Sony reveals new details for BD-Live Interactivity.

Sony has signed a four yeal contract with VoIP company BT that would bring video and voice calls as well as messaging to Sony’s handheld, the PSP.

Using BT’s technology, PSP users will be able to communicate using wireless internet for now. The companies say they are working on PC, mobile phone, and fixed line integration for the future.

“The PSP is an excellent device for both gaming and communications because of its high quality screen and audio capabilities,” offered Steve Andrews, chief of mobility and convergence for BT.

“With over 8 million PSPs shipped across Europe, we are very excited by the opportunity to give customers a whole new communications experience, connecting and seeing friends across the world through BT’s technology.”

Sony also added that the service will begin in the UK, and then move to other regions.

“The opportunity to combine our market leading expertise with BT’s knowledge in communications opens up many possibilities and we look forward to bringing many exciting functions to PSP fans,” commented David Reeves, president of Sony Europe.

Hacking Wireless Networks With The PSP
Is the PSP spurring a new generation of safety concerns?
August 24th, 2006
By Robert A.

One doesn’t often associate a child bearing a portable gaming console as a potential hacker, or, worse, a terrorist. We often disregard the PSP as a multimedia tool sincerely used for promoting happiness: watching movies, playing games, and listening to music. But how about using it for infiltrating top-secret clearance level data at some of the US’s most prestigous intelligence agencies? The PSP has all the prerequisites. If homebrew programs can be made to emulate Nintendo 64, send phone calls, utilize GPS protocols, and more, with the measily, yet powerful 333 MHz CPU, what’s stopping terrorists and malicious individuals from sending a child, armed with a PSP bearing a homebrew password brute forcer, to walk by the FBI Edgar Hoover building in Washington D.C. (who’s wireless networks reach the public sidewalk alongside the building), and gather data which could be used to thwart the government which protects us? Is this one of the reasons why Sony wants to stop homebrew? There are so many possibilities.

This brings me to my own story. The other day, I parked my car on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., killing some time before an event I was about to attend further down in D.C. I whipped out my PSP, while sitting in the car, and pleasured myself to a round of Tekken: Dark Ressurection. Mind you, it was nearly dark outside, and the lights in the car were off. Roughly ten minutes into my game, I noticed a certain figure standing outside my car. I quickly shutoff my PSP, turned the lights on, and rolled down the window. To my surprise, it was a police officer. He asked me what I was doing at that very moment. Now, of course, I am an adult, and an adult playing a PSP in the dark, inside his car, on the busiest street in D.C. is pretty awkward, one would think. So I replied and explained my situation, that I was early heading to a nightclub, and wanted to feed my addiction to a new game I had just bought. He didn’t buy it. Not one bit at that.

Maybe it was my sketchy behavior, I was excited for the night, it was a long and tiring week, and now I had to deal with the fact that I might get in trouble for something, knowing how police have a knack for finding trouble. He immediately yelled (not politely) at me and forced me to put my hands in the air, step outside the car, and place both hands on the side of the car. He then proceded to pat me down and handcuff me from behind, and then asked me to sit down on the curb. He peeked inside my car, with flashlight in hand, and thoroughly searched my car (lucky I didn’t have my 6-pack next to me, as I originally planned to bring along). He picked up my PSP as evidence of “unusual behavior” and left to his car. There, I would assume, he traced my tags, performed a background check, and called in an additional police cruiser. He came out, and by now, the second cruiser had arrived with two additional men; they all came towards me. I was deeply interrogated. Why I was parked in front of a federal building at this time at night, why I tried to hide the item in my hands when the police officer had supposedly been yelling at me from the outside of my car, before I noticed he was outside, and what the ‘real story’ was. I started laughing, I knew nothing better to do at the time; these people thought I was a terrorist. They probably thought I was using the electronic device to decrypt confidential passwords, try to detonate some sort of triggered bomb, or something along those lines. Whatever the case, they let me go as they could find no real reason to arrest me, and I was relieved. Was that right there reasonable doubt? Did those police officers have the right to approach me like that? To this day the thoughts and words of that night still skim through my brain.

Now, I don’t want to make this article a rant against the criminal system we have. I’m actually, in a way, pleased that these officers had thought about such malicious potentials from the handheld; this is what makes the US safe(r). What I really wanted to get at was the true possibilites of the PSP; there is really nothing stopping anyone with malicious intent to be in my exact same position that night, utilizing a homebrew password decrypter/brute forcer/MD5 decryptor/mini-rainbow table setup/wireless bomb detonator rather than playing Tekken. Had I been sitting in the car with a laptop on my lap, it would have been many times more suspicious. A portable device equipped with wireless capabilities and the ability to launch custom, unsigned code, coupled with a small form factor is capable of anything. The terrorists and hackers of the next generation could be simply walking down the street and hacking away, using their concealed PSP to port scan and find a way to penetrate a victim’s wireless network, and essentially, gather sensitive information.

How safe are we? Could the PSP pose as a tool for the next generation of hacking? Is this potential one of the things that Sony is trying to protect us from by pressing firmware updates, and, eliminating the ability to run homebrew? Is the PSP really a toy?

The Noobz team, Team C+D, and Dark_Alex are well known names amongst PSP fans. They are the leaders of the homebrew community in many ways. They are the ones that make downgrading possible, and emulation available. These guys are the gods of cracking Sony’s code and the masters of homebrew programming. The BBC recently had a chance to sit down with these superstars in a tell-all interview. It’s really interesting to read their stories and opinions on piracy. Check it out.

Computer hackers have scored a victory in their battle against Sony and the way the company controls its PlayStation Portable (PSP) handheld games console.
Sony sells its PSP with built-in software, known as firmware, which controls how the console operates.

The firmware locks many of the PSP’s capabilities, preventing enthusiasts from writing their own programs, known as homebrew, and running them on the machine.

It also disables its ability to play some films which are not bought on special Sony PSP disks.

But last month three hacker teams - Noobz, Team C+D, and a group led by PSP hacker Dark Alex - co-ordinating their efforts over the internet, found a flaw in the most recently released version of the firmware - version 3.03.

Using this flaw they devised a way to unlock all PSPs, regardless of their age or the firmware running on it.

This development has been a cause for celebration in the PSP homebrew community, but caused alarm at Sony because unlocked PSPs can be used to play pirated PSP games.

“The problem experienced here is not with homebrew applications, but with hackers who pirate commercial titles,” a Sony spokesperson said.

“Sony have never been in touch with me, so I am confident that what we are doing is legal” - Fanjita (David Court), PSP Hacker. “Piracy is illegal and we strongly oppose any acts which either aide or profit from it.”

But the hackers say piracy is not what motivates their teams to unlock the PSP.

“My aim is to enable as many people as possible to run homebrew programs,” said Fanjita, a member of the Noobz team. He added: “Everyone has the right to do what they want with their own hardware. Piracy does upset me, and because what we are doing opens the way to piracy it’s harder to justify it morally.

“But our stance on piracy is clear, and we hope to be role models. Sony have never been in touch with me, so I am confident that what we are doing is legal.”

Hackers unveiled

Fanjita - real name David Court - is very different from the popular hacker stereotype of the socially inept teenaged geek working all night in his bedroom.

A married man of 34, he is an accomplished professional programmer who writes server software for large telecommunications companies for a living. He spends an hour or two a night hacking PSP software in his Edinburgh home, and is also a martial arts enthusiast.

Dark Alex fits much more comfortably into the hacker mould.

A student from Spain, his hacker moniker derives from his real name, Alejandro, and a liking for all things gothic, he says. His interests are Japanese Manga comics and cats, but PSP hacking is his main hobby.

“I think it is up to users to make the correct decisions about how to use my software.” - Dark Alex, PSP Hacker. “It takes up a good part of my spare time, more or less what some other people may spend watching TV,” he said.

“I mainly do it because it is fun to research the internals of the operating system of a machine made by a big company. I am also against DRM (digital rights management - a type of electronic copy protection) in any of its forms, and against restrictions that make a device unable to show its true potential.”

Not just pirates

Dark Alex said that although his work makes piracy easier because it enabled PSP owners to play copied games, this was not his responsibility.

“I think it is up to users to make the correct decisions about how to use my software,” he said. “I believe in the presumption of innocence, unlike the media companies.”

There were many quite legitimate reasons why you might want to copy a game you own from its original disk, Dark Alex said.

“You can transport a number of games on a single memory stick, which is very convenient, and the games actually load faster. And most important for me, these games can actually be modified, allowing users to customise their games,” he said.

“I’ve seen great things done in this area, like people changing the music of games, or making full translations into their own language.”

Breaking the code

Whenever Sony releases a new version of its PSP firmware, the three hacker teams compete to see who can decode and examine it first.

They then collaborate to see if they can find any way of unlocking it.

This task has been made harder in recent months as Sony has introduced a new and more secure motherboard in the latest PSPs, and because Sony’s firmware has become increasingly sophisticated in response to the hackers’ efforts.

“When each new version of the PSP firmware comes out we can see that Sony are putting in countermeasures against the things we have been doing,” Court said.

In this case it turned out that a well known mistake in the way a PSP game called Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories was written provided the hackers with a suitable “exploit”.

By loading the game it was possible to get access to a restricted part of the firmware called the kernel, and an oversight on the part of Sony’s firmware writers then allowed the hackers to run a special program of their own devising.

An upgraded ‘downgrade’

This “downgraded” the PSP to an earlier version of the firmware which allows homebrew to be used.

PSP FIRMWARE HISTORY
2.00 Added a web browser, 4:3 video playback, MP4/AAC playback, and photo transfer support
2.50 Added Locationfree streaming, copyright-protected video playback, and WPA wi-fi security
2.60 Added RSS support and WMA playback
2.70 Added support for Adobe Flash in the web browser
3.00 Added Playstation network/Playstation 3 support and camera support

The drawback of this early firmware is that it won’t run the latest games, but this problem was quickly overcome by Dark Alex, who wrote his own firmware, called Dark Alex’s Open Edition, with the help of a fellow hacker known as Booster.

With this firmware installed, the PSP is completely unlocked, but also has all the features of the latest firmware.

Within days of the release of the Noobz team’s downgrader and Dark Alex’s Open Edition firmware, Sony updated its firmware, fixing the flaw which makes unlocking possible.

Anyone buying a new PSP with this firmware installed will be therefore be unable to unlock their console - at least until Noobz, Team C+D and Dark Alex and his crew find another exploit and the whole cat-and-mouse game played by Sony and the hacker teams repeats itself.

via BBC.co.uk