap game or whatever) and trigger an exploit. Hacking is about thinking out of the box, so people shouldn’t be so avid to dismiss something just because it’s different.

The second statement about our “lack of resources” is that what actually made me write this article. Quite often I avoid telling people on the internet that I’m brazilian. I think that it was not until today that Wololo learnt that. That’s because I will be the first to admit that we brazilians as a whole can be very impolite, uneducated and ignorant, specially when it comes to netiquette (brbrbrhuehuehue). For instance, when I played MMOs in my teenager years, I tried to hide for as long as I could from other players where I came from, such was (and still is) our reputation online and offline. But let me tell you, we are not all like this:

For that and many other reasons I am not a patriot at all, but it is also ignorant, uneducated and a little racist to claim that we could not make such things. What resources don’t we have? Most modern console hacks are software exploits, and that (great software developers) we have a lot around here. I have at least 5 close friends and acquaintances that are working om companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM and Unity to name a few. There are brazilian Linux kernel developers and maintainers. There are a lot of brazilian companies thriving on TI. And the list goes on….

I myself got my bachelors degree com computer science on a highly regarded (and free) university and I don’t like to brag, but I have knowledge on quite a few technologies like Linux server, python, ruby,rails, C, C#, Assembly, Postgresql and many others. Being brazilian (or any nationality, for that matter) doesn’t make me less capable of learning any of those.

I’m not trying to start a patriotic flame wars here, as we are all gamers, developers, hackers and videogame lovers regardless of nationality, so please let’s try to be more positive.