Hasta La Gadget!

We knew Sony would be non-plussed about the PlayStation 3 jailbreak, and now we have a better idea as to the full extent of its anger. The company has filed suit (not yet, see below) asked for a restraining order against George “Geohot” Hotz, the “hacking group” fail0verflow (Hector Cantero, Sven Peter, “Bushing,” and “Segher”), and numerous John / Jane Does over the exploit and its release. To be more specific, the company cites violations of Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, various copyright infringements, and other acts of binary malfeasance. A temporary restraining order has also been sought, asking that all “circumvention tools” be taken offline and his computers and related media (i.e. anything storing said tools) be impounded. It looks like Geohot’s servers are being slammed at the moment, so we’ve gone ahead and hosted the relevant PDFs ourselves below. We’re still sifting through ourselves and will let you know what we unearth.

Update: Nilay here — let’s take a look at what’s going on. This isn’t a “lawsuit” in the traditional sense, since Sony hasn’t filed a complaint for copyright infringement or whatever against Geohot and friends. Instead, the company appears to be trying to shove the genie back in the bottle and have the jailbreak and any information about the jailbreak removed from the web by filing a temporary restraining order. That might work in the short term — Geohot’s already pulled his pages down — but history suggests that the forces of paperwork rarely triumph over the righteous anger of nerds, and that this code is out there for good. That said, we’ll see what the court says tomorrow; although we very much doubt Sony’s melodramatic proposed motion and order will be granted as written, we wouldn’t be surprised if some sort of order is eventually granted — and then from there a formal lawsuit is likely just a few days away.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Sony asks for restraining order against Geohot, fail0verflow over PS3 exploits originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 11 Jan 2011 21:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You’ve got to hand it to the Nexus S. In spite of being a souped-up smartphone, it’s still unpretentious enough to accept power from a BlackBerry microUSB cable and easy enough to hack that it’s just received not one, but two OS ports. MeeGo, in its very raw and unfinished form, has been dropped onto the phone’s internal memory without the need for any flashing, and the method has also been successfully used to install Ubuntu on the current Google flagship. There’s very little that’s actually functional about the MeeGo install at the moment, but the ball has begun rolling and there’s a resulting question that’s occupying our minds right now — will the Nexus S have a perfectly hacked copy of MeeGo before or after Nokia releases its device for the platform? Answers on a postcard.

[Thanks, Michelle and Brad]

Continue reading Nexus S receives MeeGo and Ubuntu ports, makes our nerd senses tingle (video)

Nexus S receives MeeGo and Ubuntu ports, makes our nerd senses tingle (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 11 Jan 2011 04:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Android getting ported to the iPhone may be old news by now, but Android 2.3 (a.k.a. Gingerbread) getting ported to the iPhone? Well, that’s something… new, if entirely expected. As before, it’s the iPhone 3G doing the honors, and the port is still based on the iDroid project, which means you can hang onto iOS in a dual-boot configuration so you won’t be left in the cold when the less-than-stable port decides not to cooperate. And, yes, this once again means that the iPhone has gotten the latest version of Android before many Android devices have. Head on past the break for a video.

Continue reading Android 2.3 gets ported to the iPhone 3G, breaks hearts left and right

Android 2.3 gets ported to the iPhone 3G, breaks hearts left and right originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 08 Jan 2011 13:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For Sony, the homebrew community is both enemy and friend — at the same time hackers are exploiting the living daylights out of the PlayStation 3, they’re making the experimental PSP Go moderately interesting again. Here it is running UMD disc images directly from flash storage, letting it play games like Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, formerly off-limits since it was released on a physical disc. Sure, we’ve seen it play Sega CD games before, but this looks like the real deal — working, user-installable ISO loaders for PSP Go backups and homebrew. Not to mention the skull-and-crossbones-clad elephant in the room. Perhaps these aren’t exactly Sony’s friends, on second thought.

PSP Go hacked to play UMDs, slightly increase its desirability (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 07 Jan 2011 04:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well, that didn’t take long! Just one week after hacking collective (and chr0nic misspellers) fail0verflow revealed a hack that delivered the PS3’s private cryptography key on a platter, another hacker going by the MoNiKeR “KaKaRoToKS” has taken the next step, delivering tools that will convert your plain ol’ vanilla PS3 firmware (yup, even the latest security-minded 3.55 patch) into a fancy new custom firmware. One capable of running signed and encrypted executable .PKG files … not unlike the ones that Sony itself uses to distribute PSN games. But this custom firmware isn’t all about piracy. KaKaRoToKS writes, “Since the kernel is left unmodified, this means that this custom firmware is really meant for future homebrew installation, and it will not allow piracy. I plan on keeping it that way.” We suspect that myriad other, less scrupulous hackers don’t share that sentiment. If you want an “Install Package Files” option the Game section of your XMB, PS3-hacks.com has a guide just for you. Peep a video of a custom firmware installation after the break.

Continue reading PS3 custom firmware lets you ‘Install Package Files,’ piracy not allowed

PS3 custom firmware lets you ‘Install Package Files,’ piracy not allowed originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Jan 2011 11:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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