Let me try to answer some of these questions, with more up-to-date answers.

First of all, the easy ones: VHBL (that’s the super new cool name of HBL on the Vita, I’ll let you guess what the V means, I know, I’m super original) will not support loading PSP isos. Basically VHBL will have the same limitations and features as HBL on the PSP, and, last time I checked, running psp isos was not possible through HBL. The same HBL limitations apply to compatible homebrews. In a general way, user mode homebrews should work for the most part, while homebrews that require kernel access will not work. For now (but that could change), homebrews requiring network access might not work (or at least, the network part of them will not work). Like in the patapon exploit era, it is possible, depending on the success of VHBL, that we progressively increase compatibility if we (as a community) keep improving the HBL code in the weeks following the release. Oh, and I am talking about PSP homebrews, running in HBL within the PSP emulator. So, for now, don’t dream about a full speed N64 or psp2 emulator. What we’ll get are the PSP homebrews that you already know.

Second, the vulnerability we rely on to run VHBL is a vulnerability in a PSP full Game, not a Demo. This means you will have to buy that game on the PSN in order to run VHBL (just like in the good old days of GTA:LCS for the first eLoader on the PSP). This also means that as soon as we reveal the name of that game, Sony can probably remove it from the PSN and/or patch it.

This leads to the most asked question: when and how will this be released? Well, I have a basic idea on how the release will happen. Nothing spectacular but it should hopefully be enough to guarantee that people who are really motivated in getting their hands on HBL on their Vita will get it. I’m hoping that constantly reminding people that this doesn’t allow the to run any pirated content will attract the right people to this exploit, and not the 95% of pirates that define any console hacking scene these days

In the past weeks I’ve been polishing the release process, and I can’t predict the future, but hopefully it will go well.

Nevertheless, getting access to this exploit for you guys will be a matter of being at the right place, at the right time.

For now I’m thinking Sony’s reaction wil be to remove the game from the PSN within 24h of the public announcement. Worst case scenario, Sony is already aware of the vulnerability and have already patched the game. This is unfortunately not something I can test without getting any more guinea pigs… these guinea pigs will basically be you when the release happens, I can’t really do any better than that. Obviously, the release will not happen like your typical hack release (a dramatic article on every news site of the planet copying the hacker’s initial blog post). It will be, I expect, a bit more subtle than that.

Anyways, I added a page on this blog where the VHBL downloads will be available, so if you’re waiting for HBL on your Vita, just check that page (and our /talk forums) regularly for updates.

And that doesn’t stop here…not only can you pay the price you want, you also get to choose how to split your money between the developers of the games and charity (the eff or Child’s play).

The games in this Android Bundle are Anomaly, Osmos, Edge, and World of Goo (World of Goo only available if you pay more than the average).

So hurry up and get yours!

Note: Osmos was marked as incompatible with my phone (Desire HD) but seems to work fine so far.

I haven’t blogged about PSP homebrews in a while, but it’s great to see the trends of votes, and I decided it would make sense to blog about the homebrews people like, in case your PSP had been collecting dust recently and you’re looking for new stuff to try, or if you simply want to discover some hidden gems. Here are the highest rated homebrew games for the month of January 2012, in reverse order to preserve the tradition of a countdown:

6. Pro CFW, By VF and Coldbird

No surprise, the open source CFW for the PSP which runs on the latest firmwares is one of the most downloaded and appreciated homebrews out there, so it still has a high place in your hearts.

Download Pro CFW here

5. ALEX Kidd Jan-Ken-Pon, by Tim2001

This is only a demo and it has its flaws, but this is a nice arcade game with cute graphics. You have to pilot a helicopter and avoid obstacles.

Download Alex Kidd JKP Here

4.Megaman – Netnavi.exe, by double-B

This is a fairly addictive arcade game inspired by the “Megaman Battle Network”  series of games, in which you fight a series of enemies in a tournament.

Download Megaman – Netnavi.exe here

3. OpenCMA by Virtuous Flame

It seems I’m not the only one thinking that the Content Management Assistant on the PS Vita is crippled, as Virtuous flame’s tool is one of the most popular downloads for this month. Open CMA allows you to copy files between your PC and your Vita without needing to be connected to the internet, a “feature” that seems to be obvious for everybody but Sony.

Download openCMA here

2. BookR, by Nguyen Chi Tam

Probably one of the oldest homebrews on the PSP, Bookr is also one of the most downloaded ones. Bookr fills another void that was never handled by Sony: the possibility to read ebooks (pdf and text files) on your portable device. Yeah, reading ebooks on a mobile device is never going to become anything big, so I completely understand why Sony ignored this feature on the PSP. They took the same bright decision on the Vita, by the way.

Download Bookr here

1. Lamecraft, By Drakon

Is it a surprise? Despite the lack of recent development (Drakon, where are you?), Lamecraft has an active community providing mods and improvements, and was by far the most popular homebrew of 2011. This is a very well done Minecraft clone for the PSP, enough said?

Download Lamecraft here

Runner ups

Many cool homebrews were submitted to our database recently, and other homebrews got a fair amount of good ratings (I kept only the ones that had a “good amount” of ratings in order to have a fair comparison). These include Neur0n’s 6.60 ME (an alternate CFW for those who don’t like Pro CFW), PRXShot (codestation’s cool screenshot plugin), Draan’s cool tool to fully translate your PSP: Localizer, Spike132000′s PSP Installer (a tool to directly download and install homebrews), or the famous N64 Emulator, DaedalusX64.

Keep adding your homebrews, and keep voting for your favorite ones on /downloads!

Update: The fine prints reveal that this is not as good a deal as I initially thought it was: the “free” 250MB of 3G bandwidth is activated after your first AT&T plan, which means you have to subscribe to the AT&T offer, which makes that part no so attractive in the end. The game itself is also redeemed only if you subscribe to AT&T. This is still a good deal if you were planning on getting the 3G model, but not so attractive anymore if you didn’t have any plan to subscribe to AT&T with your Vita. Thanks to NitsudR for point this out!

And because it’s Amazon, people who already preordered a 3G model will also be getting this promotion

More info here

Note by Wololo: Thanks to guest blogger Justin Taylor for this article. This is the first time an article in this blog is not written directly by me, if you guys like this it might happen again

When the PlayStation Vita came out, everyone was excited about the remote play option. Who wouldn’t like being able to play Mortal Kombat on the Vita anywhere in the house? But, Sony blew it on this feature. The Vita has remote play, but it can only be used on some less than exciting games, like Bejeweled. However, a recent series of Youtube videos and some other players online have found a way to hack the Vita, opening it up to many other PS3 games. No one is sure if the hack is real[Note by wololo: between the time this article was written and the time it was published, the hack was proven to be real, and tutorials can easily be found to test it by yourself], but this can mean a lot for the hacker community if it’s real.

Normally when you connect the PlayStation Vita to the PS3 for remote play, it reads as a game system. No surprise, considering it is one. When the alleged jailbreak hack is used, the Vita no longer reads as a game system. Instead, the PS3 recognizes it as a mobile phone.

This is able to lift many of the restrictions the Vita has, allowing players to connect with high-profile games. At the same time, the Vita does not seem to lose any of its inherent power after the hack. In a number of YouTube videos, you can see someone playing Mortal Kombat, Battlefield 3, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Red Dead Redemption and Alice: Madness Returns. If this can truly be done, then this hack has the potential to split the Vita wide open, allowing it to play all those games you really wanted to when you heard about remote play.

This is how remote play should have been in the first place, which is causing the homebrew and hacker community to scramble. Many are now trying to find out if this hack is real, and how to duplicate it. If there is one reason why Sony doesn’t want the Vita to have such open remote play options, it is because of the gaming lags. The Vita is a strong machine, no one will dispute that, but it isn’t a PS3.

In many of these videos, you are going to notice a lot of input and gaming lags. While they look far from unplayable, it does look a little difficult to play during those intense moments when you are pulling off a 30-hit combo or shooting down 20 guys at once. Nonetheless, the games run satisfactorily, which should be enough for most Vita users.

Aside from the gaming lags, there are two other problems to worry about if this hack is real. If you do it, you are going against Sony’s ToS. If the Vita breaks, Sony isn’t going to do anything to help. Ever since PSP hacking started, bricking your system was a major problem. If this hack is real, consequences could come. Holding out to make sure it is worth it would be wise, as more is sure to come out surrounding remote play as the release date for Vita grows closer.

The Vita is without doubt the most promising mobile gaming device for 2012, and as usual, the game exclusives will probably be where the real fight is, in the war against smartphones and the 3DS. The Vita lineup for Japan wasn’t really exciting. I personally got Ridge Racer which is pure crap (more on that in another blog article, one of these days), but I know other people who got other games and weren’t impressed. Basically, it seems once you’re done with Uncharted, there’s nothing really standing out.

But the EU/US lineup seems to be more promising, with some games taking advantage of the console’s specific controls (in addition to Uncharted, which was already at JP launch): Little Deviants, Mod Nation Racers,…

Will that be enough to convince you? Or will you be stopped by Sony potentially spying on you, or by the price of the typical “everything is proprietary” Sony new hardware? For those of you who will get the Vita, it is still my plan to release HBL for it, assuming it doesn’t get patched by then.

Thanks to the work of Xaw Otihs, this new version of Wagic is now also available for the Nokia Platforms Maemo and Meego (respectively, the N900 and the N9/N950). That release of course gets all the bug fixes and improvements that we described in the 0.17.1 release.

Download

You can download Wagic 0.17 for all supported platforms on the download page here

Often compared to commercial games for its replay value and quality, Wagic is a heroic fantasy card game, in which you fight as a wizard against the computer. As you win battles, you unlock new game modes and earn credits that allow you to improve your army. Wagic is community driven and entirely customizable: you can create themes, mods, new rules, or even new games (check for example Knights VS Dagons on our forums, a game strongly inspired by strategy games such as warcraft). Wagic is available in several languages (English, French, German, spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Serbian), and open source. It currently runs on the Sony PSP, Windows, Linux, maemo, meego, Android, and iOS (iPhone, iPad).

Note: The Linux binary on our download page is still 0.16.0 and we are doing our best to provide a binary asap, but in the meantime you can always compile a binary directly from the sources if you can’t wait (sorry).

I want once again to thank Teck4 for the trust he put in me with this exploit, and for agreeing with the idea of making this exploit available to trusted people like SKFU before we attempt any public release.

source SKFU

Yesterday I read the indictment (the document that states what the prosecutors believe Megaupload to be guilty off), and one thing has been bothering me since: The Entertainment industry have in their hands, for the first time, a global-scale case study showing how much people are ready to pay (either through subscription or advertising) for digital content in today’s world, but in their arrogance will probably not draw any useful conclusion out of it. Since Megaupload was not paying any copyright owner, they were able to set the prices of their premium accounts, and/or the level of annoyance caused by advertising to match exactly what people are ready to pay for.

In other words, they have proven, especially with their premium account system, that people are ready to pay something for digital content. The problem, and this is why I think shutting down Megaupload will not stop piracy, is that what customers are ready to pay (as a result of this global-scale 5 years experiment) is way below what the entertainment industry expects them to pay.

This is described in the very first page of the indictment, by the prosecutors themselves:

estimated harm to copyright holders well in excess of $500,000,000

[...]

reported income in excess of $175,000,000

So we have, on one hand, the money that the industry would have expected to make from the sale of these goods (“well in excess of” 500 millions), and what a real world experience on a website visited by millions of real users actually provided (175 millions). Now, the harm being higher than the actually money made would not be a surprise in the case of counterfeit for physical goods (A fake Louis Vuitton is usually of lower actual quality than a real one, therefore costs less in the eyes of the buyer), but in the case of digital goods, this should actually be the opposite (a pirated movie has a higher value from the end user’s point of view since it has not limitations on when/where/how many times it can be played). Note that I’m talking of the actual “market value” (what people are ready to pay for something), and not the actual production costs (a product that costs more to produce than what people are ready to pay for it cannot exist for long in a capitalist world)

To summarize, what I’m saying is that if people are ready to pay 175 millions for a service providing movies without any restrictions, they will be willing to pay potentially less for a lower quality system with DRMs (which is currently the only alternative offered by the Entertainment Industry for movies). Yet the indictment says that the prejudice is “way over” 500 millions.

What is the consequence of this? Let’s make it super simple and assume Megaupload provided 100 million illegal downloads over the course of 5 years. This means people are willing to pay 1.75$ per file (let’s say those are movies). What the Entertainment industry would actually expect them to pay for a lower quality service (with DRMs and many limitations) is 5$, almost 3 times the price. (I’ve actually read hallucinating numbers such as 4 Billion for the “harm” made to copyright owners, which would mean the Entertainment industry expects the end user to pay more than 20 times the amount people are actually willing to pay for a movie)

What this shows me is that the Movie Industry is entirely disconnected from the actual market value of the products they sell. Don’t get me wrong, some people are ready to pay this amount for DRMed movies and such, but these people are not the people who were using Megaupload. The millions of daily users of Megaupload will not suddenly be ready to pay 3 times the previous price all of a sudden, so they will not magically migrate to legal offers, this is perfectly unrealistic.

Think about it, imagine your baker shuts down, and the other baker in your street is 3 times the price for crappy bread…. what will you do? Personally, I’ll start buying my bread from the baker close to the office rather than the crappy one close to my home…or I’ll eat way less bread… or bake my own bread, or stop eating bread… in other words, I’d find solutions to maintain the stability of my budget. The result is not that people will go more to the crippled existing legal solutions, they will instead watch way less stuff.

The solution is obviously to rethink the way movies are distributed. Music has gone a long way, with mp3s being sold without DRMs nowadays, or sevices like Deezer… it’s time Movies do the same. Where are DRM free legal offers? Where are TV shows less than 2 years old on legal offers? Why do Europeans and Asians have to wait up to 5 years before their favorite American show gets legally accessible in their country, most of the time with a terrible dubbed version?

The current Legal offer could be majorly improved with a few simple steps. Fighting efficiently against piracy is not done by shutting down one of the hundreds of sites that promote it, or by voting laws like SOPA or PIPA, which will do much more damage to legal businesses than they will do to stealers. It’s done by providing something better for a competitive price (I haven’t downloaded illegaly a single South Park episode since they started distributing on their site the episodes officially the day they are shown. Also note that the South Park website is the only way for me to legally watch South Park were I live if I do not want to wait approximately 5 years).

The problem, especially if the numbers of 4 Billion VS 175 million are real, is that no company in the entertainment industry of the US would be willing to put the necessary resources in building a digital content platform if they were told it would bring them “only” 175 million over 5 years. (which is ironic, because when Megaupload makes that amount of money, it’s considered as insanely high in the prosecutors’ eyes).

Note: I don’t endorse the copyright infringement that was promoted on Megaupload, it is hard to say anything to defend them here, but my point is that the long term consequence of this action will not be a decrease of piracy. The only victims of this are the hundreds of thousands of users who were legally using the service, as well as the (already damaged) relations between artists and their audience. Pirates will find their way, they always have and they always will. Piracy has not decreased after the napster case, it has not decreased after the DMCA law, it will not decrease after the megaupload case or the sopa/pipa.

Knowing SKFU’s passion for everything network-related, I’m assuming he’s doing some tests using some local DNS changes… or maybe he managed to put some of his own files in an official package? That would be exciting.

In previous tweets this week, he mentioned he found 2 potentially usable vulnerabilities on the Vita

VITA is back to life, since last tweet found 2 new possibile vulnerabilities. If it runs good, news in blog this evening!

That was, however, 2 days ago, and his blog wasn’t updated since then, so I’m assuming he ran into a few issues. (the “back to life” comment refers to the official 1.52 firmware which bricked his Vita…or appeared to do so…which turned out to be that the battery had to charge for almost 24 hours before the Vita accepting to turn on, for some reason)

Obviously lots of this experimentation will probably not lead to anything, but for now, every bit on info on the internals of the Vita is interesting. Let’s keep digging

source: SKFU’s twitter via mamosuke