> This isn’t the first time that Sony has had to deal with a security crisis with the popular PlayStation family. The PlayStation 3 was previously hit with a vulnerability when the company made a mistake with their cryptography on the console, allowing users to install homebrew software and allow piracy and cheating on popular titles.
Probably could have been avoided if Sony kept the Linux version of the Playstation still alive. Imagine what the (console) world would have looked like, if it was still alive. I never got the chance to even try it myself before it was gone, but I'm sure a lot of the homebrew community's energy could have been redirected towards it instead, hitting two flies with one swath.
More like it only happened because Sony restricted hardware access under Linux. If they had allowed GPU access, there would have been no motivation to attack the hypervisor.
It only ever was present because Sony wanted to cheat EU import tariffs - by allowing other operating systems, it could be imported under the lower general-purpose computer rate.
IMHO, removal of this feature should have triggered Sony having to pay back the amount of taxes cheated.
I recall they lost a bit on selling the consoles to the USAF that were used as computer cluster. (The consoles afaik sell/sold? at below cost and rely on games to make up the extra cash) So they lose money on consoles that aren't having games bought.
OtherOS existed for import tarifs reasons. Got removed when the need was gone. When the SCEA CISO warned Kaz Hirai removing it would lead to piracy, she got fired.
Then it happened.
Where do you have your bs from ?!
I thought they removed it because people were buying PS3's in bulk for datacenter use with OtherOS because the hardware was being sold for less than the cost of the parts with the expectation of getting their money back with game sales.
Is there any reason in particular you think this? Sony only removed the feature, citing "security concerns" mere months after George Hotz released the exploit. They would later go on to sue him. https://blog.playstation.com/archive/2010/03/29/ps3-firmware...
On the other hand, the Ps3 clusters were around since basically the console's launch. Additionally, the console had been selling at a profit, at least in the US, by 2009, before they removed the other os feature.
All this happened 16 years ago. If you're curious about stuff that has happened so recently, you can research it online.
> Additionally, the console had been selling at a profit, at least in the US, by 2009, before they removed the other os feature.
Also, there is no evidence that the PS3 clusters were particularly widespread. The largest single PS3 cluster I know of was the USAF 1760-machine cluster; the second largest was about 200 machines at EPFL. With 87M+ PS3s sold, that's a drop in the ocean. The PS3 just wasn't very good as a general-purpose server, and it also didn't have good interconnect at all (people struggled to even reach 100Mbit/sec on it, so it's also not a very good general HPC server); if you didn't have a problem that mapped really well to Cell, it just wasn't for you. There's no evidence any significant amount of companies bought tens of thousands of PS3s for their datacenters.
So even if Sony _did_ lose money on each sold PS3 used for servers, there simply can't have been a lot of money in all.
I think this because it was all over the tech news outlets at the time that the primary reason was due to Sony losing money because of console hardware being sold below the price of the components themselves.
A company press release is not necessarily the be-all end-all full story when it comes to justifying something extremely unpopular with their customer base.
No. 2006 (when you read about the ps3 selling for a loss) and 2010 (when the Hotz's exploit was published & other os support was removed in response and production costs had come down) are different times.
You are the one that replied to my comment demanding I research sources for your argument which you repeatedly made false assumptions on.
It's quite probable I read some sources that were dated or had some more nuance to it that I don't recall off the top of my head because it was 15 years ago. New information doesn't immediately replace old information in the minds of the entire populace - that's not how news consumption works.
I suggest you stop starting out arguments with such hostility and maybe you won't get it in response.
Please don't go in circles. I will refer you back to my comment that if you did, these stories were out of date, or perhaps you're just misremembering. You could have posted one of these supposed stories, but that probably would have have been hard, because tech sites were actually reporting something different in 2010: https://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/sony-s-playstation-3-f...
If anyone is interested in the cryptography mistake that Sony made I recommend watching the Console Hacking talk at 27c3 by the fail0verflow team: https://youtu.be/DUGGJpn2_zY?t=2096
I had Yellowdog on mine from the day I bought it until the day Sony erased it. It was not useful. I don't regret doing it and I HATE that they took it away, and I'm a linux/bsd/various-unix daily driver home and work since forever, but this linux system on this hardware was just a curiosity to play with. Too slow and limited by the hardware to be useful.
If I remember correctly. The system got broken into trivially. There was supposed to be some random value. But for some reason it was always the same value. 7 or something.
Nobody tried to hack it, everyone assumed it was impossible. But when they removed Linux, then people tried, and it was broken very quickly.
Probably could have been avoided if Sony kept the Linux version of the Playstation still alive. Imagine what the (console) world would have looked like, if it was still alive. I never got the chance to even try it myself before it was gone, but I'm sure a lot of the homebrew community's energy could have been redirected towards it instead, hitting two flies with one swath.