PS Jailbreak PS3 hack may have shutdown due to open source

Those who have spent $100, or more for the early-adopters, on PS Jailbreak and downgrade USB hacks to gain homebrew and backup capabilities for their PS3, may now just have a couple of over-priced flash-storage devices on their hands.

Tech blog Dukio is reporting that the official websites for PS Jailbreak and PS Downgrade are down, and have been inaccessible for the past three days.

If the sites are gone for good, there are a couple of likely culprits.

The first reason, of course, is Sony’s undying quest to render the devices useless with more secure firmware consistently released soon after the PS3 hackers find new ways to make them work.

The other, more likely reason is all of the open source solutions, or “copycat devices”, that have come out since the launch of PS Jailbreak. USB keys like Mathieulh’s PSGroove, KaKaRoTo’s PSFreedom, and graf_chokolo’s PSGrade offer the same functionality to users without the feeling that you’ve wasted $100 every time Sony shuts them down.

The saddest part of the story is the fact that the company had just experienced their first big legal victory against Sony last week when a Spanish court ruled the devices acceptable to own and use, and ordered Sony to pay damages caused by the seizure of product and temporary ban on sales.

I would be surprised if the PS Jailbreak team didn’t know that this outcome was inevitable. When you build a business by charging hackers an exorbitant amount of money for a product, you have to know that you’re going to get out-hacked eventually.