Thursday, January 1, 2009

'Home' system for the Playstation has been hacked

The new virtual world for the Playstation 3, ‘Home’ has been hacked by commited computer terrorists. Developers have found an intricate way to access the Playstation software in order to allow the to customise their own Playstation home experience beyond the options provided by Sony and their development team.


The Playstation ‘Home’ experience was launched on December 11th and is a completely virtual world that provides Playstation users with a three dimensional social gaming space to interact and communicate with other online players at the same time. You can do anything from go to the movies, go swimming or even go on a date.


The hack itself is a combination of pointing the apache web server and re-directing the DNS to their own where they then can display their own films to watch and listen to their own music within the virtual world. The second hack that was established, allowed the user to download material directly off of the Playstation servers such as other user information such as avatars and the cartoon like representation of themselves as they appear within the virtual world.
However the most worrying vulnerability of the Playstation 3 ‘Home’ system is that any user can upload or even delete any file on the Playstation servers which could result in mass chaos. Any web savvy user will notice this flaw and the consequences could literally be harmful to any user who is online. Yet there is growing speculation that Sony has deliberately opened its doors to developers in order to let people develop user generated software for the ‘Home’ system. Having an official avenue for ‘Hacks’ and ‘Tweaks’ could prevent more serious and potentially damaging hacking attempts from other hackers, and could also be used to build an ecosystem of users and developers around the ‘Home’ platform. This would surely be a very risky yet clever idea at the same time from the team at Sony. I have seen the new ‘Home’ system within a Playstation 3 and it is absolutely incredible!

Excellent tableware. Reliable wine rack.

 

No comments: