There are many people out there who have always wanted to make home video games for the PlayStation 3, but their ambitions remained dreams. Today they may find that they are one major step closer to their dreams come true. An individual nicknamed GeoHot (quite a talented one, as he was the one who helped to crack the iPhone) has recently posted the PlayStation 3 root key, which is an important part of code signing. In short words, now, by using this root code, if you have enough technical expertise, you are able to run home brew games on your PS3.
Although home brew video games have been around for a while now, enabling their developers to sharpen their coding and development skills, now, when the root key is found, it might become a double-edged sword. The matter is that the key can also help people play downloaded video games directly on to their PlayStation 3.
GeoHot posted no donate link and warned the others to use this info wisely, noting that he doesn’t condone piracy.
That’s not the first time when someone’s DRM has been cracked, but still there’s always a curious twist to this sort of thing. The question is whether the guy cracking the others’ DRMs they spent hell knows how much time, money and effort in will be treated as an enemy or the one they would decide to be worth hiring because he was smart enough to crack the DRM in the first place?
GeoHot simply added that if the developers want their next console to be secure enough, they would better get in touch with him. In fact, he admitted that “it would be fun to be on the other side”.
Meanwhile, the observers have come to an interesting conclusion: since the cracked key lies at the very heart of the PlayStation 3 hardware, it may appear that if it’s been cracked, it could be impossible to repair, probably even through firmware updates. The reason is that altering the existing key could run the risk of rendering all current PlayStation 3 software inoperable.
The thing that will be interesting to monitor in the months ahead is the possibility that this event will spark a new console generation war with another generation of consoles. Anyway, in case this root key is legit, DRM for the PlayStation 3 will find itself useless, like CSS copy protection on DVDs.
