14 DAY TRIAL // George Hotz might have brought Sony and its PlayStation 3 down to its knees, but the console isn't quite ready to draw its last breath just yet. Last week, Hotz managed to hack the PS3, as he revealed that, "I have read/write access to the entire system memory, and HV level access to the processor. In other words, I have hacked the PS3.The rest is just software. And reversing," but also that the code wasn't quite ready for public display, as there were plenty of details that still remained to be properly understood.
But in the two days that passed, it looks like he managed to wrap everything up and he's ready to make the PS3 hack available to the hungry masses. Even so, it will take considerable more time and resources before we get to see the first pirated game. Hotz was here to open the way, to pave the road for further exploits, not to hold our hands and hand us Uncharted 2 on a hacked PS3.
"In the interest of openness, I've decided to release the exploit. Hopefully, this will ignite the PS3 scene, and you will organize and figure out how to use this to do practical things, like the iPhone when jailbreaks were first released. I have a life to get back to and can't keep working on this all day and night," he said.
The piece of code that he just released "gives full memory space access and therefore ring 0 access from OtherOS," but there are a lot of things he left to the rest of the world to do. "I'd like to see the missing HV calls filled in, nice memory maps, the boot chain better documented, and progress on a 3D GPU driver. And of course, the search for a software exploit," he explained. And this is how the world begins to move, on the one hand coders trying to finish what Hotz started, and on the other one, Sony, trying to undo what Hotz set in motion. The code piece is posted on his blog.