Greetings people of Wololo.net, my name is AGCrown and I am trying my hand at being a guest blogger on Wololo.net. While I may not have an expertise in console hacking itself I do have tertiary qualifications in network engineering and cryptography. Having been into computers since I could barely walk and naturally being a technical person I became obsessed with the inner workings and how the hardware interacted with everything else to create the data or visuals you can when you use said hardware.

Getting to the point of focus for this article, I am going to discuss how the similarities between the recent generation of consoles and x86 PC’s have led to such an enormous advancement in hacking as seen with the PS4 and the recent BadIRET etc.

Getting down to the very basic, x86 is an architecture used for most consumer grade computer hardware and is considered an open source architecture which means every person with the inclination can research and find out nearly everything about any aspect of it. The PS4 and I believe the Xbone share this architecture and the PS4 has even been found to be running a version of FreeBSD (Linux distros and Unix based operating systems are an entirely different article) despite it been heavily modified.

Getting back on track once again, the understanding of this architecture is a good news bad news situation as from the perspective of Sony it makes their job of locking down their console much harder than it was on the likes of the PS3.  The PS3 had a proprietary chipset, while the PS4 system being based off x86 means that hackers and the likes can more easily develop and run unsigned code. It allows game developers to create their games on without as much overhead and allows them to utilize the very limited hardware that consoles have to a much more efficient extent. x86 consoles also allows the games developed for that system to be more easily ported to the likes of PC and lowers the chance of another catastrophe like GTA 4 or Dying light at release.

Now I could type all day about various aspects of the console architecture but this was only meant to be a very brief article detailing the absolute basics of how the architecture of the consoles in this generation is allowing for such a rapid progression of hacking.

Given this is my first article on this website, please feel free to include any suggestions for me to improve and leave any feedback you may have.

I also would be ecstatic if you could give me some suggestions about areas you would like me to discuss or for you to learn more about provided it relates to networking/computer penetration or cryptography, or hardware if you are so inclined.

This is AGCrown signing off.