To anyone who owns a PS5 and thinks this is cool and wants to use it: turn off updates now, it just disconnect it from the network. This will be patched and blocked, probably very quickly.
It was patched and blocked in 2022. The most common way to jailbreak stuff these days is to stash it offline for an extended period of time while waiting for a public exploit.
@misk @Creat It is so terrible. But I believe, hardware jailbreaking should long exist, for example by using raspberry pi-s to attach to the wires of the evil hardware on tricky ways. For example, by attaching pins of the memory chips, their bus could be probably locked for a short time (which is not enough yet for the main OS to crash), and their content could be manipulated. The data structures in the RAM are absolutely not protected against anything. On a Unix-related OS, you can easily find a process data structure by its characteristic signatures, and then you can simply change its UID to 0, voila you are root.
Alternatively, you can simply find the keys used to encrypt the disk content.
Alternatively, also finding the cached blocks in the block cache could be possible. By finding a block, you have access to the decrypted disk blocks, and there you can overwrite against anything, for example by giving a +s to your “su” binary.
That’s how modchips work in general but after many years of failures PlayStation security mechanisms are quite sophisticated. Jailbreaks in such cases involve chains of multiple exploits of different kinds. Hardware is often involved but software based exploits will be the most sought after as they’re easiest to for the end user.
@misk I think these modchip are exactly what would also really need in the android or iEvil world. Although I am not very sure, how could they be attached into a machine.
Just get a PC or steam deck at that point lol
Or a BC-250. Same chip, just with fewer cores. Performs about the same as a ryzen 2600 + rx 6600 pc.
Show me one in a living room friendly setting
It might be cheaper than either given that Sony subsidises their hardware and PS5 comes with 16GB of GDDR6. Getting PS5 on firmware old enough makes this a very niche thing though.
And people wonder why valve won’t subsidize their PC. If they do, they’ll run out fast. And not by gamers
These things run on rather specialised SoCs so it’s not like somebody is going to buy them wholesale to train machine learning models. Valve already monopolised PC gaming market so there’s nowhere to run with that hardware really.
Idk about that. There are many uses for compute units beside training. Inference may still be possible. But also, I’m just remembering that time the PS3 was used as a super computer. If general purpose compute hardware is subsidized, I think gamers won’t be able to get it and instead it will get to the hands of corporations or research institutes for cheap compute hardware. Why spend 1k to get a sub-par machine when you can get the same one with say $500 (if valve subsidize it)
PS3s had native Sony-sanctioned Linux support at the time - it was marketing for computational prowess of Cell processor. Funnily enough removing it as an anti-piracy measure was what prompted community to jailbreak PS3. Steam Machine doesn’t offer anything nearly as attractive, it’s just a PC and inference requires way more VRAM than it offers (8GB which is pretty awful for modern games too).
