14 DAY TRIAL // Despite Sony's legal threats, the PS3 hacking community is as active as ever, their latest accomplishment being a method of enabling a special flag that allows unsigned apps and unlicensed content to run on the console.
Rumors of a powerful "QA flag" has been floating around the community since a month ago when a well known PS3 hacker known as Mathieulh posted a video on YouTube showing hidden menus and options on his console.
The video was later deleted, but since the cat was already out of the bag other hackers began working to discover the secret button combination that makes this possible.
And a hacker going by the online handle of squarepusher2 succeeded. He revealed that the hidden combo is L2 + L1 + R1 + R2 + L3 + D-pad Down and said it works on the official 3.55 firmware.
However, knowing the button combo is not enough to unlock the powerful feature which, judging by the name, is probably meant for quality assurance engineers.
Squarepusher2 explained that "there are still some pieces of the puzzle missing" and said "the ‘community’ needs to figure these out."
"The button combo is in the bag – don't worry about it anymore, don’t go fruitlessly reversing anymore looking for a possible sign of life of this ‘button combo’ – you’ve got it. Now figure out the rest," the hacker noted, according to JailbreakScene.
Of course, someone did and revealed that one also needs to "change byte 48 of the token seed to 0×02, hash it, encrypt it, write it to eeprom and flag [themselves]."
Then a developer known as Slynk released an application that does it automatically and even published a guide on how to use it. The task requires Linux to be installed in OtherOS++ and is still not intended for the average user, but at least it's not incredibly complex anymore.
It will interesting to see how Sony will respond to this. Last time when a PS3 hack was released it decided to take an aggressive stance and sue those responsbile. This made it a target for hackers and resulted in a large number of security breaches across its web properties. Its stock price dropping by over 20% as a result.