KaKaRoTo: we're still working on a PS3 firmware 4.00 homebrew hack

VoIP researcher by day, PS3 tinkerer by night, Youness Alaoui (AKA KaKaRoTo) took a brief vacation in November from his ongoing work to jailbreak (again) Sony's gaming machine. Last fall, Alaoui made strides with firmware 3.73 and the latest update, 4.00. A recent blog post from the well-known hacker confirmed work is ongoing and a release is impossible to date.

ADVERTISEMENT

"We have not been slacking off," said Alaoui, "we're a group of about 10 developers working together for the last 2 months, for sometimes 15 hours everyday in order to bring back homebrew support to the latest version of the PS3."

The homebrew aficionados' passion project hit an obstacle late last year when, according to Alaoui, fellow PS3 scene vet Mathieulh stymied progress on the jailbreak with outright lies:

Mathieulh kept tossing his usual 'riddles' which he thinks are 'very helpful for those who have a brain', and which pisses off anyone who actually does… so he told us that the solution to all our problems was to look in appldr of the 3.56 firmware.. and that it was something lv1 was sending appldr which made the 'hash check' verified or not… so we spent one month and a lot of sweat and after killing a few of our brain cells out of exhaustion, we finally concluded that it was all bullsh*t. After one month of reading assembly code and checking and double-checking our results, we finally were able to confirm that that hash algorithm was NOT in the 3.56 firmware like he told us (at all).

ADVERTISEMENT

The pair's "Twitter fight" notwithstanding, Alaoui said his group had nailed the first part of the process - installing packages on the console. It's the next two steps which pose the bigger problem.

"The second part is to get the apps to run," he said. "That one still has major issues." Alaoui cryptically added that the final stretch of the project is "a surprise."

Prepare for disappointment, pirates: it's not back-up support. "This is and will stay a piracy-free solution for the PS3," Alaoui said.

ADVERTISEMENT

Unsure when his team's work will see the light of day, the hacker made a simple request of overzealous PS3 owners anxious to bring homebrew to their up-to-date consoles: "Be patient and please stop asking me about an estimated release date!" (via KaKaRoTo's Blog)

No posts to display