iPhone Hacker ‘Jailbreaks’ PlayStation 3

iPhone hacker and blogger geohot is the first person to successfully hack Sony’s Cell-powered PlayStation 3 gaming console, in what is likely to “ignite the PS3 scene,” according to the hacker. Geohot is responsible for two iPhone hacks freeing device owners from iTunes’ “shackles.”

“I have read/write access to the entire system memory, and HV level access to the processor,” geohot wrote last Friday. “In other words, I have hacked the PS3,” he revealed to the world. “The rest is just software. And reversing. I have a lot of reversing ahead of me, as I now have dumps of LV0 and LV1. I've also dumped the NAND without removing it or a modchip [...] 3 years, 2 months, 11 days...thats a pretty secure system,” he added.

While the hacker still had a few nuts and bolts to deal with, he ultimately decided to release the exploit to the public, according to his most recent blog post. “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. Please document your findings on the psDevWiki,” geohot said.

Fans of Softpedia’s Mac section should recall us mentioning hacker-extraordinaire geohot in sentences containing the words “blackra1n,” and “purplera1n,” these being two jailbreak / unlock tools released by the guy. Doing similar work as the infamous iPhone Dev Team, geohot gained notoriety by releasing hack software in a record time following Apple’s successful attempts to patch older holes exploited by the aforementioned group of hackers. Currently at version 3.1.2, the iPhone OS is jailbreakable / unlockable by a variety of tools, including geohot’s.

In October, 2009, an update on the iPhone Dev Team’s blog revealed that users enjoying the benefits of a jailbroken / unlocked iPhone should not attempt to update to OS 3.1.2 (currently the newest version of the operating system). The team warned that its own PwnageTool and redsn0w hacks were not yet compatible with 3.1.2, with no estimated release time for compatible tools.

The Dev Team update then soon mentioned the Windows-only jailbreak tool from geohot – blackra1n, which was to become available for Mac users too, in a little while. Hacker geohot had previously released a jailbreak / unlock tool ahead of the iPhone Dev Team. The application, Purplera1n, was capable of jailbreaking and unlocking the iPhone 3GS under iPhone OS 3.1.