The aMSN team donates to the EFF

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Thanks to the ads that we have displayed on the aMSN website, the aMSN Team was able to gain a bit of money and we decided to donate part of that revenue to the EFF.

The EFF is a donation-funded nonprofit organization that defends our digital rights, helps promote net neutrality and raises questions about our privacy and our rights as consumers of the Internet. It fights for us in court and helps protect the digital world from big corporations who do not care about their consumers. The EFF also has a “Coder’s Rights project”  that defend developers like us.

The aMSN Team has  just donated 2500$ to the EFF and we are glad to help them in their fight. We encourage everyone to help this cause, since we are all benefiting from their hard work and maybe it’s time for us, as Internet consumers, to give back to them.

We wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

The aMSN Team.

Second Humble Indie Bundle + Braid Linux release!

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Hi all,

After the huge success of the Humble Indie Bundle from last May, which I absolutely loved, the group of Indie developers decided to release a second Humble Indie Bundle with five other games, one of which is Braid, my favorite Independent game.

I suggest everyone goes over to http://humblebundle.com and buys those games, you name your price and you get five great games with no DRM and with Linux, Mac and Windows binaries available for you to install on any and all of your PCs. you can also decide how to share that money you just spent, how much you want to send to the developers, or to the EFF or Child’s Play charities. Don’t waste any time and go show your appreciation of good games and your support to the open spirit of writing multiplatofrm, non-DRM games. Maybe this time again, like in the first bundle, the developers will decide to release their games to an open source license (I wish:)).

In the last bundle, I was a bit sad that Braid wasn’t included, but it was because it wasn’t available for Linux yet. I had previously discussed with Jonathan Blow (the author of Braid) about Linux support and he said that it would eventually be available, and he indeed delivered! Although there has been no news about this and no release of Braid for Linux so far, the Humble Indie Bundle also marks the release of the Linux version of Braid. Get the bundle and you will be able to download a native version of Braid for Linux (although it’s been reported that the Windows version worked under Wine).

I’ve tried running Braid on my  Linux system and had the horrible issue of the ‘missing GL extension’ that so many people are having. I checked the game’s bugzilla on icculus and found the related bug report in which Scott Mansell found the solution : The missing extension is “GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc” which is disabled on the open source drivers because it is covered by a patent and requires a licence.
If you live in a country where the patent doesn’t apply, you can enable it using driconf. Simply install it (“sudo apt-get install driconf” or “sudo yum install driconf”) then run ‘driconf’ and enable the S3TC extension in the “Image quality” tab of driconf.

Thank you Scott Mansell! 🙂

I hope this helps a few of you, enjoy!

KaKaRoTo

GStreamer: GstFilters to be (hopefully) merged into gst-plugins-base

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Today is the day of the Gstreamer Conference 2010 in Cambridge. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend, but I thought I’d share a little something about the things I’ve done on GStreamer, as part of my work for Collabora.

If you remember my last post about Fsu, I talked about how you could use the FsuFilterManager and FsuFilter  classes to create some really cool GStreamer applications that can modify the pipeline dynamically, using a minimum amount of code and a very easy to use API. There was a lot of interest to this during last GUADEC and I decided to move the code from Farsight into Gstreamer itself. The FsuFilter* objects are independent of Farsight, and can be useful to a lot of people, so there was no reason to keep them there.

I have ported the code from Farsight into gst-plugins-base and renamed the FsuFilter* classes into GstFilter* and made it into a libgstfilters library. I opened a bug report on Gnome’s bugzilla asking for my branch to be merged into gst-plugins-base. I would appreciate it if everyone interested in this could have a look, review the code if possible, mainly review the API and try to use it. I’d like to make sure that the API is stable, feature complete and easy to use for everyone, so if you have any complaints about it, feel free to comment on the bugzilla so I can fix it and hopefully get cleaner/better code merged upstream soon!

You can find the built gtk-doc of the GstFilters library here.

Update: To clear any possible misunderstandings, the GstFilters library hasn’t been accepted yet into gst-plugins-base. So far, I’ve only opened a bug report and hopefully, after it gets reviewed, it might get accepted into -base (or not). I’d just like to get people to comment on the API and help me improve it.

Thanks.

PS3: Why I don’t like the Hermes payload

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First things first, the title says “why I don’t like the hermes Payload” so this has nothing to do with Hermes himself. I don’t know him, I never spoke to him, so I don’t know what kind of person he is and so I have no opinion on him personally. Now, I want to make some things clear, I’ve seen a lot of people criticize me for ‘bashing Hermes’, and many people seem to think that I’m trying to say “I’m better than him” or something. Also, it looks like I created some confusion with my comments from my previous blog post. So I want to apologize and make sure there is no confusion anymore : When I said that the hermes payload is ‘dangerous’, people misunderstood me.. no it is not specifically dangerous for your PS3, it won’t brick it or anything, the only ‘danger’ there is, is that it could (in some situations) crash… then you’d need to reboot, that’s it.. so don’t freak out about his work being harmful or anything, because as far as I know, it’s not! Some people also told me “give credit where its due”, and I want to do it, I’ve always given credit to people, every time I achieved something, I gave credit to those who helped me achieve it. I’m not looking for fame here (if I did, I would have announced PL3’s release 3 weeks ago when I created it) I’m just having some fun in my free time doing something that I like. Hermes did contribute some nice things, and I appreciate what he did, mainly he figured out how to fix the controller issues with some games, that was something very difficult to fix and I’m surprised at how fast he came up with a solution and it was a smart solution and all I can say is “good job”. The other stuff he did in his payload, I don’t like that much, and that’s what I want to cover in this post.. I may have been ‘harsh’, but I don’t see the point in trying to be diplomatic, I’m a programmer, not a politician. I don’t like his code, and I speak my mind, I’m being honest, and I’m not trying to criticize him without any reason, as far as I know, I’ve stayed respectful and that’s all that matters to me. To those who don’t want to know about all the technical details, let me ‘conclude’ here by saying that if the hermes payload works for you, then good, use it, I’m not telling people to stop using it, I’m not saying that PL3 works better either, maybe his payload works better in some situations, maybe not, but overall, the user’s choice should always be “whatever works for you”. The PL3 initiative is about having a standard repository for payloads, and having a common code base for everyone to work on, so in the future, PL3 might evolve faster and have more features, or maybe it won’t, the thing to note is that it’s better for payload developers to base their work off PL3. But again, this is meaningless for most users, apart from maybe clearing up the confusion about all these payloads and nobody knows which one to use. Also, I talked about PL3, which is a common repository for contributors to work on, people seem to have nicknamed it “kakaroto’s payload” or “kakaroto’s pl3”, but I never said it was my payload, PL3 is PL3, it’s not all my work, and if you look at the commit log, you will see that I’m not the only contributor to it. PL3 itself integrates patches and solutions provided by Hermes, Waninkoko and Mathieulh, I improved some of their patches to make sure it works better for non-3.41 firmwares, but it’s still credited to be their work. PL3 is not my payload, PL3 is a payload repository for everyone. Also, PL3 as a project is a repository containing multiple payloads (default one, development one, dump_lv2, dump_elfs, etc..). PL3 is not perfect, nothing in the world is perfect, so it might have bugs, it might not work for some people, who knows what might happen. But I never said that it was perfect, so people should stop thinking that I said that. It’s written more cleanly, it’s better in terms of the infrastructure behind it, but that’s the only thing I can vouch for. Also for those complaining about me adding a donate button to the blog post, I don’t see how that’s relevant, I’m not begging people for money (and I haven’t received any donations in the last ~3 weeks just so you know). If you don’t want to donate, then don’t, no reason to bitch about it. I’ve put the button there so that people who appreciate the work and want to donate something have a way of doing it. I asked for donations before because I needed to buy a PS3 for development, I already raised enough money to buy it, so I don’t need any more donations, so I’m not asking people for donation money anymore, as simple as that. Anyways, here are the more detailed/technical explanations on the reasons why I don’t like his payload : First, the code is not clean, it’s unmaintainable. The fact that he gives his source code in .rar files instead of a git fork is the biggest issue I have with it. And yes, that does not matter for users, it only matters for developers.  The problem with his method of delivery is that you have no way of knowing what he based his code off, so it’s hard to figure out what he changed.. also, when you find out his base, and do a diff, you get a huge diff for everything he did, all in one shot, and then you have to reverse engineer it to understand what he patched. That’s complicated and annoying for developers! For those who follow my twitter, you can see how many commits I do, I always like having “small commits” because each commit becomes independent, self explanatory and easy to review. It also makes things easier to integrate, if you want a specific thing, you just merge/cherry-pick that single commit, instead of copy/pasting code, and editing it to remove the clutter. The  other reason I like git is that if he used it and I merge a commit from him, then the code stays credited to his name in the commit log, it allows me to have his code without ‘taking ownership’ of his work, it allows everyone to be credited for what they did, and I think it’s the first thing to have for an open source and community project. The reason why I said his code could crash is because his payload got too big and couldn’t fit anymore in the allocated memory we have in the kernel (1296 bytes), so he decided to just move the code to a random position (0x7fff000 I think). This means that his payload will work as long as no application, game or kernel allocates memory which ‘randomly’ ends up in that area.. if it does, then the payload would get overwritten and the kernel will crash. The proper way of doing it (PL3 does that) is to allocate memory during the initialization of the payload, copy the functions we want in that memory that we own, and write those functions to be position independent so they would work no matter where they are placed in RAM. Another reason is the way his syscall8 works, I tried to read his assembly and reverse engineer it, and I seriously was lost and couldn’t understand what was happening.. there are no comments (you’ll notice that my payload has a comment on almost every instruction), so how can I integrate his syscall if i don’t even know what it does… if at least it was on git, I could see the commit messages and understand what each chunk of code did, but he doesn’t use git, so… The way he fixed the controller issue was also not very good, he patched two offsets to jump to a function that decides on some kind of enum on what response to return and you controlled that with his own system call 8.. why do something like that? it makes the fix dependent on people using this new syscall, and it’s useless when you can just patch it directly to return the right value. I also didn’t like the fact that his code became a mess that is 3.41 independent, and it would have taken a huge amount of work just to try to make it work again on 3.15. I already spent time cleaning up the payloads and making them work for older firmwares, so why fork and write code that doesn’t integrate that, it just makes collaboration harder. There’s also the whole syscall 35 versus 36 issue, but that has nothing to do with his payload since I added sc35 after he released his payload. It’s not about his payload being bad because it doesn’t support it, it’s simply about PL3 having a ‘superior’ (if I may say so) system call. What it means for users? nothing at the moment, maybe it will be used for doing fancier stuff later on, maybe you can map a game to your bluray and a different game to /app_home, that could be useful for users, but for now, it’s simply more flexible and cleaner code. There are many other small things that I didn’t like, but it mostly just summarizes to “the code is not clean and it’s unmaintainable” and “he doesn’t use git”. Like I said, if you don’t care about that, then I see no reason for you not to use his payload. It doesn’t mean either that he’s not skilled, it simply means that he may lack experience in code sharing and experience in open source. But that doesn’t make his work any less valuable. I hope this clears things up a bit. I criticized his work, said what I thought of it and people over reacted, I wanted to make sure people didn’t  misunderstand me, and didn’t think I don’t respect Hermes for what he’s done already. Everything else is just drama and people trying to get attention. If this post stirs up even more trouble, then so be it, I don’t think I have much more to say. I said what I think, people should take it or leave it. I do not however tolerate people insulting me for no reason at all. So please, criticize me all you want, just stay respectful. Thank you, KaKaRoTo

PS3: The payload mess…

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Hi all,

I see a lot of people asking me some questions and I notice a lot of ignorance in the net about the different payload and the latest PL3 payload. So I want to make things clear..
First of all, people should stop talking/requesting/using the hermes v3 payload, I don’t like his work, and the payload is not good, it might crash the system in some cases, it’s not written properly, and hermes doesn’t even seem to understand how git works.
Also, PL3 already includes (for some time now) all the good stuff from hermes, it already supports installing game updates, or running games without a disc, anything else that Hermes added is useless and dangerous could crash in some situations (requiring a reboot).

Some might have seen my tweets about my new payload being released, and many are asking me what is the difference between my payload and what is already available.
PL3 doesn’t support syscall 36 anymore, for multiple reasons, first, it was bad code, it was mapping a path to a single hardcoded value (/dev_bdvd or /app_home or /dev_flash or whatever is hardcoded in the payload) which means that, since we (the PSGroove and PSFreedom developers) don’t want to support running backups, all the official payloads weren’t working with the backup manager without being patched first. The syscall 35 I added in my payload is more generic though, it is the proper way of doing things. You can map any path to another other new path, the prototype looks like this :

  syscall_35 (char *old_path, char *new_path);

This means that the payload doesn’t need to have a hardcoded /dev_bdvd path in it, or have extra code for mapping /app_home to something else.. or having syscall 36 change both /dev_bdvd and /app_home breaking homebrew when using a discless mode with a backup manager. You also don’t need a special payload to run the ‘firmware usb loader’.. It all just works because the choice of the path mapping is given to the homebrew applications themselves. This means that the backup managers will just map /dev_bdvd to what they want and they will work by default on my payload, there will be no need for a patched version of the payload to make them work.
This however means that the backup managers that depend on syscall 36 will stop working. For now Gaia Manager is the only backup manager available that is compatible with my payload. But I’m sure more will be ported to use syscall 35.
People need to understand that this new syscall 35 has to become the new standard, this is what all the payloads should use, nothing else, and this is what everyone should start using, not the old, crappy, backup-manager specific, PSJailbreak written, syscall 36.

We need to have some form of standardization for all these payloads, I’m tired of seeing about 100 different payloads floating on the internet, it doesn’t make sense. I always believed in a single payload that works for everyone, and that’s why I created PL3, that’s why it’s a project independent of PSFreedom (and PSGroove has been ported to it) and that’s where all the efforts should go. Also, by using PL3, you automatically gain support, and all the same features, for whatever previous firmwares PL3 already supports (3.01, 3.10, 3.15 and 3.41).

I have just recently seen this new payload that everyone is so happy about that includes “all the good things from 3 worlds”, the one created by Rancid, which includes the stuff from hermes, waninkoko and Mathieulh… and I was shocked to see how much people were happy about this.. people don’t really seem to understand that this wasn’t necessary at all? PL3 has had all those patches for a while now, so why did Rancid even bother making this payload that includes the patches from hermes, waninkoko and Mathieulh? Why would you spend your time doing something that already is available!

This blog post is meant to stop all this ignorance and let people know that they don’t need to look for a special payload, just use PL3 and you’ll get everything you need. It is also meant to explain to everyone what is different about my payload.

On a side, I have received a P3Hub device, kindly donated to me by the people from r4king.com, and I have now tried PSGroove for the first time! I’ve also created a fork of jevinskie’s port of PSGroove which is now improved and updated to support the latest PL3 version. This means that the PL3 payload is available for everyone, those using PSFreedom as well as those using PSGroove, so there is no excuse now on not using it or relying on badly written payloads developed by people who barely know how to code (yes, using winrar instead of git is a good indication of that).

Update: I forgot to rant about peek&poke!!! So let’s do it now… well, the default payload in PL3 has peek and poke disabled, and for a simple reason : Nobody needs them! and more importantly they are misued! I’ve look at the code of the different backup managers, and it looks like all of them use poke to patch the memory to ‘fix something’ because they think that it’s their job to do it.. no it’s not! If you have a working patch, then submit it to PL3 and if people complain, tell them “use the proper payload”, don’t try to take advantage of peek&poke to go and modify the kernel’s instructions! The reason is simple.. you are a homebrew app that does X, then do X, leave the kernel patching to the payloads! Just as PL3 doesn’t map /dev_bdvd to /dev_usb000/I.Like.This.Game/ and locks it out! Also, I’m on firmware 3.15, so when you decide to poke and patch the kernel with a hardcoded offset, you’re just screwing up my kernel because the offset is firmware dependent! it’s not the same depending on the firmware you use, and I don’t want you playing with it. So.. peek&poke are really not useful to anybody, they are not even available on a normal linux pc, so why would you want them in your default payload, right?! The only people who should use a payload with those syscalls enabled are real developers, people who want to analyze and patch the kernel on the fly while they are doing some development of, maybe, a kernel driver! That’s it. Anyways, that’s enough ranting from me for today!

P.s: In my branch of PSGroove, I wrote a script that build the .hex file for every supported device (from the README) for every supported firmware. You can find all the hex files here : PSGroove+PL3 hex files

Update: Thanks to evilsperm, I’ve updated the archive with hex files for these devices : Blackcat, Xplain, Olimex, UsbTinyMkII, Bentio and OpenKubus.
Update 2: Some people reported crashes with my payload when running backups with installed updates. I figured out the cause and fixed it now in git. The hex files above have also been updated

Thanks for reading.
KaKaRoTo

PSFreedom now supports firmware 3.01, 3.10 and 3.15

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Hi,

I’ve got some great news for those of you who have not updated your PS3 firmware! I have just succeeded in adding Firmware 3.01 support into PSFreedom. I’ve pushed the latest code to github and you can now download the source and compile PSFreedom for 3.01.
For now, you will need to edit config.h and change the FIRMWARE_3_41 into FIRMWARE_3_01, then recompile. However, I will soon add support for dynamically choosing the target firmware version by simply doing a :
echo 3.01 > /proc/psfreedom/fw_version

I will soon add support for firmware 3.10 and 3.15, so be patient, and you will be rewarded. I would like to thank Klutsh as well as Philippe Hug who helped me achieve this port to 3.01.
The new payload changes are available in the PL3 github and any project/port that is also using PL3 should automatically gain support for the 3.01 firmware.
You will also be able to enjoy some new ‘tools’ in PL3 that will allow you to dump the LV2 kernel as well as the decrypted ELF files of the XMB and other configuration files it uses. The ethernet dumping is also now compatible with PS3 Slim models.

Update:
Philhug and I have worked together recently to make PL3 compatible with 3.15, and it is now done, working and ready for you to use. I have just pushed the latest changes to github, so just update both PSFreedom and PL3, and define FIRMWARE_3_15 in PSFreedom’s config.h and recompile. You will then be able to enjoy your unrestricted PS3 on 3.15 firmwares. Enjoy!

Update 2:
I have just added support for firmware 3.10 to PL3. You can get it by upgrading to the latest git version of PL3. There are however some changes in there that might break PSFreedom, so wait until I update PSFreedom tomorrow to be compatible with the latest PL3 changes!
I have also added a HOWTO file that explains the steps required to port PSFreedom to an exploitable firmware. Enjoy

I would like to thank, again, those who have donated. For the others, you can still donate, if you appreciate the work I’ve done.

Enjoy!
KaKaRoTo

PS3: Introducing PL3 and 3.01 firmware news

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Hi,

I’ll announce two things, first, let’s talk about PL3.. PL3 is a new project I started in order to have a common repository of payloads that can be used by any ‘jailbreak’  implementation. I got tired of copying payloads from PSGroove, and I had some nice changes in mine that I thought the PSGroove project could benefit from, so I thought I’d create a single repository that both projects, PSFreedom and PSGroove (or any other similar projects) could use.

You can find it in github, so don’t hesitate to submodule it and use it.

Second important news… I’ve bought a new PS3 just for homebrew. Thanks to all who donated money so I can buy it (I didn’t get enough donations to pay for it, but enough to help me). I bought this PS3 used and it came with firmware 3.01! This is good and bad news : I can’t use PSFreedom to jailbreak it, so i’ve put on hold any improvements for it, however, it will allow me to actually port PSFreedom to older firmwares! My plan is to get the jailbreak working on 3.01, then move on to 3.10 and 3.15 (depending on how hard it is, i might skip 3.10).

Another good news is that after 4 days of  work, I was finally able to dump the LV2 memory from the 3.01 firmware, and now all that remains is to find the right offsets to patch, and port PSFreedom to 3.01, so all those who are still using this firmware version, you will soon be able to jailbreak it! Once I’m done with that, I’ll try to do the same with the 3.10/3.15 firmware versions!

To dump LV2, I used a trick and algorithms found by marcan42, so big thanks goes to him, as well as many other people who helped me out, RichDevX and Aaron in particular. I used RichDevX’s idea of ignoring the JIG and bruteforcing the address in which the port1 descriptor gets stored until I get a hit, then use that payload to dump lv2, then find the right JIG offset for that particular firmware from the dump. Marcan’s trick was to send the data through the ethernet cable by using LV1 only hypercalls, and it worked!

Now the latest git version of PL3 has a new ‘dump_lv2’ payload which you can use, it is firmware independent, and only uses LV1 hypercalls, so it should just work… It will dump all the lv2 memory through ethernet, so fire up wireshark, save the dump to a .pcap file, and use the tool in PL3/tools to extract the memory dump from the .pcap file.

In other news, I will soon upload to Ps3utils an .idc script that will search and find the syscall table, and correctly resolve all of its functions and name them properly.. maybe even have it automatically find all functions of a dump in order to save time creating procs in IDA. I’ll let you know once I’m done with it.

KaKaRoTo

PS3: Registry viewer and PDB generator

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Hi all,

Here’s a quick post to share these small tools I wrote.

First, there’s  a .pdb file generator, it’s useful to install demos, I wrote this 6 days ago, but didn’t want to release it, I didn’t want people to use it to pirate PSN games, but it turns out it only works for demos… Even if it installs full retail games, they won’t run because you still need a license to run them. Also, two other people released similar tools (but much better, with more customization, good UIs, etc..) so I don’t need to keep this to myself anymore!

Second is a registry viewer! The /dev_flash2/etc/xRegistry.sys file contains a lot of interesting stuff, mostly your user settings, but it also contains some settings that you cannot change through the XMB (like QAMode or debugSoftwareUpdate, etc..). The file format is quite weird, SKFU attempted to reverse engineer it but didn’t really succeed, but thanks to Matsy who figured out how to link the keys with their values, I was able to understand the file format (most of it anyways) and write this app.  It’s just a crappy tcl/tk script that I wrote real quick! I’m really bad at UIs so I thought I’d put a quick and dirty tcl/tk script to build the UI for it.. it’s not much, it doesn’t allow you to change values, so don’t pay it much attention. Matsy is working on building a QT application to allow you to view and edit the registry values, so be patient, in the meantime, you can use this simple viewer to check out the contents of the file!

You can grab these tools (and possibly other stuff I might write in the future) from my new git repository at : http://github.com/kakaroto/ps3utils. They are both released under the GPL license.

On a side note, I just upgraded to firmware 3.42, so I’ll be taking a bit less active from the ps3 hacking scene for a little while, until I get enough money to buy a new (used actually) PS3. I also want to thank everyone who donated so far, so… thank you 🙂

KaKaRoTo

PSFreedom news, homebrew and donations

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Hi all,

I suppose many people are now following my blog and you’re all eager to learn more about the latest PSFreedom news!

Important things first : Please stop asking me if PSFreedom will work on your phone, NO it will not work on any Symbian phones and it won’t work on iPhones (see next paragraph though). Stop asking and just accept that and buy yourself a Teensy board or an AT90USB microcontroller or similar and install PSGroove on it, then you’ll have your own dedicated dongle.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get back to business! I told you last time that NTAuthority almost had the iPhoneLinux port working, well the good news is that it does indeed work and it’s been released! Please read the instructions to get it installed from the wiki. Note however that it only works on iPod Touch 1G, iPhone 2G and iPhone 3G, it will not work on iPhone 3GS or 4G or any other iPod… so please don’t even ask about it!!!!

In similar news, we’ve added support for many new Android devices, the list almost reaches 40 models, and about 25 unique devices are now PSFreedom compatible! Again, you can see the whole list of supported devices in the wiki. I just want to make one thing clear : I made PSFreedom for the N800/N810/N900 phones, but I didn’t port it to android. Although I helped some developers port PSFreedom to new USB controllers, I didn’t port or compile any build of PSFreedom for any Android device, so your thanks should go to those responsible for doing it. This is a community effort and those from the community who helped this project should receive our thanks!

Now, what you’ve been waiting for, what’s new in the  PS3 scene, well, many things. First, I’ve recently joined the group of Mathieulh and I’ve been working with them to figure out how the kernel and payload works! I’ve also recently created a new branch in git for writing custom assembly for the payloads instead of using the hardcoded binary blob from PSJailbreak. I’ve cleaned up the payload used by PSJailbreak as well as documented it so others can read it and better understand how it works. The reverse engineering and information has been provided by the group of Mathieulh as well as some of my own reverse engineering work. You can find the ASM payload file here. AerialX from the PSGroove team is also working on cool payloads so you should check out his git repository too!

Also, Matsy and I have reverse engineered the xRegistry.sys file format and are now able to modify the XMB registry in order to enable new features (QA mode, debug options, etc..), and we’ll be working in the next few days on making a homebrew application that would allow you to change these settings safely.

Now for the sad news.. I will be forced to update my PS3 system very soon, for multiple reasons.. First, I’m getting the PS Move tomorrow and I really want to buy Tumble (PSN game) which looks like an awesome game and I can’t do that if I don’t upgrade my PS3 since PSN is locked for firmware 3.41. I also am a PSN+ subscriber and not being able to connect to PSN and enjoy the content I paid for is absurd and it feels like it’s wasting those 50$ I paid for PSN+. Finally, I had to reformat (and restore from backup, Thank God) my PS3 hardrive yesterday because as I was testing the payloads, I kept crashing the PS3 and I kept shutting it down the hard way which seemed to have corrupted my hard drive. After I restored my backup, all my content is there, but when I try to launch a game it says “To access this content, you must active this system. Go to ‘Playstation Network->Account Management’ to activate this system”, which I cannot do without connecting to PSN. This basically means that the 50+ games that I have bought on PSN are now inaccessible to me. So for all these reasons, I have chosen to update my PS3 to the latest firmware version.

As you all know by now, Sony has fixed the vulnerability we’re using to run homebrew in the latest firmware update, which means that once I update, I won’t be able to use PSFreedom or run homebrew applications anymore. This means that I won’t be able to work anymore on homebrew and custom payloads.. I could try to write something but I won’t be able to use it or test it, so the motivation will not be the same. For that, I’m asking you, those of you who used and enjoyed PSFreedom and are grateful for it or those who would like to see more of my work in the future, that you please donate a little something. Your donation will be used in order to buy a new PS3 that will be used only for homebrew and development. Note that I am not requesting you to donate, you have no obligations to do so and I’m not promising you anything either in exchange for a donation. Also note that, as stated earlier, I do not make ports of PSFreedom to new devices/phones, so don’t hope or expect me to make it work for your phone because you donated something. So only donate to me if you are grateful for everything I’ve done so far and you want to show your appreciation. If you decide to donate to me, then thank you very much! Your donations are very much appreciated and they might allow me to release something cool and useful to the PS3 homebrew scene in the future (but I can’t guarantee anything to anyone of course).

So if you want to donate some money, just click on the Donate button below! If you want to donate some hardware (a PS3 maybe, or a Teensy board or anything), contact me and let me know.

Thank you all for your support!
KaKaRoTo

PSFreedom 1.0 and lots of news!

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Hi all,

I’ve wanted to post about PSFreedom for the last 4 days now but everytime there’s something that prevents me from doing so.. there is so much happening that it’s hard to keep up and I’ve been overwhelmed by the reaction!

PSFreedom has seen a tremendous success, it’s been featured on multiple news sites  including Engadget, we’ve had a huge number of ‘fans’ (more like leechers:p) popping up on the newly created IRC channel (#PSFreedom @ irc.freenode.net). Someone (devz3ro) donated a domain and web hosting for our new http://psfreedom.com/wiki website. The number of people who have worked hard to create a beautiful and well organized wiki to keep track of all the ports. The number of  people who have tried (and many succeeded) to port PSFreedom to so many different devices and those who sent me pull requests on github as well as those who simply read my code and reviewed it and decided to comment on my commits so I can improve the code.

Anyways, it has been a tremendous success, real community work and I want to thank personally everyone involved, everyone who helped, whether it be with a small or a big contribution to the project.

Now about the news, I have quite a few… first, a lot of people are asking me how to get this working on the N800 and N810! Well, it’s been working for a few days now, but the mass storage driver was conflicting and made the controller unstable. However, today, drizztbsd contributed a patch that fixes this issue (by killing hald-addon-usb) without modifying any file from your system, so enabling the exploit on the N800, N810 and N900 is all a matter of running the ./psfreedom-enable-maemo.sh script! There is also an easy to use graphical application that should be released today by MohammadAG and a special thank you to Bash who also contributed the PSFreedom logo.

I have also received a ton of requests from people to port this to the iPhone and/or one of their Symbian devices… my answer to that is : RTFM!! In other words, no it is simply *impossible*. It can only be ported to other Linux devices. However, we are close to having it work with IphoneLinux (actually, I just got confirmation a few seconds ago that it’s finally working) as NTAuthority spent countless hours porting it and fixing the controller’s incomplete driver in order to make this work. Once his port is finished, and stable, he will make it available to everyone, so stay tuned and follow the Device compatibility list on the wiki!

Other good news, PSFreedom has been ported to a huge amount of devices already, and the list keeps growing every day! We currently support and have working binaries for not only the N800/N810/N900 but also the Palm Pre, Archos 5 (Generation 6), Archos 5 IMT (Generation 7), as well as, thanks to the work of DocMon in porting PSFreedom to the MSM72K controller, The HTC Desire (Bravo), Nexus One, HTC Dream (G1), HTC Sapphire (HTC Magic 32A/32B), HTC HD2 (running Android), HTC Wildfire and I’ve received confirmation a few minutes ago that it’s been successfully ported to the HTC Evo as well as HTC Diamond. Also, waninkoko recently ported PSFreedom to work on the Dingoo open game console.

For the future, you can expect a lot more devices to be supported, like the iPhone/iPod (Through iPhoneLinux only) as well as the Gp2x Wiz game console, and the huge list of compatible devices available in our wiki. Also note that running the PSFreedom on an Android device isn’t as easy as it is on the N900, you need to flash some nandroid thing, then flash a custom kernel (because Android’s kernel sucks) then run PSFreedom in that environment, then run Nandroid again to restore your system… It is quite complicated but many people are working on making it much simpler to do, the famous AmonRA contacted me and said he started working on building a PSFreedom-compatible recovery image with a menu item to enable/disable the PSFreedom functionality.

There is one last  important bit of news I want to share with you : PSFreedom 1.0 has been released (more like tagged) and it adds support for many devices, the Makefile allows you to build for a specific platform by specifying it as a target, ‘make N900’ or ‘make Desire’ or ‘make Dingoo’ will build it for your needs with the right configuration. Also more importantly, this version will allow you to customize which payload or shellcode you want to send to your PS3 during the exploit. Many people have requested a version that allows you to play backups, while the original release of PSFreedom didn’t allow that, it quickly got patched to allow the backup manager to work. The new release of the PSGroove yesterday also adds 2 system calls that allows user space application to modify the GameOS kernel, and that meant a new payload is available for developers. This version of PSFreedom provides all these payloads and you can choose which one to set by simply copying it to /proc/psfreedom/payload once the module has been loaded. The same also applies to the shellcode.

That’s it for now, there are a ton of other news I’d like to share, but this post is long enough and I’d like to keep some surprises for next time!

Thanks to all for your support!

KaKaRoTo