Dongle wars the PS3 Jailbreak story in brief

The PS3's History is littered with old jailbreak methods and fakes. Looking back over the different PS3 jailbreak methods of the past Early exploits relyed on the built in Java of BlueRay menus. Java on the blueray was too limited and only a small buffer overflow was found. By then the otheros feature has been added by Sony to enable Linux on the console The great this about Linux was the ability to probe the PS3 system and firmware. Geohot made the first progress with his memory glitching method for accessing the hypervisor. News hit us that OFW 3.21 would remove otheros! On the 1st April other OS was removed by Sony “due to security concerns” All hope seemed to be lost and the scene was getting much quieter again. Much of the blame online was directed at Geohot himself.

With very little fan fare a single video appeared on you tube showing a new PS3 Jailbreak dongle. Such big news of course went viral and even hit the BBC new pages. The jaded scene called fake on the video at first. More reputable online stores backed it up with claims they had pre release versions. Stores were inundated with preorders for the $100+ dongle. Due to the massive demand many who pre ordered had to wait months. During this time Sony rushed out a new firmware update. This blocked unknown USB devices from working. With the USB port now blocked the dongle wouldnt work on newer firmware. The upside was that every game released to then would be playable from USB. It meant the end of playing them on PSN though. Many big game releases for the coming christmas were going to require newer firmware. GT5 was out in October and couldn’t be backed up. The minimum firmware version for the game was 3.50 with jailbreak users stuck on 3.41.

By christmas though the eboot had been finally patched and the game was playable. CCC saw failoverflow announce to the world Sony's mistake in public key generating. New years eve and the next day saw the scene light up with the first news of the public keys. Geohot released his hello world on new years day Then in a move that angered sony he released his jailbreak. This one small pup file patched out the key checks enabling both homebew and PSN access. Running backups on geohots jailbreak was hard to set up. More CFW releases followed from the likes of Keamw and team rebug.

For two months people enjoyed backups and playing them online. Cheating became rife though especially on the Call of Duty games. Meanwhile Sony were working behind the scenes to change things. During this time a hacker quietly gained access to the PSN account server. The details of 50 million PSN users were stolen Realising what has happened Sony shut down the entire network. Sony took nearly two months to get PSN back online When it returned the added security meant no more PSN for CFW users. For the average user accessing the network was too difficult. As new games come out they are uplayable due to firmware restrictions.

And so the stalemate situation continued For some time but the release of the true blue dongle reunites it. This shady company locked the eboots so they would only run with the dongle. How much this had to do with Paradox is unknown but they were to release the Eboots. Warez group Duplex were the first to release a whole load of PSN games which were previously encrypted wih newer keys. The exact method TureBlue were using to resign the Eboots could only be guessed at, that was until the 3.60 keys were leaked by an unknown hacker. This definitely marked another rise in activity on the ps3 scene. Obviously Duplex didnt like the built in DRM of the TB dongle and started to try to crack it. Very quickly they started releasing many of the TB eboots to work on any CFW. Promises were made by TB manufacturers of a dongle update and newer games but this never came to light Maybe this is the last we have seen of TB! Probably not. Another big development to note is the new found ability to convert from CEX to DEX. this means running homebrew and backups without the need for the keys at all. Debug units are tied to the Dev Network though so no PSN for DEX users. The best way of course is to keep PSN and modify the latest firmware so a jailbreak for firmware 4.21 is needed. The great thing about that is retaining access to PSN with the ability to backup games. Also PSN access is not counted as full unless you also can buy things from the store.