PS3 hacked... well, exploited

Well it's not taken long for someone to figure out a way around the various locks on the PS3 and this 'exploitation' could be the way forward for hackers wanting to run homebrew on the PS3. It's all explained over on www.ps3hax.net but the gist of this exploit is to bypass the age-rating system built into the PS3... do that and you're going in under the security lock-downs. If you can do that then you can, in theory, get a toe-hold into running homebrew apps on your PS3. It's all to do with the way the PS3 handles a TIFF image. You slap the TIFF image onto some form of memory card or USB stick and open it up. The PS3 has a minor kitten over it and leaves the PS3 controls and XMB still functional... which lets you launch a game. The thing is, though the game will not launch properly, it will allow a delay for a disk swap. After whipping out that game disk and chucking in another, you pull the memory device with the TIFF and then the new game will boot. Ok, so nothing immense there except that this works on titles which should be locked by the PS3's age rating system... so that's one level of security bypassed. Expect a patch from Sony to sort this out pretty soon.