PS3 Cracked wide open

An article in Wired reveals that the PS3 has now been cracked wide open because hackers were able to retrieve the encryption keys that Sony signs it’s software with.

This should come as a relief to many researchers who previously had been using PS3′s to run linux clusters in super-computing applications. As this article about the U.S. Airforce’s PS3 cluster noted, they had to wind down the project because Sony removed the “otherOS” feature which made this project possible.

Now, with the PS3 hacked wide open it would be possible to use newer PS3s again. Of course this isn’t likely since it violates U.S. law (DMCA)…

Play Station 3 Cluster Guide

A group of researchers has posted a guide to turning a bunch of Sony PS3s into a supercomputing cluster. The researchers chose the PS3 it is a relatively inexpensive device with a powerful cell processor that “packs a punch.”

Other than the publicity it’s getting, there isn’t much thats new here. The PS3 has a been able to run “guest” operating systems such as Linux since it was released. Sony has even had some of its own employees working on improving it. And using Linux as an inexpensive clustering environment is certainly not new but it is still really cool to see something like this put together.

PS3 Linux Video mode fix

I’ve finally figure out how to fix the display resolution on the PS3 running Linux. I’ve added it to my PS3 Linux page which is here.

OpenSUSE 11.0 on the PS3

I wrote a “installing OpenSUSE 11.0 on the PS3″ tips page. Check it out here.