First of all, thanks to Abdullah who pointed me to Kakaroto’s recent twitter posts, as I’ve only been following the PS3 scene distantly recently.

I love drama

Let me say that I love drama in the console hacking scene. Not that I chose to love drama, but I remember that my first “excitement” in the PSP scene was to understand who the hackers were and how they figured things out and made stuff work. One thing that really shocked me (probably because I’m a developer myself and like to be recognized for my work at least at much as I like my salary) is how often “normal” people (the users) would forget about who the real hackers behind a given homebrew/hack/discovery were exactly. I’ve been internally boiling several times when I saw some people kept thanking “Dark Alex” for every possible hack on the PSP, even when he wasn’t involved at all… (another one that I really hated was the “thank you pspgen” I could see once in a while during the HBL era…not pspgen’s fault, but we have to live with the fact that users don’t really care and/or are dumb).

Long story short, it always fascinates me to understand how a vulnerability was discovered and turned into a usable exploit. And in order to understand that, the human factor is essential, (half of the console hacks are released in a hurry because of a human mistake or a leak), hence the love for drama.

The facts

Recently MathieuLH has been in the middle of a new PS3 scene drama, as Kakaroto has been working on a jailbreak solution for recent firmwares, and Mathieu initially refused to help while claiming on twitter that he had the solutions to recent firmwares hack. He apparently then pretended to help when he was actually only giving “riddles” which weren’t bringing much that wasn’t already known. This ended up *** off Kakaroto, and led to strong words exchanged on twitter. Unfortunately Mathieu’s twitter is not public anymore (a good move IMO, although a bit late, it should have been private when he started bragging about 4.0 without providing any POC), so I missed half of the fun.

Chosen bits from Kakaroto’s twitter (I unfortunately don’t have access to Mathieulh’s posts):

@Mathieulh “people should be satisfied of what they get”, lol, thank you master for the bone you throw at my face, woof woof

@Mathieulh you wrote your own toolchain, your own disassembler, you even wrote the *** wikipedia code. you invented cryptography!

@Mathieulh haha, you already left us to do everything on our own, you shared LESS than what we had already publically documented. so ***

@Mathieulh get real dude, you could paste me the man page of ‘printf’ then ask me to lick your *** cause you “shared plenty”, *** that

@Mathieulh you don’t care about the war for opening up the console? then why the *** do you call yourself a “ps3 dev” ???

@Mathieulh you “helped” open it up at first? no, psjailbreak did, and we all know who wrote psgroove (NOT YOU), you were just the releaser!

@Mathieulh only sony wins when someone decides to hold back the scene

@Mathieulh your whole attitude disgusts me. you leave the scene because of haters? I would leave it because of *** like you.

@Mathieulh YES stupid, you have a right to not share, but don’t TALK about it, and don’t expect the “I love you, my savior” treatment either

 

@Mathieulh no it wasn’t “plenty”, you gave 5% of what was requested, and you didn’t share “how to find it”, you gave riddles, and then I have to start reverse engineering your *** riddles.

If you just shut up instead of telling everyone what you have and don’t want to share, then you wouldn’t be so hated in the scene. I just WASTED 3 whole *** days hunting down this one little thing that you have but you just flaunt us with it saying you won’t share it.. you are in every private channel on IRC, you see what all the devs are discussing, you use the knowledge from everyone, you receive stuff from everyone from everywhere, then when you are needed, you say “no, I won’t give anything to you”, then you ask us to lick you *** until you feel all proud about yourself, then throw us a *** bone saying “it’s over there, and if you have a brain you’ll find it”, why not just outright say “I’m so 1337, so much better than you, I have all this stuff JUST FOR ME and you’re too *** stupid to do anything like me”?

No, I am grateful for the “help” you gave, and yes you have every right not to share what you did on your own, BUT, when you use someone else’s knowledge, then it’s ethical for you to give back the same way, also, if you don’t want to share, then *** shut up about what you have instead of being a *** and telling us you have something and not going to share it. And finally, if you decide not to share, ok, your choice, but don’t *** come arguing with me about how you helped and how you shared “plenty” and all that ***.. you don’t want to share, then be a man and own up to your actions and accept that I say that you’re not sharing and that if the release is delayed it’s because of you because we’re spending the next *** month re-doing everything you did. Don’t start arguing with me about how you’re helpful when you *** don’t want to help.

You don’t want to help, then shut the *** up.

 

The result is that MathieuLH officially leaves the Sony scene for the billionth time, until next time (last time he left the scene was no longer than 1 month ago).

Getting personal

I initially wrote a gigantic post on this subject, and erased everything. I’m definitely on Kakaroto’s side on this, but I won’t give any details (which is what I was planning to do initially) as this was getting personal and just adding fuel to the fire.

However to summarize my feelings, let’s just say that 1) from personal experience, working on something that MathieuLH is working on, or worked on at some point in the past is like walking on a drama minefield (I can’t help but to mention that MathieuLH registered on our /talk community just to make sure that we were properly thanking him for his help in the PSP homebrew signing effort, which really sounds exactly like what happened to Kakaroto recently) ,  2) I think it’s fine to hack just for the technical challenge, but in that case there is no need to open a twitter account and brag about it, this is just counterproductive, and 3) belittling fellow hackers just to make oneself look better is really lame.