
Developer claims 'PS4 officially jailbroken' - thebeardisred
http://www.networkworld.com/article/3014714/security/developer-claims-ps4-officially-jailbroken.html
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muraiki
Given that this uses a FreeBSD kernel vulnerability, what is the impact of
this upon general FreeBSD usage? It sounds like an arbitrary process can read
and write to the memory of another process. I'm sorry if this is a dumb
question, but this is something I'm not really familiar with!

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muraiki
From talking with people on #freebsd on freenode, it sounds like freebsd
should be unaffected. The system calls involved are Sony-specific additions to
the kernel.

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imglorp
Please ELI5 why consoles need to be locked?

Say I'm Sony. I could have a locked platform, sign up some content shops to
make a very small number of titles, and sell a few consoles. Or I could make
an unlocked platform, reap all the benefits of the locked one, _plus_
encourage a large community of people making all sorts of new things for it,
sharing, and spurring many more console sales.

So why lock when you could instead have an ecology?

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pjmlp
Because around 1983 the amount of crap was so much that it drove the entire
videogame industry to a crash, as no one knew any longer which games were
worth buying.

Nintendo then introduced the concept of locked down consoles as a way to
control game quality.

[http://www.ign.com/articles/2011/09/21/ten-facts-about-
the-g...](http://www.ign.com/articles/2011/09/21/ten-facts-about-the-great-
video-game-crash-of-83)

~~~
Zikes
If Sony cared about game quality they would never have allowed Knack to
happen.

More likely consoles are locked down because:

1\. Exploits may allow cheats in games, most worrying for multiplayer titles.

2\. Exploits may allow unfair unlocking of achievements, which add to overall
"gamer rank" systems.

3\. Locking down the ecosystem ensures you pay the console tax to get your
game on the system.

4\. Locking down the ecosystem prevents game piracy, which is one of the very
few advantages consoles have over PCs.

Edit: A surprising number of downvotes for claiming console makers care more
about money than they do about their customers. Need I remind you that one of
the only titles available for the PS4 on launch was a $50 port of Angry Birds?

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pjc50
The anti-cheating system is really the one aspect of a locked platform that
benefits consumers by ensuring that people you play against are _also_ locked
down.

Valve's anti-cheat seems to be merely OK and may have a false positive
problem.

~~~
Zikes
It's a fine line on PC. There was some recent controversy over a relatively
obscure title called "osu!" which did things like take screenshots, upload
file contents, and upload a list of running processes, which many gamers were
fairly upset about. Since a PC can do so much more than a console, there are
privacy and security implications that anti-cheat systems have to take into
consideration.

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yifanlu
This uses an known (and patched) FreeBSD vulnerability (BadIRet). It only
works on PS4 <= 1.76 (pretty old now) and is not publicly available (CTurt
does not have permission to release it). I think this whole article is just an
advertisement for this "green Monday" sale tacked in on the last paragraph.

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Chol
This could be interpreted as an announcement for 32C3
[https://twitter.com/fail0verflow/status/677033828917993472](https://twitter.com/fail0verflow/status/677033828917993472)

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Aissen
I'm guessing it doesn't mean the console is "cracked" yet since you'd need to
attack the hypervisor and boot chain-of-trust to do that.

