Hacking the PS4 / PS5 Through the PS2 Emulator(cturt.github.io) |
Hacking the PS4 / PS5 Through the PS2 Emulator(cturt.github.io) |
“ but with the release of the PS5 and the introduction of PlayStation's bug bounty program, I was motivated to attempt some kind of exploit chain that would work on the PS5.”
Money is a perfectly reasonable reason to jump through the “responsible disclosure“ hoops. If you want to do work like this for purely altruistic reasons, go ahead, I’ll cheer you all the way. If someone else does it for money or reputation instead, I’ll still read their fascinating write up of it.
Money is definitely a valid motivator.
I just want to play the game like a normal person. But it's no fun anymore.
As for your end statement, I believe having root access, or just the same level of control over the individual device as the manufacturer does after the sale, is a matter of consumer rights/protections ripe for legislation, not about "features".
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy...
Vast majority of people hack their consoles to pirate or run homebrew, not cheat. Consoles are usually only hackable on non-current firmwares anyway which means no online play.
>Piracy hurts game developers/publishers.
This has been disproven countless times.
I believe a good reason why the PS2 was so dominant was because of how widespread PS2 piracy was.
Lol who uses that argument in 2022? TLS cost is a rounding error with current generation of hardware.
They've removed features before. They tore OtherOS out of the PS3.
I don't see PS2 compatibility as being sacred to the PS5.
"CTurt stressed to Ars that it would be nearly impossible for Sony to plug the hole that enables mast1c0re. That's because a version of the exploitable PS2 emulator in question is packaged with each available PS2-on-PS4 game rather than stored separately as a core part of the console operating system. [..] For physical PS2-on-PS4 discs, that means the exploit should continue to work as long as you refuse any online updates before playing. And for digital releases, even if the exploit is later patched out, there are methods to downgrade to a stored, exploitable version using proxy HTTP traffic from a local server."
so there isn't just a single PS2 emulator in the PS4/PS5's OS, it's a per-game emulator.
I believe it is doable, but the long-term impact to consumer loyalty is another question. Xbox is a peer system and people may move to it and potentially not return.
(I'm frustrated over this because as an ISP employee that has to answer to 'slow device speed' complaints, we try to speedtest from the device, and the built-in PSN speed test is woefully low compared to a browser-based test proving our network isn't to blame.)
OtherOS came with the system in the box, and Sony tore it out after consumers had already purchased the system.
A subscription service, they can just end it and refund people's money and call it a day. It's absolutely not set in stone.
Unless they decide the revenue from the highest tier is worth leaving it in place. To be determined.
Sounds like a great way to destroy Sony's motivation to support backwards compatibility :P
However, once these countries developed further and the people who grew up with PS consoles started to make more money, guess which consoles and games these people decided to buy? Hint: it wasn’t Xbox!
Long story short, easy access to piracy was a gateway to future PS game sales in many developing countries.
PS3 was originally PS2 backward compatible, then they removed that feature to shave a few bucks off the BOM.
Just think! All your CDs and movies in one machine, that you can play on your big rear projection TV over your 5.1 surround speakers!
Just think! They had absolutely no intention of releasing a version that was actually a PS2 with wireless controllers, and indeed thought the very idea that anyone would buy such a thing was laughable.
That would have blown the market to pieces.
Any theoretical PS5 piracy would almost certainly require it to be completely disconnected from the Internet so that the firmware and operating system could not be updated (or verified by Sony).
In the old days, all you wanted and could do was play games so stakes were low. Now you have Netflix, NFL, and years of digital “goods” tied in there.
I do agree with you that piracy played a big part on PS1, and PS2 success but the role of it in the modern day won’t be as important as in the past.
The PS5 became profitable in 2021.
With PS2 emulation, I suspect far more people do use it and it would be much, much easier to prove you used it. This could lead to a huge settlement against them.
I have no doubt that viable piracy improves hardware sales in less fortunate economies, I just don't think it's enough of an effect to have the dramatic impact on global sales that was implied above.
If you want a console whose global sales I think were driven in large part by piracy, look no further than the PSP.
1: https://www.vgchartz.com/charts/platform_totals/Hardware.php...
Buying one from USA.
Sometimes even flying to USA, buying the console and flying back is cheaper than buying local.
And during the PS2 era, everyone I knew that owned a PS2, bought it from a shop that sold modchipped PS2 that they bought from smugglers that got it from USA.
Currently I see that with the Switch, of the people I know that own a game console, most of the time is a Switch, and most of the time is a pre-modded Switch imported from USA, usually an old hardware version with Atmosphere installed, because modchipped Switches are buggy.
edit: Also all of them were modchipped, you could take any console to any random electronics repair shop to get it modded.
Did you even read the link?
1) it is totally unfair for the honest buyers if other people can get it for free in an "illegal" way.
2) The IP holders may simply don't want people to get there work for free, irrespective of the fact "they are not going to buy it anyway!". I've seen lots of indie artists express such opinion.
Ultimately, I don't think that's something bystanders have a say. You (general you, not "you" you) can't force your "rational analysis on economy of privacy" on the IP holders. Large game companies obviously almost only care about the profit, so you may assume they think that way. But that can't be applied to everyone.
I have never, ever seen anyone make that argument. How would that even work? "I paid fof this Smart TV. Then I heard about a massive shoplifting operation that took place on the store I bought it from. Damn! Why did I have to pay when those thiefs got many for free!". Doesn't hold up.
> 2) The IP holders may simply don't want people to get there work for free, irrespective of the fact "they are not going to buy it anyway!". I've seen lots of indie artists express such opinion.
What would the motivation for not wanting them to get it for free be, then? Unless you don't want people to get your works in the first place. If you do, I don't see how piracy might make you angry without the "concern over potentially lost sales" element.
Well, now you see one, I am making it.
Your analogy with tangible goods doesn't work. Shoplifting, or stealing, could be a felony and is heavily frown upon morally. The risk of getting caught up is much higher, and the consequence is more serious.
I won't be angry about "thieves getting them for free" despite I paid for the TV, because I knew they will end up in jails eventually, if not already.
Piracy, while theoretically illegal, is almost never punished. It realistically has no risk. So there are a lot more people doing that than shoplifting. And yes, I feel salty when I paid full price for X game while someone is getting it free.
>What would the motivation for not wanting them to get it for free be, then? Unless you don't want people to get your works in the first place.
I only want my paid customers to get it, whoever doesn't pay doesn't deserve to get it. Pretty simple. I don't find it's hard to understand. Go ask any artist live with Patreon money how they feel about it.
If you live in a society that tolerates more fraud or crime you will pay more.
I always find that interesting, because to my eyes the quality jump from DVD to Blu-Ray is the biggest we've ever seen (and likely ever will see) in home video formats, way bigger than the move from VHS to DVD. I don't think DVD has aged particularly well, especially in a world of non-interlaced digital flat panel displays. A properly mastered Blu-Ray disc still looks considerably better than the HD streams being offered by just about any modern streaming service, but DVD generally looks worse than your typical 480p stream.
Some DVDs are poorly mastered, and modern encodings are better than mpeg2 at the same bitrate, but 480p DVD should compare well to bandwidth limited 480p streaming.
If S-VHS had ever caught on for commercial releases, then the jump might have been smaller, but a VHS was visibly worse even on screens of the time, and screens were getting bigger pretty fast back then.
Also, DVDs were fundamentally very different from VHS, while Blu-Ray is just the same thing but incrementally better (yes, I know it's pretty different in a lot of important ways, but it looks very nearly the same, and you use it the same way).
DVDs introduced or normalized:
1) Surround sound on home media.
2) Widescreen picture (widescreen VHS existed, as did pan-n-scan DVD, but DVD popularized home widescreen video sources)
3) "Extras"—sure, you'd see the odd making-of feature on a second tape with some VHS releases, or available separately, but nothing like e.g. commentary tracks.
4) Multiple audio options from one piece of media (original audio plus dubs on foreign media)
5) Nice-looking captioning, potentially in multiple languages, not like ugly VHS/TV CC managed by the TV.
6) No rewinding.
7) Chapters & menus.
8) ... probably more that I'm forgetting about.
Plus they didn't degrade every time you played them (provided you didn't scratch them when handling the disk) and pretty much never self-destructed in the player.
Granted, Laserdisc did some of this too, but it was too expensive and too bulky and ~nobody had one. I'm not even sure more than half the population of the US knew laserdisc existed.
Meanwhile, Blu-Ray brought us... more pixels. And the disks are more durable. A few other features, sure, but only nerds know about those, really. That's about it. The pixel-count increase was big, but it wasn't a whole new thing.
In short: DVD was a new thing; Blu-Ray was "just" better DVD. Consider: almost nobody called a DVD a tape. Tons of people still call Blu-Rays "DVDs".
Whatever the technical merits of Blu-Ray over DVD, it simply didn't make as big a splash. Probably didn't help that streaming services were starting to make non-film-geeks reconsider having a home video library at all, early in Blu-Ray's lifespan.
> A properly mastered Blu-Ray disc still looks considerably better than the HD streams being offered by just about any modern streaming service,
Heh, especially Netflix. Encoding artifacts everywhere. Every dark scene is a bunch of big squares. Terrible, terrible picture. I can get 2GB(!) h.265 blu-ray rips @ 1080p that look way better than Netflix's 1080p. The problem is they're (streaming services generally, that is) incentivized to make the stream as bad as they possibly can, without driving away too many customers, because storage and data transfer costs are major expenses for them.
This. DVD arrived back in the CRT-era when most screens were both smaller and had lower resolution than modern screens. When Blu-ray hit the market, 32"+ flatscreens had started to become mainstream.
If you try watching a Bluray on a 24" CRT TV then you'd hardly notice the difference when comparing to a high-quality DVD release.
I still say if SEGA went DVD with the Dreamcast we'd have a totally different console scene, but I'm also a huge SEGA fangirl, so what can I say.
> (1) Independently of the author's economic rights, and even after the transfer of the said rights, the author shall have the right to claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to, the said work, which would be prejudicial to his honor or reputation.
I also bought PS3 before Hotz by the way. Over the span of 2 years I bought like 3 games I cared about the most, that's all I could afford with the money I had available as a kid. After the jailbreak I had some 20 titles.
I absolutely assure you no one, ever, bought original games in those countries. Especially not the (relatively) rich who could afford them.
DVD playback wasn't a selling point. No one had DVDs back then. Everyone watched xvid on their PC. That was the only way to obtain digital movies. DVD stores were very minimal and saw no attention. Rentals were mostly VHS.
> I won't be angry about "thieves getting them for free" despite I paid for the TV, because I knew they will end up in jails eventually, if not already.
So whether you get angry about it or not depends solely on the thieves getting punished, not on the act itself? Seems like a very narrow way to view it.
> And yes, I feel salty when I paid full price for X game while someone is getting it free.
Why? That has no effect on how you enjoy the game. Why would you get salty about that, considering it doesn't affect you in any way? Especially since you said yourself earlier that piracy doesn't "necessarily hurt dev in term of income", so you wouldn't even worry about the dev(s) not making any more games because of piracy.
What's the damage for you then?
(No, I'm not saying they are the "same thing" or the same level of seriousness. Just to demonstrate I can hate things that doesn't affect me negatively.)
"Piracy is bad" -> Why? "(One reason is) People get angry that others are getting their paid stuff for free" -> Why would they get angry? -> "Because piracy is bad" -> Why?
etc.
Piracy is bad because it's unfair to honest buyers. This is literally my original argument. Not because people get angry about it, I never even mentioned that to begin with. You are the one who came up with "people get angry" angle by using a crappy analogy.
Do I really need to prove how this is unfair? A paid $60, got a copy of game. B paid $0 by illegal means, got a copy of game.
Same goes to shoplifting, actually. Not sure why it "doesn't hold up". I simply care less because police exists. Regardless if anyone "gets angry", it is an unfair situation.
Hell, you even made up another strawman: "Why would they get angry? -> "Because piracy is bad" -- said no one.
To be Mr. obvious, people get angry because they're in the disadvantaged end of an unfair situation.
Have a nice day, this is my last one.