May 2009

3 weeks ago, Davee released the ChickHEN, a cool piece of software that enables homebrew on all PSPs, including the psp3k and the slim ta88v3.

Davee’s work relies on a tiff user mode exploit (that has been patched in firmware 5.50), and on a Kernel exploit that he found. Usually, when such a vulnerability is made public, Sony reacts quickly and they fix the issues, with a new firmware containing only a “security update”.

But nothing happened so far…

Are the engineers business people at Sony considering that the Kernel exploit is not a threat on the PSP as long as we don’t find a new user exploit?

Did sony give up on the PSP to work on the PS3? Or is it rather that their PSP teams are so focused on the E3 that they have no time for firmware updates? Or that they don’t care about the PSP security anymore, since the security on the upcoming psp2 (or psp4000, whichever it is) will be way stronger?

What do you guys think? Why didn’t sony release firmware 5.51 yet?

I run a cool Wordpress plugin called “blog stats” to get information on the popularity of my site.

It gives me stats such as the most popular keywords used on search engines to reach this blog. Some come with no surprise, such as “magic the gathering psp”, or “mtg psp”, or “wagic”. Other are a bit funnier, such as “what is wololo”.

It also gives me a count of the number of visits. The Tiff exploit created a huge peak, multiplying my number of daily visitors by 20 :

Such a peak can also be seen when some rumors about me running an exploit on firmware 5.50 appeared on the net.

The recent events also have had a huge impact on the number of downloads of Wagic itself. At first I was happy, but then I realized that more than 90% of the new downloads came from chinese IPs, probably because some popular Chinese websites made a confusion between homebrews and ISOs? Well, that or Magic the Gathering just became ultra popular in China for some reason

Anyways, minus the 3 crazy days whith these thousands of Chinese downloads, The latest version of Wagic has still been downloaded between 5′000 and 10′000 times within a month (difficult to count precisely since other websites distribute the file too…)

And here I start to dream…wow, if I got half a dollar for each download, I could just quit my job and work fulltime on homebrew development   (Why doesn’t Sony have an Apple store, goddammit ???)

If you read my blog, you probably already know about MTGForge, a Java application that allows you to play Magic the Gathering against an AI on your PC (the game that showed me 2 years ago that Magic against an AI was not completely impossible).

A developer adapted MTGForge into a java applet, allowing you to play it in a browser.

This is very cool, I hope the 2 devs will share their code repository so that the progress made to one of them will benefit the other.

I also have no doubts that WotC will find a reason to shut this down one day or another, so enjoy while it lasts.

SoloMTG

Granted, it doesn’t beat Magic on the go with your PSP, but for that we already have Wagic

So, I’m ok with a little buzz on files I created 2 months ago. It brings people to my blog for no reason, but it’s still cool for my ego. (Except when people call me a faker when I’m clearly not responsible for people posting news…).

I randomly came across a news on QJ.net today about a “Libtiff exploit” for the PS3. You think the news posters would learn, but hey, I guess the word “exploit” brings visit to their site, and therefore ads revenue (QJ.net is a great site, don’t get me wrong, but be careful when it comes to “exploit”, they don’t seem to make the difference with a crash).

This is the exact same file as the one seen yesterday in the so called “psp exploit”. I created this file months ago (minus the 16 “00″ on top of it), and it was proven (months ago, for f##k’s sake) that it would lead nowhere on the PSP.

Big news, the psp and the ps3 both use the libtiff, and are therefore crashing when fed some crafted files that match bugs reported on the public bug list.

So, congrats to the champion who downloaded the psp file, tried it on his ps3, and called this an “exploit” (and deserves all the names Freeplay could give him).

I don’t own a ps3, and I can tell you already: this is not going to lead to an exploit.

I’m sorry for distributing this file a while ago. I was only asking for help, discovered after a few weeks later that this would lead nowhere, but didn’t realize it would create so much buzz.

I should put a copyright on this file