Things have been going extremely fast since the leak/release of 3.60 PS3 keys yesterday.

Developer PSDev released a partial dump of the PS3 3.60 firmware a few hours ago, which will be useful for the devs who want to investigate the inner workings of that firmware. Such files could be also potentially useful for people willing to create a 3.60 custom firmware (which, let me clarify, does *not* mean a 3.60 hack, but a Custom Firmware with 3.60 features that would technically be running on a 3.55 PS3. So, if you’re stuck on 3.60, this is not directly useful to you).

To be perfectly honest, I believe that the people who have the skills or the knowledge to reverse engineer those files and/or work on a CFW probably also know how to extract them in the first place. Nevertheless, it’s a good release for those of you who want to get started and have a look at them without having to learn how to extract them first.

I won’t release these files here, as for anything related to Sony firmware they probably contain lots of copyrighted content that is not supposed to be distributed.

In addition to this, those of you who want to enjoy “backups” of 3.60+ games on your 3.55 CFW should be rejoicing, as more and more people are publishing patched eboots for many games. Again, I do believe providing you with these links is not in my best interest, but if you head over to your favorite sharing/p2p website, you’ll probably be finding whatever you want fairly easily. Lists of backups compatibility are also being updated on many scene websites.

Finally, not sure if this is a coincidence, but Sony announced they will be having a maintenance of their network today, which will last 2hrs. Quoting their blog announcement:

This maintenance will start at approximately 12:00am midnight Pacific Time (1:00am MDT / 2:00am CDT /3:00 am EDT) and last for about two hours, ending around 2:00am PDT on Thursday, August 2nd (3:00am MDT / 4:00am CDT / 5:00am EDT). During this maintenance period you WILL be able to sign in to the Network if you have signed in at some point over the past few days. So please be sure to sign in now if you wish to access PSN during this maintenance window.

I’m personally not too much into the whole “playing backup” thing, but some other things are catching my interest with the 3.60 keys release, in particular this recent addition by eussNL in the ps3 dev wiki, indirectly related to Kakaroto’s work on his 3.60 Hen:

Q: recently 3.60 keys surfaced (lv1ldr, lv2ldr, isoldr, appldr), what does this mean for this release and the future?
A: That is actually a multiparted answer:

now that several binairies (Iso module + CoreOS minus the loaders that are inside lv0) can be decrypted, more investigation can be done in them, which give a new boost in (unrelated to the HeN) other targets, like:
Hardwareless downgrades : Downgrading with PSgrade Dongle (lv1.self)
QA Flagging / systemtokens (spu_token_processor.self) and usertokens (spu_utoken_processor.self)
PS2 compatibility (mc_iso_spu_module.self , me_iso_for_ps2emu.self , sv_iso_for_ps2emu.self)
Getting per_console_root_key_1 / EID_root_key on 3.56+/slim3K (lv1.self , aim_spu_module.self)
Backsigning applications for <=3.55 and patch sys_proc_param_version (appldr.self , lv2_kernel.self)

Q: So does this mean a future release would be sooner?
A: Only God knows 😉 But it can also be that because of the above, it would become meaningless/surpassed by better progress. So lets all hope for the best 🙂

Lots of exciting stuff in there… Of course all of this is hypothetical for now, but assuming the right people start looking into it…we could very well see homebrews or software downgraders happening on 3.6+

Sources: eussNL, ps3hax, playstation blog

Q: recently 3.60 keys surfaced (lv1ldr, lv2ldr, isoldr, appldr), what does this mean for this release and the future?
A: That is actually a multiparted answer:

• now that several binairies (Iso module + CoreOSminus the loaders that are inside lv0) can be decrypted, more investigation can be done in them, which give a new boost in (unrelated to the HeN) other targets, like:
  • Hardwareless downgrades : Downgrading with PSgrade Dongle (lv1.self)
  • QA Flagging / systemtokens (spu_token_processor.self) and usertokens (spu_utoken_processor.self)
  • PS2 compatibility (mc_iso_spu_module.self , me_iso_for_ps2emu.self , sv_iso_for_ps2emu.self)
  • Getting per_console_root_key_1 / EID_root_key on 3.56+/slim3K (lv1.self , aim_spu_module.self)
  • Backsigning applications for <=3.55 and patch sys_proc_param_version (appldr.self , lv2_kernel.self)

Q: So does this mean a future release would be sooner?

A: Only God knows 😉 But it can also be that because of the above, it would become meaningless/surpassed by better progress. So lets all hope for the best 🙂