The Mess Hall

Dazbobaby wrote:on a another note, would you be as pissed if hacking the ps3 required a modchip instead of a 5mb firmware patch? It certainly makes things less accessible if its modchip only.

Not really fussed. It's not the actual hacking that winds me up... The games, films and music industries have been dealing with pirates pretty much their entire existence and will no doubt continue to do so. What annoys me is the pro-hacker, anti-Sony attitude. It's not like it's Greenpeace versus BP.

P.S: all those things you listed do sound quite cool.

Blaaaa u took my comment the wrong way.
I was laughing at how they where trying to explain what was happing / they were doing.
It was a daft comment.
It made me laugh. Blaaaaa never mind

In other (related news)...PMSL - un-fucking-believable:

Eurogamer wrote:Frustrated by Modern Warfare 2 hacks? Infinity Ward feels your pain. But don't blame the developer. Blame Sony and the PlayStation 3's compromised security.

Infinity Ward's creative strategist Robert Bowling, aka fourzerotwo, took to the official Infinity Ward forum to discuss the PS3's recent troubles.

"Sony has recently acknowledged a breach in security on the PS3 which resulted in games to become exposed to exploits and hacks," Bowling said. "Modern Warfare 2 is no exception to this security exploit and we understand that some of you have experienced problems with stats and other issues associated with this."

Apparently PS3 Modern Warfare 2 players are susceptible to hacks that affect their statistics and, in some cases, delete their progress. One gamer, ktell, described the problem on the Infinity Ward forum.

"This issue is really out of hand. I can't log on without getting deranked, vulgar messages across the status bar on the bottom, etc. etc. Infinity Ward should be policing the lobbies looking for exploiters and banning them. It may be a Sony glitch (although the hacked files are related to MW2's game data), but Infinity Ward can at least patrol their own games.

"I mean seriously - I spent 27 days playing that game, unlocking, ranking up etc. Now all my challenges, perks, guns and kill streaks are gone? And my KD is like 10 million to one now?

"Un-f'ing real. You should at least be able to restore my account to where it was. What's up with that?

"This is horrible, just horrible."

According to Bowling, Infinity Ward is powerless in the matter.

"Games rely on the security of the encryption on the platforms they're played on, therefore; updates to the game through patches will not resolve this problem, unless the security exploit itself is resolved on the platform.

"Regretfully, Call of Duty games are receiving the bulk of the hacker's attention, due to its high player counts and popularity. However, the number of legitimate players severely outweighs the bad apples."

Bowling's advice: only play with friends.

"If you are concerned about playing with players who are hacking, I encourage you to play exclusively with friends by utilizing the party or private match options in Modern Warfare 2 and Call of Duty 4 to avoid such players as much as possible until this issue is resolved by Sony.

"At this time, we do not have the ability to restore or adjust individual stats."

Looking to the future, Bowling promised gamers that Infinity Ward will not rely on platform holders to stop hackers from ruining its future projects.

"Let me assure you, while we are very reliant on Sony updating their firmware and security to address the core problem of this issue, we are looking at every option available to us to help any user affected.

"This only applies to legacy games such as Call of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2. In the future we plan to adjust our approach to not rely solely on platform security and reduce the ability for this to happen in our games, as has already been displayed by the work Treyarch has done on Call of Duty: Black Ops to prevent similar measures."

So no CoD games on PS3 ever had hacks before the PS3 was cracked open? Oooooo....k

Well there was a glitch
(Saved game Exploit) that soon got patched out.

then there was the lobby hack, When somone was able to inject / modify the data when he was the host of the lobby.
Not everyone could do this.

Now a hack is out, the possibilities are endless
As there is no dedicated server, God Mode, Instant reload, Infinity Ammo are all possible.
Memory hacks, Aim Bots are possible

Also D3D layers will be possible, Charms (Bright colour overlay on units)
Wall hack, Name Tags. No Sky No Water. Bla bla bla bla


I see there point from now, that a hack like this has never been out, only small exploits that are not so easy to do and popular.
Ill be surprised if you can get a decent game without this happening

theENIGMATRON wrote:Ill be surprised if you can get a decent game without this happening

And it won't just be Call of Duty that's affected.

Thoughts on the Sony vs George Hotz case from the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Co-authored by Corynne McSherry and Marcia Hofmann
For years, EFF has been warning that the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act can be used to chill speech, particularly security research, because legitimate researchers will be afraid to publish their results lest they be accused of circumventing a technological protection measure. We've also been concerned that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act could be abused to try to make alleged contract violations into crimes.


We've never been sorrier to be right. These two things are precisely what's happening in Sony v. Hotz. If you have missed this one, Sony has sued several security researchers for publishing information about security holes in Sony’s PlayStation 3. At first glance, it's hard to see why Sony is bothering — after all, the research was presented three weeks ago at the Chaos Communication Congress and promptly circulated around the world. The security flaws discovered by the researchers allow users to run Linux on their machines again — something Sony used to support but recently started trying to prevent. Paying lawyers to try to put the cat back in the bag is just throwing good money after bad. And even if they won — we'll save the legal analysis for another post — the defendants seem unlikely to be able to pay significant damages. So what's the point?


The real point, it appears, is to send a message to security researchers around the world: publish the details of our security flaws and we'll come after you with both barrels blazing. For example, Sony has asked the court to immediately impound all "circumvention devices" — which it defines to include not only the defendants' computers, but also all "instructions," i.e., their research and findings. Given that the research results Sony presumably cares about are available online, granting the order would mean that everyone except the researchers themselves would have access to their work.



Not content with the DMCA hammer, Sony is also bringing a slew of outrageous Computer Fraud and Abuse Act claims. The basic gist of Sony's argument is that the researchers accessed their own PlayStation 3 consoles in a way that violated the agreement that Sony imposes on users of its network (and supposedly enabled others to do the same). But the researchers don't seem to have used Sony's network in their research — they just used the consoles they bought with their own money. Simply put, Sony claims that it's illegal for users to access their own computers in a way that Sony doesn't like. Moreover, because the CFAA has criminal as well as civil penalties, Sony is actually saying that it's a crime for users to access their own computers in a way that Sony doesn't like.


That means Sony is sending another dangerous message: that it has rights in the computer it sells you even after you buy it, and therefore can decide whether your tinkering with that computer is legal or not. We disagree. Once you buy a computer, it's yours. It shouldn't be a crime for you to access your own computer, regardless of whether Sony or any other company likes what you're doing.



Finally, even if the researchers had used Sony's network, Sony's claim that it's a crime to violate its terms of use has been firmly rejected by courts in cases like United States v. Drew and Facebook v. Power Ventures. As those courts have recognized, companies like Sony would have tremendous coercive power if they could enforce their private, unilateral and easy-to-change agreements with threats of criminal punishment.



Sony's core arguments — that it can silence speech that reveals security flaws using the DMCA and that the mere fact of a terms of use somewhere gives a company permanent and total control over what you do with a device under pain of criminal punishment — are both sweeping and frightening, and not just for gamers and computer researchers. Frankly, it's not what we expect from any company that cares about its customers, and we bet it's not what those customers expect, either.



Source: EFF

Read more: PSGroove.com http://psgroove.com/content.php?670-Ele ... z1BcGkb84k

It's exactly this kind of thing that pisses me off about the whole affair. This article takes on a whole new level of WTF. For one, calling hackers "security researchers"? Really? I'm pretty sure they can only be called that if they've been paid by Sony to do it in the interests of making the system safer. Otherwise they're just hackers.

And again - the article is blurring the line between hardware and software. People are entitled to do what they want with the hardware, sure. But they are using the system software under license and are therefore subject to the conditions of that license.