June 2009

Ingredients:

Take an unknown random guy, registered on the forums of a relatively well known german site for less than 2 months. This ensures a maximum lack of credibility, which is important. People don’t trust hackers who have been on the scene for years, but they will trust a perfect unknown guy: the white knight coming from nowhere.

Use a savegame from a random game (Monster Hunter JP Version), and mix with the binary of the chikHEN. Put all of this in a zip archive, and wait for a few hours.

If everything goes well, your fake is ready to be baked. After the information gets lost in translation, several sites that people tend to believe will do the work for you, changing what was probably a simple joke (or, who knows, a real crash ?) into a magical gamesave exploit that works on all games (yeah, right…)

In a matter of hours, your name will be on top of all PSP news sites: your fake is ready. Unfortunately, like most soufflés, it will probably lose its shape in a matter of seconds, as soon as it’s out of the oven and people start realizing this was just a prank.

But don’t be worried, the scene is very forgiveable. In a few weeks, you can come again with the same receipe and trick them again. Have fun!

There is probably no exploit in Monster hunter or Need for speed, but these are good games, so it’s still good to get them

No. it’s not out. If the PSP was an important target for WotC, they would have had created the game a long time ago. I started coding Wagic because I knew there would never be an official Magic the Gathering Game on the PSP…

But have you seen the screenshots of the new XBox 360 game (planned to be released in the hours to come)? Seriously, do you see anything here that would prevent it to be ported to the PSP?

Look at them, the same ratio, and even with such small pictures (600×333, the PSP is 480×272), it looks like it would be doable and actually easy to port (just remove a few special effects, reduce the resolution, and you’re done!)… Well of course PSP is probably not where the money is right now, but…

Oh well, at least we have Wagic…which does have a manapool, ha! I wonder how many cards Duels will handle, by the way 

I spoke too soon. The PSP Firmware 5.51 has been released, and, although this hasn’t been confirmed yet, it probably fixes the Kernel exploit of the Chikhen. Actually, it’s probably the only thing it does. What took you so long, Sony?

I now it won’t prevent noobs from doing the mistake, but if you like homebrews, don’t upgrade.

source
EBOOT

The new Sony hardware revision is not publicly available yet, however reports from the E3 convention tend to confirm that it runs on the same firmware base as the PSP 1000/2000/3000. Namely, firmware 5.50.

The PSP Go will probably ship with a different revision, though. Unless firmware 5.50 already has a bluetooth driver integrated, which I doubt (but I haven’t looked at the firmware, so I can’t really tell).

Anyways, knowing the costs of developing an entire firmware from scratch, it is obvious that the PSP Go will share some code with its older sisters, since the hardware is pretty much the same. And if they share the code, they will share the bugs.

Assuming some hackers find exploits in the new firmwares, how easy would it be to adapt these exploits to the PSP Go? It’s hard to tell, but it will be easy to check when/if this happens. We’Ve seen with the Eggsploit that the vulnerabilty is a bit different between the PSP Phat and the PSP Slim. The difference was analyzed with PSPLink, and one file for each model was created. The PSP community was extremely lucky at that time, that the exploit for the slims(2000) worked on the lites(3000) as well. If it hadn’t been the case, there would have been no easy way to investigate the crash on a PSP3000 (it is not entirely true actually, help from people who had access to homebrew on the PSP3000 at that time – such as DAX or Miriam – would have solved the issue)

In other words, what led to the hack of the PSP3000 was the fact that we have access to debbuging tools on previous versions of the console, in addition to the similarities with the new model.
We can think it will be the same for the PSP Go: it would be financially bad for Sony to maintain different software on two revisions of the same console, especially one that has been out for 5 years.

So if an exploit is found on new firmwares, I believe it will be likely to work on the PSP Go as well. Even better, we know there are a few kernel exploits available in the PSP firmware, that were never publicly revealed, and therefore never patched (for example, joek’s exploit, that led to PSPGen’s Gripshift-CFW earlier this year). So If I wanted to play with words, I’d say the PSP Go has already been hacked

But I wouldn’t hold my breath. If I were to buy a PSP today, I would probably get a Slim. I believe it’s the best bet nowadays (The Daxter packs are hackable with Pandora batteries), especially since all models run CFW now. But I think the PSP Go’s sexy… when it gets hacked, I can picture myself selling my PSP3000 and getting a PSP Go.

Oh, and for people expecting a hack of firmware 5.50. I personally hope, if such a hack is found, that it won’t be revealed before the PSP Go is out in stores

As a professional developer, and as a homebrew coder, I am strongly against video games piracy, and digital piracy in a general way. Well, it doesn’t mean I never downloaded illegally, let’s be honest here, I’ve been a student too. But now that I have a salary, I tend to buy more and pirate less.

There’s still a problem with the current legal offer though: Movies.

As a foreigner in Japan, it is very difficult to get access to non-japanese movies. Let’s give an example: I got Wall-E on DVD (ordered from the UK) 1 month before it was out in theaters here.
It is not a problem with Japan. It is a problem with wanting to watch movies in a country that is not yours. Don’t get me started on how difficult it would be for me to watch French movies without the pirate bay (luckily Amazon ships worldwide, if you’re ready to pay the shipping). And don’t get me started on Christine Albanel either, that’s not the point of this article, although it is completely related.

Oh, sorry, I’m stupid, I didn’t know standard browsers don’t work on your futuristic website

Anyways, the other day I decided to play Mr. nice guy, and rent a movie from the Playstation store. My goal was to rent the Disney movie “Bolt”.
If you go to the US playstation store , you’ll see in the “movies” section (bottom of the page) a bunch of titles available for Rent, for the PS3 or the PSP.
Here’s the example for Bolt:

The first thing that surprised me was that there is no “Buy” or “Rent” button on the page. I first tought I needed to log-in (which I did), or maybe I needed to “activate” my PSP from my user account (which I did) to be recognized as a “legit” psp owner… but it didn’t change anything.
At the bottom of the page, a “Where to buy” button redirects the user to… Amazon! What? That’s certainly not what they meant…

A few hours spent on the “Knowledge center” (a marketing name for what human beings call a FAQ), and an email to the Customer service brings me the solution:

Thank you for writing us about your issue. You have to actually go to the Playstation Store on your PSP(R) portable entertainment system to make purchases.

Ok…right… how about you clearly say that somewhere on the page, for example, in red letters where the BUY button should be? Goddammit…

IPism  (Sorry sir, please use that other server, the one for people of your kind.)

Anyways, I was motivated in my quest for honesty, so I followed the instructions and went to the playstation store with my PSP. I will not talk about the issues I had to connect (you can only have one PSN account on the PSP, and unfortunately I already had a European one – did I mention I’m a European guy living in Japan with a strong interest in American movies?), or the issues related to the fact that I run a custom Firmware on my PSP.
So, not mentioning these issues, here I am, on the Playstation store, with a large selection of… games??? absolutley NO movie??? WTF??? Where did Bolt go?

So let’s sum this up. I can see the movie is “available” on the PC store, but I can’t buy it from there, for god knows what stupid reason, and according to the customer service, I could buy it from my PSP, but it is nowhere to be found…

Hmmm, let’s email the customer service again, and ask why that is. Although, people who don’t live in the US probably already guessed the answer, ’cause it’s always the same stupid reason:

Thank you for writing to us about downloading your movie from the PlayStation(R)Network to your PSP(R) portable entertainment system.

Unfortunately, because you are using a Japanese IP Address to access the North American PlayStation®Store, you will not be able to purchase the content that you want such as the movie “Bolt”.

Oh, yeah, thank you. Well, that could be written somewhere on the main page as well. I knew that was the reason, but not everyone is as dedicated as I am, you know…

Gattaca – let’s fake my ADN to look like a WASP

Now there, Sony, don’t cry. You obviously don’t want me to buy your products, but I’m a nice guy, and I have access to a VPN. So I’ll even go through the trouble of installing your new Media Go application, fire it through the VPN, and, there it is, the Movie I’ve been trying to buy for 6 hours now:

But I’m a bit suspicious. It’s a PSP Movie, but I want to watch it on my TV, so I need to send it to my psp3000, not my Phat. The terms of use say I can copy a rented movie to only 1 PSP. Therefore the psp3k needs to be activated and/or recognized by Media Go…which is not the case (the message says “please connect your PSP through the USB port blablabla…”, which… I just f##king did!).

On a different computer, the error is different. The PSP is recognized, but Media Go tells me I need to update it to use it with the PSP Store.

Oh, well, I guess I can’t have homebrews AND be a nice guy, now, can I ?

Sorry, Sony, the money’s not for you…

36 Hours were spent between the time I “wanted” to buy the movie, and the time I was finally able to buy it. And how did I buy it, do you ask? Well, on Amazon…

The industry is not ready

To be honest, Sony’s not entirely to blame: The guys at the Customer service were nice and answered quickly (and accurately) to my questions, it’s not their fault that some stupid businessmen are still stuck in the 19th century (seriously, the fact that these guys still believe people live in the country they were born makes me wonder about their level of education. They should burn in Hell, next to the guys who came up with the great idea of “region locking” DVDs and blu rays…).
Also, it’s not only Sony. I tried the other day to buy some MP3s from Amazon and got the same kind of problem. Note that at least the message on Amazon’s website is clear (“sorry, only for people who live in the US”).
And finally, the fact that I’m on CFW doesn’t help much since I don’t want to upgrade.

But the real problem is the following: Pirate sites don’t ask me to be browsed with my PSP in order to download them. They don’t require me to give up on homebrews in order to watch a movie. They don’t require me to live in a specific country. They don’t prevent me from copying the movie on the device I want.
The movie industry as a whole is one century late with their business model. There are people in this world who would be ready to pay for a quality service matching their needs. I’m one of them. I’m ready to pay for digital content. But apparently Sony and the others aren’t ready for me. I’ll come back in 10 years, to see if IPism (it’s close to racism, but with your IP address) and DRMS have become a thing of the past. Meanwhile, I’m back to Amazon’s DVDs, and for the things I can’t find on Amazon, I know some Pirates on some Bay…

See you in 10 years, Sony…