Australian court bans PS3 hack – open-source PS Groove released

Rest in peace PS Jailbreak. Long live PS Groove. And the latter is free and open-source. Making it more valuable to gamers, and much more damaging to Sony.

As expected, an Australian court upheld the ban on the sale of PS Jailbreak, the PS3 hack which made news around the world at the end of August. Unfortunately for Sony, the ban was made pointless by the release of a free open-source version of the Playstation 3 hack on to the Internet.

Sony’s Playstation 3 is the last of the major games consoles of the current generation to be hacked. All the others fell pretty quickly, but the PS3 managed to hang on in there for several years. That was until the PS Jailbreak showed up on dongles being sold via Australian websites such as OzModChips, ModSupplier and Quantronics.

Sony acted fast, securing a temporary ban on the sale of PS Jailbreak after just a few days. Last week the ban was made permanent, with the importing and distribution of the PS3 hacks banned outright.

But Sony was caught out when the day before the permanent ban was granted PS Groove was released to the Web via BitTorrent sites. PS Groove does the same thing PS Jailbreak did – allowing pirated games to be played and games to be backed up to the hard drive – but it’s free and completely open-source.

Mathieu Hervais, one of the 20 hackers behind PS Groove, told BBC News:

We want people to run the software they like on the system they paid for without it having to be licensed by Sony. We released it on the Internet because we believe in openness, choice and innovation from everyone. We understand (games console makers’) point of view as well when it comes to protecting their income or business models, we just believe compromises could be made to keep everyone happy.

PS Groove essentially means Pandora’s Box has been opened, and Sony is going to struggle to close it again. The only option left open to them now is a PS3 firmware update which could possibly stop the hack in its tracks. But the hackers are unlikely to give up at this stage, and any counter-measure is likely to be cracked as soon as it appears.