Cobra Black Fin dongle announces the beginning of Piracy on the PS Vita for December
Well… as much as I hate proprietary dongles, I must say this is some interesting piece of news.
A new website was recently created, announcing the arrival of the Cobra Black Fin, a dongle to play isos on the PS Vita.
What’s intriguing about the Black fin is how it’s going to work: the Black Fin relies on p2p sharing of the games in order to work. In order to play a specific iso, you’ll need someone, somewhere, to have the original game cartridge inserted into the “Black Fin reader” connected to their PC. It probably does not matter who that person is, or where they are, what matters is that when you attempt to play an iso, the PS Vita will try to authenticate the cartridge, which will trigger a signal on the black fin card (inserted into your vita) to look for an original cartridge somewhere on its network (the cartridge connected to some guy’s PC), and communicate with that original cartridge for authentication. One’ll still need the iso on their SD card, and the original cartridge will only need be needed for the authentication steps, I assume.
According to their marketing description, this is so that you can share games with your restricted circle of friends. Practically, I’m convinced their global p2p network will ensure you can play whatever game is on the network, and everyone on the net will be “your friend”.
Like it or not, it sounds like a very clever and out-of-the-box idea. From a technical perspective, this is brilliant.
From a usefulness perspective, however, it assumes people will play nice and share games on their end. Maybe the Cobra Black Fin network will work a bit like torrents, letting you play games only if you share some of yours. There’s also the risk this could die if it does not gather momentum: if many people buy and use the product, Black Fin have built themselves a huge network of p2p piracy. But if only a few hundred people get it, it will die as soon as it appeared.
Long term too, this is most likely not a viable product: as less people use it, less and less games will be available on the network.
Nevertheless, from the technical approach, I can’t help but think this is a pretty brilliant idea. Nobody likes DRM piracy dongles, but you have to admit the idea is ingenious. How does the black fin card contact its p2p network in the first place? That assumes they have ways to run some level of unsigned code, and I’d be interested to understand how this works.
Such a system makes the Vita 3G much more interesting for pirates, all of a sudden. You’ll need network access in order to play the isos.
We’ve known for a while that hackers know how to dump vita cartridges (therefore acquiring the isos will probably not be a problem for people using that system) and how to run the isos, with some limitations. It is possible this dongle announcement will force some hackers out of the woods, to provide the scene with free piracy mechanisms, just like we’ve seen on the 3DS scene.
We have yet to confirm if this is true or some advanced hoax, but it does look legit. The dongle is announced to hit retailers by the end of the month.
The Full Press release:
The Black Fin allows Vita and Vita Slim Wifi and 3G users to share their Vita games over the internet.
The Cobra Black Fin Emulator card stores game ISO’s on Micro SD and the Black Fin Card is then inserted into the Vita/Vita Slim console
When connected to the Black Fin servers authentication of the Vita game is performed by matching the ISO on your Micro SD card to the same original game running on a peers’ Black Fin reader connected to his PC and the Black Fin servers or friends’ servers.
You might ask why it is necessary to authenticate the game you wish to play using an original card connected to a server?
Vita has a very secure card authentication mechanism, which to date has not been penetrated and is based on secure cryptography. It is unlikely that a direct authentication method which avoids having to use a peer to peer system will appear any time soon. As a result Cobra has designed a unique and cutting edge peer to peer sharing device which allows users to share their favourite games with friends over an internet network.
Vast resources have been poured into designing a flash card which is the same size as the original Vita card itself. Yes, the Cobra Black Fin squeezes all of its technology into a card no bigger than a Vita game card with tons of features and packing serious hardware power! When you look at the circuit board design and components used you start to understand the expertise and time required to pull off a design of this magnitude.
Expect release of the Cobra BlackFin end of December 2015..
Resellers can reserve their stocks in advance by e-mailing: sales@cobra-blackfin.com
Initial batch is sure to sell out fast, so be sure to reserve your stocks in advance to avoid disappointment.
Stay tuned for more information and further picture and video presentations.
Source: Cobra Black Fin, via PlaystationHax
I thought this was an April fools joke, but it’s December…
I like ISOs and playing backups but I wish this dies a quick painful death. Enough with the dongle ***. Its NOT needed.
When a NON dongle way comes out I hope that will be awesome but this is not.
Guess Stanislav (the Russian one 😛 ) died of a massive joygasm or heart attack. He’s usually all OVER these kinds of stories. XDDD
The SD card is interesting to me. It can be used as a back up cartridge for PS Vita Memory card dumper of Major Tom.
There you go again.
Whinge whinge whinge, I don’t want to pay for it, whinge whinge whinge.
Just a back up then why not put your game backups there especially when you got a small PS Vita Memory card. Put a microSD with 128GB!
Supposed to be a reply to the nakedfaerie idiot
Put it on the right place.Same as what you type Id…
Why would the dumps be in the ISO format, its a rom card. should be rom dump, not a disc image dump
The problem with some comments here is that they are not thinking outside of the box
This thing will die in no time, Vita has always struggled to sell in the first place, most people who bought it already played the few games that are worth having a Vita, many people will be scared of the p2p system and the few people who still buy this will stop using it when they realize it sucks having so little people on the network…
This won’t be a system seller neither to get the attention of non-vita owners.
And I love the comments “This will kill the vita, Sony/developers will stop making games for it”
You serious??? Sony already stopped making games long ago, major developers barely made a game for it when it came out and never bothered again, the indie people were the only ones who ever showed that they cared about it.
Vita is long dead.
Hey pidoraz, why are you using MY VK profile as your website ?
Hello Gregory do you like *** OPRAH LOL
The *** are you talking about???
Merry Christmass everyone 😀 well i love the idea that how it is work , it might be hard for some of us , but at the end i love the idea that how it is going to work 😀 i will buy one for sure if it will arrive in iran to test the product and see how it is going to work , and im going to thank everyone in the community for their hard works over hacking , thanks u all
Yesss!Rather, it would be!
so for people with no internet connection cannot use this? I hope someone out there could make like flashcart , 🙂
I don’t think this Black Fin – if it is real – is that interesting. But if it is real perhaps it’ll lead to better things, like a way to reuse the game cart slot as a microSD converter solving the expensive Vita memory card problem which everyone hates. I’ll read Yifan’s thread to get his opinion…
Slight problem with this: Requires Internet Connection, therefor, if you are not on the Latest OFW, Update Nag from heck. Vita Update Blocker does not always work.
im realy confused hear helow
fake
what the f… weirdest hack i ever seen, i deff wont be paying for it, ps+ gives me all the vita games i need, eventually, probably literally all of them if not all ready
it’d be handy to just use with your own collection because you could use a big microSD card to fit lots of games rather than swapping game carts or using vita memory cards.
thats cool i would get it just to play multi player games with a friend even if they dont have the game.
Can this lead to finding exploits in ps4 by using vita remote play, running unsigned stuff and connecting to ps4
This seems pretty weak. You have to A) depend on people even owning this obscure thing and B) having the game you want to play available and on the server at the time you want to play. The chances of that happening at any given time seems astronomical.
Sony won’t like it if you play with your dongle! 😀
Finally a light at the end of the tunnel!
I’d buy this. Even it works as a closed loop just for me. I have a media PC at home for my Plex stuff so I could just leave this thing plugged into my PC and play my games away from home right?
So if this thing’s real, that’s the end of what little is left for the Vita.
People find a way to pirate the games –> Don’t buy originals –> Sales drop –> Devs stop making software –> Console dies. Simple as that.
Fun fact: the ecosystems for Vita and 3DS are NOT the same. So stop the bullcrap of piracy boosting the sales. LOL
And you pay money to support piracy. Makes me want to puke.
I’m fine with PS+ and what games I get from it, AND the games I buy from PS Store or cartridges.
With the way things are, Vita doesn’t need piracy.
The Vita stays floating because of a small niche of games. There is really isn’t much left to pirate, except to destroy that last reason to own one.
I have to agree with you. I had a sort of sad realization yesterday that Vita is pretty much close to being a legacy platform anyways. What saddens me is that it is a really nice piece of hardware even several years out. Carts are so cheap in the USA for it and I own everything worth playing on cart. I don’t even think it will have that many more cart releases….maybe some Altus jrpg or a few lame 3rd party.
Of course this hack device seems awesome to those of us that like a good mod but the timing is too late and its too cumbersome. How about a Dr64 anyone?
PSN+ has been great for Vita especially if you have been onboard all along because I have over 60 psn+ titles as well as other stuff purchased when they have their super sales.
Whats great about Vita has been that it gets most Indies that ps3/ps4 get and it is an awesome PSP and PSX player. I really wish it would just get cracked open because with its spec it would be a nice video and emulator player (like a super PSP).
I have largely neglected mine in favor of the 3DS (sorry but fire emblem alone got played more than everything I have ever played on my Vita to this point). Still there are a lot of good games I purchased and never played like Y’s so I am going to give it some love.
Vita was really Sony’s WiiU (accept I would argue Vita is a better kit where WiiU got better games)……they just sc*** the marketing, and never positioned it right. VitaTV is an awesome concept and if they had just launched it cheap as competitor to Roku and AppleTV it could have scored big. It is a mini console, that plays Vita/PSP/PS1 and streams ps3/ps4. All it needed was good media apps and tell me how its not way better as a gaming/video box than the others?
RIP Vita….you are already dead so piracy will not be your undoing.
Last!
This sucks big ***. Why can’t we have a cart like sky3ds?
ok… if you go to the website cobra-blackfin.com and watch the video… it looks like in order to play games you must have this awkward looking device protruding from the top of your vita… that doesnt look practical lol. imagine how uncomfortable that would be. count me out unless im wrong and the only thing needed to play the game after loading it would be the card.